The Oxford Book of Villains

From pickpockets and pirates to tyrants and financiers, The Oxford Book of Villains brings an arresting collection of crooks, murders, seducers, con men, traitors and tyrants--the world's greatest villains, both fictional and real. Here readers who love mayhem will find villainy in all its shapes and sizes. Billy the Kid rubs shoulders with Mac the Knife, Captain Hook with Casanova, Caligula with Rasputin, Fagin with Dr. Fu-Manchu. There are master criminals (such as Dr. No, Raffles,...
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From pickpockets and pirates to tyrants and financiers, The Oxford Book of Villains brings an arresting collection of crooks, murders, seducers, con men, traitors and tyrants--the world's greatest villains, both fictional and real. Here readers who love mayhem will find villainy in all its shapes and sizes. Billy the Kid rubs shoulders with Mac the Knife, Captain Hook with Casanova, Caligula with Rasputin, Fagin with Dr. Fu-Manchu. There are master criminals (such as Dr. No, Raffles, or Professor Moriarty), minor miscreants (such as P.G. Wodehouse's Ferdie the Fly) and even bumbling incompetents (such as Peter Scott, a Briton who in 1980 made seven attempts to kill his wife, without her once noticing that anything was wrong). John Mortimer (author of Rumpole of the Bailey) has ranged high and low, taking excerpts from the greats of literature--including the Bible, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, Moliere, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Trollope, Mark Twain, and many others--and from the leading detective and mystery writers--including Eric Ambler, Dick Francis, Wilkie Collins, Ian Fleming, Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain, Angela Carter, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Here is a collection packed with scoundrels and rogues, murderers and swindlers, who will by turns delight, surprise, and chill.