Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  A fearful place

  There are two Sherlock Holmes stories in which Moriarty appears, The Valley of Fear and The Final Problem. In The Valley of Fear, set before The Final Problem but published after it, Holmes is trying to prevent Moriarty’s agents from committing a murder. He never actually meets Moriarty, but in the final part of the story, Moriarty sends him a note. In The Final Problem, Holmes almost succeeds in his task of destroying Moriarty’s underground organisation, but he has to leave London in a hurry to escape being killed by Moriarty’s men. Moriarty follows him, and eventually catches up with him in the Swiss Alps, where they finally meet at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle was obviously impressed with the waterfall, which is over 180 metres (600 feet) high, and is one of the highest cataracts in the Alps. He imagined the scene on a particular ledge, accessible only by climbing a path to the top of the waterfall, crossing a bridge over it, and following a trail down a hill. Today, there is a memorial plaque at the ledge which reads: ‘At this fearful place, Sherlock Holmes vanquished Professor Moriarty, on 4 May, 1891’. (Interestingly, Mary Shelley was also inspired by the great waterfall, and had her monster Frankenstein follow a similar route in 1818.)

  Unusually for a detective series, Conan Doyle had his hero plunge to his death along with the villain. The reason for this, he later explained, was that he felt he was writing too many Sherlock Holmes stories, instead of trying his hand at serious literature. Of course, the fact that he was being well paid for the stories, and that they were extremely popular, made it all the more difficult for him to stop. However, according to a letter he wrote to his mother, when he wrote The Final Problem he had decided to kill of Sherlock Holmes. He had realised, ‘I must save my mind for better things, even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him’. Despite his best intentions, however, Conan Doyle could not resist resuscitating his hero, and eventually brought him back to life in The Adventure of the Empty House.

  Intelligence and evil

  In Moriarty, Conan Doyle created a memorable character who is frightening not just because he is evil, but because he is super-intelligent: a scientist, with a knowledge of mathematics, astrophysics and technology that is well beyond most people’s grasp. This idea of science and technology as potentially destructive goes back to the eighteenth-century Romantics, to authors like Mary Shelley, who were alarmed at the rapid progress of technology and had lost faith in the rationalism of the Enlightenment period. The Romantic writers stressed the power of the supernatural and were fascinated by the irrational, rather than rational, aspects of human nature. Conan Doyle brought this strand of thought, in which intelligence is no longer linked to rationalism and but has become dangerously intertwined with subterranean emotions of hatred, lust for power and violence, into popular literature in the nineteenth century with his Sherlock Holmes series. Although he did not see the stories as having great literary merit, they touched on some of the important themes of European literature up to that time, such as the place of the irrational, of dark emotions, in the minds of intelligent people. The fact that he made his hero an opium-smoking intellectual and his arch-villain Moriarty a scientific mastermind made his stories all the more fascinating to the general public, who had been used to detective fiction in which the heroes and villains were somewhat two-dimensional ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

  A living legend

  Despite Conan Doyle’s attempt to kill off Moriarty, he survived well into the twentieth century and beyond, as new generations of writers took inspiration from the idea of a criminal mastermind presiding over an evil worldwide organisation that threatens to destroy civilisation. In addition, Moriarty was represented on film by a number of actors in the 1930s and 40s, including George Zucco, Lionel Atwill and Henry Daniell. In 1985, Moriarty was played by Anthony Higgins in the film Young Sherlock Holmes, which elaborated on Moriarty’s life history. In 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a film adaptation of the comic book by Alan Moore, which casts Moriarty as the head of British Intelligence, the supervillain finally meets his end at the hands of Fu Manchu, another fictional master criminal.

  Moriarty has also been parodied in various comedies, including the seminal 1950s British radio show, The Goon Show, in which a character called Count Jim Moriarty appears as an incompetent criminal mastermind. In the 1988 movie Without a Clue, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson reverse roles, with Holmes emerging as a bumbling fool and Watson as the true genius of the piece. In this story, Moriarty attempts to undermine the British economy by counterfeiting money, but, during an action-packed finale, he meets his end when gas pipes explode in a theatre fire. In yet another incarnation, Moriarty appears in cartoon form as the evil Professor Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective. Here, he and the Holmes character, Basil of Baker Street, fight to the death on Big Ben, the famous clock tower at the Houses of Parliament. Both the characters fall off the clock, but in true Disney style, only the villain dies.

  Today, the fictional character of Moriarty continues to fascinate writers, film-makers and cartoonists, as well as the general public in many countries all over the world. The fact that he remains such a shadowy figure in the Sherlock Holmes stories has only served to intensify speculation about him, making his legend all the more inviting for new generations of storytellers to elaborate upon.

  Fantomas

  Fantomas is a fictional master criminal who was created by hack writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre at the turn of the twentieth century. The first appearance of this character, who went on to become one of the most famous villains in French crime fiction, was in 1911. After that, he appeared in forty-three stories, most of them written by the Allain–Souvestre team, but some of them written by Allain after Souvestre died in 1914. In later years, the Fantomas series inspired a number of television series, films, and comic strips.

  Commentators have pointed out that in some respects, Fantomas is a typical villain in the old-fashioned, Gothic novel style, but, as a serial killer, he also represents a modern anti-hero. In this respect, Fantomas as a character represents an important development in the history of crime fiction. Fantomas is also fascinating as an instance when popular fiction, churned out as trashy, commercial writing, developed a serious following among artists and critics, inspiring many of the surrealist painters, writers and film-makers of the day.

  Infant sadist

  The background of Fantomas emerges piece by piece in the stories that feature him. We are told that he is of British and French ancestry, and that he was probably born in 1867. French writer Jean-Marc Lofficier has speculated that the creators of Fantomas may have imagined him to be the son of Rocambole, a fictional adventurer, who was also important as a link between the Gothic novel style and modern crime stories. According to this theory, Fantomas’ mother was Ellen Palmure, a British aristocrat who was Rocambole’s lover for a while. Ellen gave birth to twins, Fantomas and his nemesis, Juve, in 1867. Ellen did not keep either of the children: Juve was raised in a French state orphanage, while Fantomas was taken into the care of the Rev. Patterson, a friend of Ellen’s, in the UK. As a child, Fantomas displayed a sadistic nature, and his original family shunned him.

  As an adult, Fantomas grew into a monstrous individual, who would stop at nothing to commit his evil, destructive crimes. A master of disguise, Fantomas leads his arm of street thugs, known as ‘apaches’, wreaking havoc on the inhabitants of the city at any opportunity. He also has an army of spies and henchmen and he commands a shadowy underworld of outcasts committed to the downfall of civilised society. Although he is a member of high society and moves with ease among the rich and powerful, in his secret life as Fantomas, he wages war against the status quo and attempts to spread chaos and terror wherever he goes.

  Torture and terror

  Some of his most dastardly crimes include: releasing dozens of plague-infested rats on a ship to infect the passengers; putting sulphuric acid in perfume dispensers in a Parisian department store; and crashing a passenger train,
killing all those inside. He also enjoys torturing and terrorising individuals. In one story, a rebellious underling is hung as a human clapper in a large bell; in another, a victim is placed face up in the guillotine so that he can watch the blade come down on him before he dies. Fantomas has no mercy, and nobody really understands what motivates him.

  Inspector Juve, a Parisian police inspector, carries out a single-handed crusade against the evil genius Fantomas. Only Juve realises the extent of Fantomas’ evil nature, but on the whole he is powerless to do anything about it. Although Juve does his best to capture Fantomas, he usually fails, for Fantomas is ‘everywhere and nowhere’, and constantly slips through the net. In the end, Juve finds himself becoming obsessed with Fantomas, to the degree that he wonders if he is going insane. Whether or not Juve is actually Fantomas’ twin brother, there is a deep connection between them, and this picture of the psychological link between the police inspector and the criminal he is trying to catch is a very modern one, predating much of twentieth-century crime fiction.

  Death’s head tattoo

  Other characters in the Fantomas novels include Jerome Fandor, who helps Juve in his campaign against Fantomas. Fandor, also known as Charles Rambert, is a journalist on a newspaper called La Capitale. There is some suggestion that Fandor may be Fantomas’ son, just as Juve may be Fantomas’ brother. Fantomas’ mistress is Lady Beltham, the widow of one of his victims, who has strong misgivings – as well she may – about the relationship. She wants to break away from Fantomas, but each time she tries, she is drawn back to him. Thus, the liaison persists over many years.

  The character of Helene, Fantomas’ daughter is again a very modern one. Helene sports a lurid death’s head tattoo, smokes opium and wears men’s clothing. She is in love with Jerome Fandor, and he with her, but for a long time their passion for each other is never requited. If Fandor really is Fantomas’ son, a sexual relationship between them would be incestuous, but it is never made clear whether this is the case.

  The shadowy existence of Fantomas, and the fact that we never find out his exact history, allowed his creators to constantly play with his identity, bringing in all sorts of unlikely connections between the characters. In various stories, it is hinted that in the past Fantomas was a man called Archduke Juan North, who lived in the German principality of Heisse-Weimar, and fathered a child, Vladimir. Next, we hear that he lived in India, where he fathered another child, Helene. Helene’s mother was a European woman, who had also been having an affair with an Indian prince, so it is possible that Fantomas may not be her father after all.

  Death on the Titanic

  We also hear that, in the late 1890s, Fantomas travelled to North America, Mexico and South Africa, where he fought in the Boer War under the name of Gurn. It was at this time that he met Lady Beltham, the wife of Lord Edward Beltham, and the pair became lovers. When they came back to Europe, Lord Beltham discovered their affair and tried to shoot his wife. To prevent this happening, Gurn hit Lord Beltham with a hammer and then strangled him. Lady Beltham stays with Fantomas, but she is deeply unhappy about the relationship, and after helping to kill one of Fantomas’ victims, she commits suicide.

  Fantomas’ son, Vladimir, appears in 1911, only to have his lover murdered by his father. Vladimir, who turns out to be almost as evil as his father, is eventually shot by Juve. The following year, both Fantomas and Juve meet their end aboard the famous Titanic.

  Surrealist visions of evil

  The Fantomas series was hugely popular in France and elsewhere in Europe, and it also attracted praise from artists and writers of the period. The surrealist writer Guillaume Apollinaire praised it highly, saying: ‘From the imaginative standpoint Fantomas is one of the richest works that exist’, while the film maker Jean Cocteau referred to its ‘absurd and magnificent lyricism’. Certainly, the Fantomas books are more surrealist than realist: the central character himself seems to have an unearthly existence, and extraordinary scenes abound in the stories. For example a horse-drawn cab gallops at dawn through the Parisian streets, with a corpse riding it as coachman; blood, sapphires and diamonds rain down from the sky; victims are poisoned with deadly bouquets of flowers; and the gold is stripped from the dome of the Invalides each night. In addition, there is the constant interplay of shifting identities in the books. Fantomas’ nemesis is Juve, who may or may not be his twin brother; Juve’s partner is Fandor, who may or may not be Fantomas’ son; and Fandor’s lover Helene may or may not be Fantomas’ daughter. To make matters more complicated, Fantomas also dons a myriad of disguises, for example impersonating a tramp, Bouzille, who sometimes helps him in his escapades. But Bouzille sometimes helps Juve, and Juve also dresses up as Bouzille on occasion. Thus, in the Fantomas series, we are constantly confronted with characters and their mirror images in a way that does not remotely describe day-to-day reality but which has great resonance in describing the tortuous relationships between people on a psychological level. To this extent, Fantomas is not run-of-the-mill crime fiction, but accurately portrays the lurid fantasies of the mind, and the way human beings always move between good and evil, in a series of relationships and actions that question their basic morality.

  Amazingly, the authors of the Fantomas series wrote the novels at the rate of one a month. They were published for thirty-two successive months, and were eagerly awaited by Parisians of all social classes. There were many reasons for their popularity: the low price of the books (65 centimes each); the lurid covers by Gino Starace, the first of which showed the ghoulish Fantomas hovering over Paris holding a knife dripping with blood; the gruesomeness of the crimes; the fact that the hero always escaped; and also, that his motivation for committing the crimes was never clear. The novels were made into a series of films directed by Louis Feuillade, which were also extremely popular. However, World War I then intervened. Feuillade was wounded, and although he later resumed film-making, he never made another Fantomas film. Souvestre died in the influenza epidemic at the end of the war. Allain married his widow and went on to write more stories, but the Fantomas novels never achieved the same popularity again.

  Hannibal Lecter

  Of all the criminal masterminds in fiction, Dr Hannibal Lecter is perhaps the most memorable. The creation of author Thomas Harris, Lecter is a highly intelligent, cultured man who trained as a psychiatrist but became a serial killer. He is a cannibal, devouring parts of his victims in the most gruesome ways, but is also renowned as a gourmet and talented cook. This combination of primitive savagery and sophisticated savoir faire is what makes Lecter such a chilling character. He is at once the most base of men, and the most high-minded.

  Traumatic childhood events

  The first novel in which Lecter appears, Red Dragon, was published in 1981, and five years later, this was adapted for the screen under the title of Manhunter, starring Brian Cox in the role of Lecter. There followed a run of movies starring Anthony Hopkins that made Lecter into a household name, and he was also played by actor Gaspard Ulliel.

  Hannibal Lecter’s background emerges piece by piece in the novels by Thomas Harris. According to Harris, Lecter was born in 1933, the son of a wealthy aristocrat, Count Lecter. Lecter’s ancestry went back to a warlord, Hannibal the Grim, who was the victor at the Battle of Grunwald, a real battle that took place in 1410. In the battle, which became one of the most famous in medieval times, the Poles and Lithuanians defeated the Teutonic Knights, a crusading military force of German Roman Catholics.

  Hannibal Lecter’s mother, Madam Simonetta Sforza, was equally aristocratic, being connected to the Italian Sforza and Visconti families, who ruled Milan at different times over a period of two-and-a-half centuries. Rumour also suggests that among the family’s antecedents was Giuliano Bevisangue (‘blood drinker’), a notorious tyrant in Tuscany during the twelfth century, but this is never confirmed.

  Hannibal’s sister Mischa is three years younger than him, and the siblings share a very strong bond. However, with the onset of Wor
ld War II, their childhood is brutally disrupted. The family are forced to leave their country house and hide in a forest lodge to escape from the Nazis, and at the age of twelve, Hannibal finds himself an orphan when his parents and their servants die in the fighting. The lodge is overrun by desperate looters who round up the children to eat them. Hannibal’s sister Mischa is eaten, however, Hannibal manages to escape, with a wound on his neck where the skin has been stripped away.

  Hannibal then finds himself back in his original family home on the estate, which has now been turned into an orphanage. The orphans are a violent, bullying crowd and he begins to engage in the same behaviour, but he is then rescued and taken to his uncle’s home. There, he falls in love with his aunt, Lady Murasaki, who teaches him about Japanese culture. At the age of thirteen, Hannibal beheads a local butcher who has insulted his aunt, bringing him to the attention of the authorities in the shape of Inspector Pascal Popil. Hannibal is set free and continues his education, training as a doctor.