GETTING RID OF A VILLAIN

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4666, 25 February 1924, Page 4

GETTING RID OF A VILLAIN

(By a Story-writer in the Overseas Daily Mail. In one respect at least the twentieth century story writer has a distinct pull over the previous generation. That is, in,the matter of disposing of his villains.

Fifty years ago the villain could be hanged, drowned, or shot, or sent to spend the remainder of his miserable existence in prison. At a pinch he could be killed by lightniug.

Quilp drowned himself; that villainous schoolmaster Squeers was transported. Bill Sikes ended his detestable career by falling thirty-five feet from the parapet of a house into Folly Ditch. The most original fate suffered by any of Dickens’s villaiins was that of Darker, who was destroyed by a railway engine which “struck him limb from limb and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat.” The advance of science and discoveries in natural history and geography have given to us moderns many new methods of disposing of our bad characters. We have at our disposal flying machines electric devices, submarines, terrific explosives, air guns, noiseless rifles, poison gas, and many new drugs.

I recently read a story in which the villain, a particularly unpleasant character, came to a bad end by being shot by his accomplice with a dart dipped in wourali poison. Tn another, a South Sea yarn, the rogue, while stealing pearls, was trapped between the closing shells of a tridacna. a species of giant clam. Perhaps the most ghastly of all imaginable fates was that which overtook a poisoner who, while experimenting with the germs of a deadly disease by means of which he intended to wipe out the hero, accidentally inoculated himself.