Collection · The Telegraph's list of 50
The Telegraph asked its critics for the fifty greatest villains in literature. Thirty-one of those books are old enough to be in the public domain, and twenty-four of them are here, free to read. The other twenty-six are accounted for at the bottom of the page, every one of them.
What the list is good at is refusing to be a horror shelf. Satan is on it, and so is a rat in a Beatrix Potter story. The villains that hold up are rarely the monsters: they are the ones with a plan, a good manner and a reason.
If you only read one, read Clarissa — or rather, read about Lovelace and then decide whether you have two thousand pages in you.
This is not our list. Every book on this page is one the Telegraph's critics chose; our job is to say which are free, which are not, and why.
The titles were checked against two independent renderings of the list, which agree on the forty-eight they share and on the order of them; two entries appear in only one of the two. The order is not reproduced here: the original article could not be read directly, so calling that sequence a ranking would be a guess dressed as a fact.
One thing here is ours, and it is worth being clear about it. The Telegraph put the book on the list; naming which character is the villain is our reading. Where a play has more than one candidate — King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi — the note says so instead of picking for you.
The 50 greatest villains in literature, selected by critics at The Telegraph.
Six villains you can name without reading the book
These six escaped their novels a long time ago. All of them are less tidy on the page than in memory: the vampire has a moustache, the pirate is the most likeable man on the ship, and the devil gets the best lines.
Start here
Milton set out to justify God and wrote the most persuasive devil in English. Satan gets the argument, the defiance and the line everyone quotes; God gets the exposition. Blake said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.
Villain Satan
Iago destroys four lives with hints and a handkerchief, and never says why. He offers two motives in the first act, adds a third in the second, and drops all of them. His last line is a refusal to explain.
Villain Iago
He appears in remarkably little of his own novel — it is told in letters and diaries by the people hunting him. The evening dress and the cape come from the stage — Hamilton Deane's 1924 play — and the accent is Lugosi's; Stoker's Count has a heavy moustache and crawls down the castle wall face first.
Villain Count Dracula
72 pages
A villain who is also the hero, and the book is built as a detective story about that fact. Stevenson burned the first draft after his wife told him he had missed the allegory, and rewrote it at speed — exactly how fast is still argued over.
Villain Edward Hyde
The best-liked man on the ship and the one running the mutiny. Stevenson's trick is that Jim keeps choosing to trust him after he knows, and the book never quite condemns him — Silver walks away with some of the money.
Villain Long John Silver
Moriarty is on stage in a single story, The Final Problem, and Conan Doyle invented him to kill Holmes off. He is present for a handful of pages and became the template for every criminal mastermind since.
Villain Professor Moriarty
Six seducers, forgers and confidence men
The most dangerous villains in this list do not break in. They are invited, they are charming, and the book takes hundreds of pages to admit what they are.
2,924 pages
The longest novel in English, and the villain writes a huge share of it. Lovelace is funny, brilliant and without a conscience until it is far too late, and the length is the point: you spend so long in his company that his charm starts working on you too.
Villain Robert Lovelace
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Two aristocrats treat seduction as a campaign and write each other letters about it. Merteuil is the strategist and the more frightening of the pair, because she has thought hardest about what being a woman in 1782 costs.
Villain The Marquise de Merteuil
Fat, elderly, fond of his white mice, and the most quietly menacing person in Victorian fiction. Sir Percival Glyde supplies the threats, but Fosco does the thinking, and Collins gives him excellent manners and a real intelligence.
Villain Count Fosco
A financier whose fortune may not exist, and a London that would rather not ask. Trollope wrote it in disgust at the speculation of the 1870s, and it has been rediscovered after every crash since.
Villain Augustus Melmotte
A stranger befriends a young Calvinist and persuades him that murder is permitted to the elect. The novel tells the story twice, once from outside and once from inside, and never settles whether Gil-Martin is the devil or a delusion.
Villain Gil-Martin
Hardy's subtitle calls Tess a pure woman, which brought the reviewers down on him in 1891. Alec is the one who ruins her, but the book is at least as hard on the man who forgives her and then does not.
Villain Alec d'Urberville
Four villains from before the novel existed in English — one poem in Old English and three plays. The vocabulary of villainy in the language was largely set here.
The oldest villain on the list, and the poem is careful to give him a grievance: he attacks the hall because he cannot bear the sound of people enjoying themselves inside it.
Villain Grendel
Claudius murdered his brother, married the widow and rules well. Shakespeare gives him a prayer scene in which he tries to repent and finds he cannot give up what he killed for, which is more interior life than most villains ever get.
Villain Claudius
More than one candidate
Edmund has the soliloquies, the plan and the order that kills Cordelia; Goneril and Regan have the power. Reasonable readers pick differently, and the tragedy is arguably that Lear is his own.
Villain Edmund, or Goneril and Regan
More than one candidate
A widow marries in secret and her two brothers destroy her for it. Ferdinand supplies the rage and stages the cruelty, the Cardinal the cold detachment, while Bosola does the work and spends the play sickened by it.
Villain Ferdinand and the Cardinal
Four books routinely handed to eight-year-olds, each with a villain that does not soften on rereading.
Barrie made him an Old Etonian obsessed with good form, which is funnier and worse than the pantomime version. The book is also much darker than the play: Peter thins the ranks of the Lost Boys when they get too old.
Villain Captain Hook
A lame tiger with a grudge and a talent for recruiting the young wolves. The Mowgli stories are only part of this book, and they are colder and less musical than anything Disney took from them.
Villain Shere Khan
A moneylender who hounds a child across England for sport. Quilp is grotesque, gleeful and genuinely unsettling, and Dickens plainly enjoyed writing him far more than he enjoyed writing Nell.
Villain Daniel Quilp
Read the introduction first
Fagin is one of the most influential villains in English fiction and one of the most openly antisemitic: for most of the early chapters Dickens calls him «the Jew» rather than by name. He revised later editions after a reader wrote to him about it, and it is worth knowing that before you start.
Villain Fagin
Four books where there is nobody to argue with. The antagonist is an obsession, a void, or a god who is not interested.
The whale does not have a plan and Ahab is the one who steers everyone into it, which is why the list can put a captain among the villains. Melville gives him one leg, one obsession and complete authority over thirty men.
Villain Captain Ahab
93 pages
Kurtz is talked about for two thirds of the book and present for a handful of pages. What Conrad puts at the centre is not a man but what the trade did to everyone in it, which is why the book keeps being argued with rather than simply admired.
Villain Kurtz
The strangest book here
A journey across a planet where every landscape imposes a different morality on the traveller. The antagonist turns out to be the god of the world itself, and the character who looks like the villain is on the other side.
Villain Crystalman
Lovecraft's whole effect depends on the thing not caring: the horror is scale, not malice. Worth knowing that his views on race were extreme even by the standards of his own time — his letters are explicit about it — and that the story's dread of foreign crowds is part of that.
Villain Cthulhu
The other twenty-six
Two reasons. Seven are in the public domain and simply are not in our catalogue yet. Nineteen are still in copyright; six of those are below with the year they come free in the United States, and the rest are accounted for underneath.
Not in our library
Lewis was nineteen when he wrote it, and the first edition was anonymous; he put «M.P.» on the second himself, months later. The scandal was large enough that he then cut the book for the fourth edition.
Not in our library
The novel Northanger Abbey is making fun of. Montoni is the model every Gothic villain in this collection is measured against.
Not in our library
Written around 1590 and not printed until 1633. Barabas came first and Shylock came after, and Marlowe's version has no interest at all in being sympathetic.
Not in our library
Attributed to Cyril Tourneur for three centuries. The revenger is also the villain, and the play is aware of it.
Not in our library
Svengali is the reason the word exists. It sold two hundred thousand copies in America in its first year and is now barely read.
Not in our library
The first Don Juan on a page. Molière and Mozart's librettist work from this play; Byron mostly borrowed the name.
Not in our library
Published in 1908 as The Roly-Poly Pudding and retitled in 1926. A rat who intends to bake a kitten into a pudding, and the oddest entry on the Telegraph's fifty.
Unlocks January 2034
Mrs Danvers, and a narrator who is never given a first name.
Unlocks January 2034
Pinkie Brown is seventeen and the most frightening person in English crime writing.
Unlocks January 2045
O'Brien, who is patient, reasonable and entirely certain he is helping.
Unlocks January 2046
The White Witch, and a hundred years of winter without Christmas.
Unlocks January 2051
Humbert Humbert narrates, which is the whole design: the prose is beautiful and it is doing the crime's work for it.
Unlocks January 2051
Tom Ripley gets away with it, and Highsmith wrote four more books letting him keep getting away with it.
