Criminal Mastermind vs. Evil Mastermind

Or, to put it down with a few names: Professor Moriarty vs. Dr. Fu-Manchu. This can be seen as a companion piece of sorts to last week’s post about Fu-Manchu. I think I might have given the impression that Moriarty simply wasn’t a mould of any kind, but he was - just not for future Bond or comic book villains. He is the one characters like Fantomas or Dr. Mabuse were based on, though - a criminal mastermind. Fu-Manchu on the other hand is an evil mastermind. And, yes, as the post title proposes, there is a difference. So, if you’re about to create a villain for a pulp story or suchlike, this post could prove helpful.

Even with the little information Arthur Conan Doyle gives us about Professor Moriarty, it’s clear the man is dangerous. If Sherlock Holmes himself takes a holiday to get away from London until everything has blown over, he’s not dealing with some petty thief, that much is for sure. Moriarty is the ‘Napoleon of Crime’ - he rules the underworld of London and, probably, at least the British Isles, if not more. So what is the difference between him and Dr. Fu-Manchu (especially as the professor holds the higher academic rank)? Scope. The difference between a criminal genius and an evil genius is scope.

To Moriarty, the crimes he commits or, rather, has his people commit, are the end goal. They bring him something he wants: money, power, the removal of people who threaten his life or wealth. Moriarty sits in his web like a spider, or so Holmes tells Watson who tells the audience, and whenever a crime is committed in London, he gets his share. He eliminates threats to his way of life or, rather, has Colonel Moran and others eliminate them. Make no mistake, in a time before the telephone and fast travel, it’s hard enough to control such a criminal empire and it takes a very strong mind to keep all the threads under control. Plotting, planning, controlling, intimidating - Moriarty’s days sure are full of work (especially as he also holds down a regular job, as not to arouse suspicion).

But it’s no surprise that Dr. Fu-Manchu doesn’t hold down a regular job as well - he wouldn’t have the time for it. His scope is larger than Moriarty’s, because the crimes are not his end goal. His end goal is world domination and the crimes only serve as a means to that end. Fu-Manchu’s whole organisation is much bigger than Moriarty’s would ever be. Fu-Manchu orders a theft, a robbery, a kidnapping, a murder not to just profit from them, but because they bring him closer to his goal. He removes people not just because they threaten him, but because they stand in the way of his long-term goals, even if they don’t know it. He has no scruples whatsoever to kill even his loyal henches (or send them to their doom), if they have failed or the situation demands it.

For your regular story, a villain of Moriarty’s scope is the right one. A crime lord or mafia boss or a shadowy businessman who has more business than just that which he officially owns. He’s a dangerous adversary for your regular hero, has a lot of shady people under his control, and can do a lot of damage.

For a comic book, an espionage story, or a pulp one, though, you might want to raise the stakes a little and that is when people like Fu-Manchu come in. Villains who pose much more of a threat than a crime lord ever would, because they threaten people’s very way of life.

When you’re writing a villain of the Moriarty type, you’re staying in the realm of realism. You can draw inspiration from real life, read up on drug lords, mafia bosses, gangsters from the prohibition era - there’s a lot of sources you can milk to make your villain better. You can, of course, go slightly above that with them. They’ll be better at being bad than most of their real-life counterparts were. They’ll be less prone to making mistakes - unless it serves the plot, of course. They’ll have a better grip on their men and be less likely to be overthrown during internal struggles. But they’ll still be the kind of people the police (perhaps a federal branch) will deal with in the end.

When, however, you’re writing a villain of the Fu-Manchu type, you have to go far above realism. You need to look at espionage movies (Bond or Kingsman should work well), at comics, at pulp stories, at the kind of action movies which are far above realism, too. Or you can look at the realistic villains and push all about them to eleven. As I said: it’s a question of scope. An evil genius isn’t going for a simple theft or even a complicated plan to get to a well-guarded vault. They won’t spend time on things which don’t further their own plan for world domination - and for some reason, they’re never really out of cash, although that could be a nice hook for your story. They have everything to oppose even a government or two: manpower, wealth, technology, knowledge. They’ll have some genetically modified sharks in a tank for the occasional secret agent. They’ll be building an army of robots for the big takeover. They’ll have henchmen galore (could I be wrong and there are henchmen trees?). They’ll have at least one secret lair where they plan everything and set it in motion - most have several, just in case. And they’ll always have backup plans for their backup plans. Evil geniuses don’t play chess, because it’s a kid’s game to them.

There is a place for both types of villains and it depends very much on the kind of story you want to write whether you’ll choose a criminal mastermind or an evil one. You can go a lot further with the evil mastermind, because the scope is much bigger, but for a realistic story, they’ll be too much over the top to use.

Thoughts On An Evil Genius

Quick! Think about the blueprint on which most evil masterminds like Dr. No or Dr. Doom or other evil geniuses are based. What name would you put on that? If I were a betting girl, I’d bet that most of you said ‘Professor Moriarty’ (James, if you’re on first-name terms). And most of you would be wrong, because that position belongs to another who has been out and about a lot more than the esteemed professor of mathematics: Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Professor Moriarty, despite being a villain movies and TV series about Sherlock Holmes (and the modern additions to the canon) like to pit against the Great Detective, only features in one story written by Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Final Problem”). It’s likely Doyle chose a mirror version of Sherlock Holmes to kill him (only he wasn’t allowed to let his detective rest). We learn little about Moriarty on the whole, merely that he is a professor of mathematics and that he is head of a criminal organisation spread throughout the British Empire (and beyond, one might suspect). He is a criminal mastermind, but we learn little about his powers. We even learn little about him as a person, since his fight with Sherlock Holmes happens off-screen - Watson comes too late to save his friend and only finds a message. He is not the kind of blueprint the average evil genius is derived from.

Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu-Manchu, on the other hand, has had ample time to imprint himself into the memories of readers, viewers, and writers alike. From 1913’s “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” to 1959’s “Emperor Fu-Manchu,” Rohmer himself brought the sinister Chinese doctor back to life over and over again. He was followed by other writers, 2012 (according to Wikipedia) having been the year of the last release so far (more have been announced).

Fu-Manchu is such a staple that one of the three evil geniuses in the computer game “Evil Genius” was styled after him: a tall, lean Chinese with green eyes (which is, pretty much, the first description ever given of him in “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu”). Professor Moriarty has no evil genius styled after him (the other two are a bald, slightly chubby millionaire and a femme fatale).

Make no mistake, the original novels are filled with racial stereotypes which, while understandable during Rohmer’s time, are not acceptable for a modern writer, but as with Jules de Grandin, it’s important not to expect modern sensibilities from a writer who lived a long time ago. And, as much as all of the non-white characters are written in a stereotypical way, the Chinese Dr. Fu-Manchu remains a strong and powerful character who seems rarely hindered by the shortcomings which are implied about Chinese people on the whole. He poses a definite threat to the heroes (Nayland Smith and Dr. Petri in the first three novels, with Petri being the Watsonian viewpoint character) and more often than not, it’s the intervention from a third party which saves the lives of the heroes. Fu-Manchu doesn’t just hatch big plans, he also pulls through with them. He’s ahead of the game, which allows for him to disappear in time (until the very end, when he usually seems to die - only to pop up again in the next instalment). He is way ahead of Smith (as his main adversary) and he has unlimited resources in loyal henchmen, dangerous creatures, and exotic drugs and poisons.

Of course, the stories profit immensely from the time they were written in - a time before mass media and internet access when nobody could just look up specific poisons and find out they didn’t exist and when you could invent new people from the far corners of the earth as much as you liked, because those corners were too far and too dangerous for most people to travel. Like most pulp stories (for that is, in essence, what they are), the Fu-Manchu novels do not hold up to too much questioning and you need to do a bit of heavy lifting to believe the characters (especially Dr. Petri by himself) always cross paths with Fu-Manchu again. One should think that a genius of his level would learn to leave Smith alone and avoid him with all his powers after a few meetings. But then, the Devil Doctor is very arrogant and that can explain quite a bit. Arrogance is a usual downfall for evil overlords, masterminds, or geniuses, after all.

Still, when I recently returned to the stories, I found them engaging and interesting to read. And I realized that modern evil geniuses have a lot more to do with Fu-Manchu than with Moriarty (if only because we don’t see that much of Moriarty, unless you look into modern versions of him which, in turn, were influenced by other evil geniuses). Fu-Manchu is the shadow in the back, the one who pulls the strings and lets many, many people dance to his music. He is the one who arranges for everything to fit with his plans, who has henchmen (many of them, of course, Asian), who hatches his successful evil plans. He is much more than just a criminal, he’s a man who strives for world domination. It’s not just about controlling the underworld, his plans are aimed at changing the world’s power structure and putting those into positions of power he has control over. He has much more in common with the average Bond villain than Moriarty ever will.

And that is what makes the stories interesting to read. First of all, Fu-Manchu clearly doesn’t do evil for evil’s sake. He considers the murders, kidnappings, and other crimes to be a necessary part of his plans - and his plans are too important to worry about morals. He also might be highly amoral himself, which his creator would attribute to him being Chinese (and thus ‘below’ the white race), but a modern author might, indeed, attribute to him being a psychopath, as many comic book or movie villains of his type. He surely fits with the basic attributes of a psychopath:

• Lack of empathy: check
• Grandiose sense of self-worth: check
• Wide array of crimes and methods: check
• Manipulative mindset: check
• Deceptive tactics: check
• Risk-prone behaviour: check

He’s also one of those villains who kill their minions for blunders (which, if you really think about it, is pretty stupid - good henches don’t grow on trees). And the first, perhaps, whose daughter sometimes works against him (a trope with the children of evil masterminds you can find quite often - although in her case it’s because she wants to replace him, not because she’s in love with his nemesis).

And remember how I mentioned that Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to kill Sherlock Holmes, because he was fed up with him? The same happened with Sax Rohmer and Fu-Manchu. He didn’t like the character that much, but the audience loved the stories and wanted to read about the man again and again. Rohmer obliged and thus we have quite a few stories (13 novels by Rohmer overall, plus a collection of short stories), although there are sometimes long periods between their releases. Yet, Fu-Manchu survived his creator, just as he survived the end of every novel, despite things looking the other way. Nayland Smith’s insistence at the end of “The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu” that he will only believe Fu-Manchu is dead once he’s seen a body rings true for the series on the whole - and is one more thing which Fu-Manchu left to the community of evil geniuses.

There are things to be learned from the history of Dr. Fu-Manchu, both things to use for your own evil genius and things not to use (any longer or at all). The Devil Doctor, the Lord of Strange Deaths (both names attributed to Fu-Manchu) is still hovering over evil geniuses today, no matter how often he supposedly has died.

Don't Waste Your Villain

Villains are extremely important to most stories, because you need someone to oppose your hero or someone your hero can oppose, depending on how you want to see it. Next to the hero, the villain is the second-most-important character in your story. Think about this for a moment.

Conflict, which is important to every kind of story, is most easily reached by the hero having one goal and the villain having another (or the same, if it’s a goal only one can reach), both of which are at odds. This sets them up and pits them against each other, so the story can unfold around them. See the linked post about conflict for more information on this.

A villain also should always be more powerful than your hero, have more wealth, influence, power, magic - whatever is important to the plot. If you’re writing a thriller, the villain (or antagonist, if you want to put it less harshly) is the one behind all the crimes happening. If you write a love story, the villain (here, antagonist might indeed be the better word) is the second person interested in the love interest or someone hell-bend on stopping the romance from happening. If you write a book about intrigues, the villain will be the one who directs the intrigue against your hero. It’s also important for the villain to be really threatening - a stupid or inept villain is not going to cut it for anything above a kid’s story. The threat-level of the villain determines the heroism-level of the hero, after all.

But now for the main topic of this post - not wasting the villain. There are a few examples for this in very popular stories, but I’ve picked the Star Wars Prequels for my post.

If you look at the original trilogy (today’s episode 4-6), you will find that the plot hinges a lot on Darth Vader at the beginning and slowly, without dismissing him completely, shifts to the Emperor as the Big Bad at the end. This is a very good use of a villain.

Vader is introduced very early (first scene of the first movie) and is kept threatening throughout all three movies, even though he does get his little redemption act at the end of the last one. The good thing about this is that you have an iconic villain (because Darth Vader is recognizable on the first look, even for people who have no idea about Star Wars) who threatens with ease, hold a lot of power (the whole military of the Empire is at his beck and call), and is an extremely strong fighter with ill-disguised magic on top. He’s physically intimidating, he can kill people without even touching them (the Force Choke is established early in the first movie, too), he’s an ace pilot, and he’s in a position of power which would even make him dangerous, were he not that physically threatening himself.

Now compare the duo of Darth Vader and the Emperor to the many villains from the prequels. “The Phantom Menace” introduces Darth Maul who, being very different from Vader, would have made for an interesting and engaging villain for the whole trilogy, too, only to kill him in the end (and for this post, his eventual resurrection doesn’t matter). “Attack of the Clones” introduces Count Dooku, who could also have been a challenging villain for the trilogy, but he’s killed at the beginning of “Revenge of the Sith.” The last movie, then, throws General Grievous into the fray, only to have him (her? it?) killed off as well. That’s three villains, two of which (plus Asajj Ventriss from the early Clone Wars cartoons, but minus General Grievous) would have been sufficient to carry the whole trilogy, leading up to the big reveal (not for the audience, but for the heroes) of Senator Palpatine being a Sith himself and behind it all.

By throwing each of the villains into the bin by the end of the movie where they opposed the heroes (or a little later in Count Dooku’s case), the movies do themselves a big disservice. One big strength of the original trilogy was that you knew the villains. You only needed to hear a few bars of the Imperial March and you knew who would be along shortly. You only needed to hear the artificial breathing sound to know who was arriving. Vader was the main threat, even though the Emperor was more powerful. He was the one the rebels had to fight directly, he was the one Luke had to face off against twice (Obi-Wan taking the brunt of the fight in Episode 4), he was the threat the audience knew and expected.

Darth Maul had potential, a lot of it. He looked intimidating, even though in a different way than Vader. He wasn’t as tall or physically imposing, but his lither build and higher agility still made him a very dangerous adversary, not to mention the yellow eyes, tattooed face, and horns made him look threatening. He clearly was a good hunter and when he went up against the heroes, he killed the more experienced one without suffering injuries. In addition, his double-bladed lightsaber was a novel concept for the movies (although the comics had done it once before with a Sith Lord of old). Then he was cut in two and the dark side was on Sith short of the full set (and would stay that way until towards the end of Episode 3).

Count Dooku also had potential. He wasn’t that physically threatening, not a new Darth Vader, but he was a slightly weaker version of the future Emperor himself - a man whose power didn’t lie in direct confrontation, but in influence and intrigue. And not that bad a fighter, either, when push came to shove. He was also allowed to wound the hero, very, very much like Darth Vader in Episode 5. He would have been a different enemy for the heroes, someone who could start Anakin on the path to darkness by manipulating him a little (as Palpatine does later). In Ventriss (only in the first Clone Wars series), he also had a right hand who could pick up the slack and deliver the physical threats to the heroes. He survived the first movie he was in, only to die in the prologue of the next one. Dooku was a fallen Jedi, not a Sith, so we’re still one Sith short of our set.

The less said about the strange abomination that is General Grievous, the better. It’s clear that the makers of Episode 3 were already very much focused on the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader and didn’t really want to invest that much into another villain for the story. They should, however, either have found another way to keep Obi-Wan and Anakin apart or invest more time into that villain, because he (she? it?) isn’t even a good one, despite the talent to wield four lightsabers simultaneously.

The prequels have a lot of problems, but the scattered villains, none of which gets a lot of time to develop, are the biggest one by far. The original trilogy had the hero and the villain develop parallel, giving the audience more information on the villain and giving the villain more powers as the hero grew stronger, too. The prequels pitted the heroes against a new villain in each story, never giving the villains much time to develop, to become threatening to the heroes. By the time they were established enough so the heroes officially knew about them, they were already about to go.

Imagine, for a moment, Darth Maul had never been killed off, but only wounded at the end of the first movie. He’d have made his escape or he’d have been taken away (like Vader being flung into space at the end of Episode 4). Wouldn’t you as the audience have waited for him to turn up again in the next movie? To see, perhaps, how he had grown (and overcome his injury) while Anakin had (although I still think they shouldn’t have made that jump, but introduced Anakin as an older person)? Confronting Obi-Wan at first, only to find that he had to face Anakin as well. A menace who would threaten someone dear to Anakin (better than just that vision of Padme in pain). A menace who would wound him, but have to yield to someone else again, perhaps to Yoda, perhaps to Obi-Wan, perhaps just to circumstances. In the third movie, they could have pitted him against Anakin and have made Anakin finally killing him part of Anakin’s change into Darth Vader. One apprentice Sith replacing the next by killing him - a suitable way of doing it for the bad guys of the galaxy far, far away.

Or imagine Count Dooku in the wings instead. Him spinning his intrigues, luring the Jedi into traps, taking their advantages and making them hunt for him in vain. Pulling the order (which he, as a former Jedi, should know even better than Palpatine) apart and preparing for its eventual doom. Another kind of story, but with the prequels branching out into the whole topic of galactic politics, also a possible take. And with Ventriss as his right hand, we would have had another ‘Vader/Emperor’ team-up in the story, a look at what was to come - the consummate politician and manipulator and his servant who deals out the physical damage.

I admit, I would have liked it more if they had kept Darth Maul, because he’d make for a better villain in an action movie, but I could see the other story do well, too - only, perhaps, not really as a Star Wars movie.

Learn from the prequels’ mistakes and don’t waste a villain. There may be times when you need to sacrifice a lesser villain early in the story: a strong hench, a right hand, a secondary villain in the big picture of things. But don’t throw an established villain aside easily. As the hero might have to run and live to fight another day, there are times when the villain has to do just that as well.

Three Types Of Heroes

This picture actually lists all three types of heroes you can find in a story. Those who were born as heroes, those who become heroes on their own, and those who are forced to become heroes. Or, as the picture says: some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. So, let’s have a look at those types and see what stories they’re good for.

Some are born great. Some people are born as heroes and never doubt themselves for a moment. A lot of pulp heroes fall into that category. There is no initial reason for them doing heroic stuff, they just see a hero is needed and are that hero. Like the fairy tale prince, they do heroic deeds because they are heroic deeds. It is, to put it plainly, their job.

As already mentioned, they’re often found in pulp stories, especially the classic kind. During that era, heroes needed no tragic back story. Their back stories were merely set up to explain why they could do so much different stuff. They often were adventurers or former soldiers - tough men who knew how to keep themselves alive, who could handle weapons, and were trained for unarmed combat. Those were the basic necessities for a pulp hero, everything else (like Secret Agent X’s skill to look like everyone he wanted to copy) was a bonus.

Stories with such a hero in the leading role are not about the hero themselves. Quite often, the hero doesn’t change much during the story, they have no need to. They are what they are and they know it, there’s no reason for them to second-guess their motives or come to terms with being heroes. Instead, such a story focuses on challenging the hero’s skills, on making them go all out and fight for a good cause. It’s about the cause, about another character who needs saving (but, please, not too many damsels here), about a villain who is clearly evil and needs to be stopped before something truly horrible happens. Indiana Jones is such a hero. Sherlock Holmes is one. They’re not looking for a reason to be heroic, it’s just part of their regular work.

If you create a mercenary who travels the world to fight where it is necessary, you have a hero like that. If you have a prince (fairy tale or else) who does heroic deeds for the deeds’ sake, you also have a hero like that.

Some achieve greatness. Some people become heroes through their own free will, because their surroundings push them to it. That is what you find often in literature, because it allows for the growth of the main character. The natural hero, the one born great, doesn’t have growth, but we like it when the main character at the end of the story is different from the same character at the beginning. We have past generations of authors to thank for that, because at some point, it became a rule that a hero needed to learn something from what happened to them. That growth was an intricate part of the story.

Stories ranging from simple ‘slice of life’ stuff to the great epics contain heroes like that. Heroes who begin the story as a regular person and become heroes through their own choices and deeds. And that is an important part: their own choices. The hero of this type, the one who achieves greatness, has a say in it. They get to decide whether or not they are heroic. They see something they can’t accept and become heroes to change it. They are drawn into an unwanted situation and rise above it out of their own will. They change themselves to change the world around them.

Because of that, these stories revolve around the hero and what they do or why they do it. They give the hero room to make mistakes, to make wrong decisions, trust the wrong people, believe the wrong lines. As long, that is, as the hero at some point realizes they’ve been wrong and strives to undo the damage they did. That is important. A hero doesn’t just recognize a mistake, they also do all they can to undo it or at least minimize the damage done through that wrong decision. And the story, despite all other plot points, is about the hero and their growth.

A simple citizen who goes up against authorities, because they believe a law or an action is wrong, a teenager who confronts the bullies in their school, or a woman challenging the status quo are heroes like that. Many different stories can be spun about them, but they will all inevitably see an everyman rise to the status of a hero.

Some have greatness thrust upon them. There is a shorter name for that kind of hero: the chosen one. Especially YA novels seem to have a fondness for them, as successful franchises like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games show. Those heroes are chosen by fate, in essence. It might be through a prophecy, it might be through a seemingly human agent, it might be through just being there at the right (or wrong) time. They have no say in it, they make no choice. The choice is made for them.

Chosen one stories usually feature a world which has something severely wrong about it. Maybe, it’s a dystopian regime, maybe it’s an extremely powerful wizard in the wings, maybe it’s something else. There’s always something everyone fears, but nobody goes up against. And this is the first big problem with chosen one stories: to justify why only this one person can go up against the wrong. Do they have special powers? Why are they ready to challenge the status quo? Why are they able to and everyone else is not? It’s often hard to justify.

Chosen one stories also revolve a lot around the chosen one. Most of them at first balk at their position and don’t want to be chosen. They’re afraid of the task or just neutral towards the problem they’re supposed to solve. So the story must bring in motivation for them, must make the problem a personal one, so the chosen one finally gets up and going.

The chosen one usually faces very bad odds. Of course, those born heroes would laugh at the odds (and probably would look good while doing so), but the chosen one is not born as a hero. They’re born as an everyman. The only difference between them and the heroes who achieve greatness is that they do not get a choice. Someone, usually fate, makes the choice for them, no matter what they want. That might be a reason why adolescents like those chosen one stories so much: they still have a lot of choices made for them, not knowing how much of a pain in the ass it is when you have to make all the decisions yourself. If someone else can be chosen for something great, then so can they.

A chosen one can be the child whose coming was foreseen centuries ago or just that one teen who is not like all of the others. What makes them chosen ones is that at some point someone or something chose them to do what nobody else can do.

Those are the three types of heroes you will find in stories. They may follow the hero’s or the heroine’s journey. They may be men or women or furry aliens from Alpha Centauri. They’re all heroes, though.