Character guide

Mr. Verloc

major

Also known as Verloc, the silent Mr. Verloc, the wise and good Mr. Verloc, the late Mr. Verloc

Verloc sells dubious photographs and sundries from a Soho storefront while quietly serving as a paid informer, a man whose entire method is to be overlooked. His marriage, his household, and his anarchist acquaintances all function as camouflage, and he treats them with the same dull, proprietary patience he gives his stock. When his handler demands a spectacular outrage, Verloc's comfortable inertia collides with the violence he has spent years merely talking about, and the novel's middle turns on how badly a man of his temperament handles a real bomb.

Mrs. Verloc

major

Also known as Winnie Verloc, Winnie

She keeps the shop, keeps house, and keeps her simple-minded brother Stevie close, having chosen Verloc as a husband chiefly because he offered the boy a home. Her manner is stony and practical, her gaze deliberately turned away from whatever her husband actually does upstairs and out of doors. That refusal to look into things is her armor, and it is exactly what the story will test, since her love for Stevie is the one force in the book capable of moving her past endurance.

Comrade Ossipon

major

Also known as Ossipon, the robust Ossipon, the big Ossipon, Alexander Ossipon, Comrade Alexander Ossipon

Ossipon talks revolution in pubs and meeting rooms while quietly pocketing money from women he charms and abandons, his physique impressive and his moral substance thin. He is both drawn to and intimidated by the cold little bomb-maker who barely acknowledges him, and his vanity makes him a poor judge of the people he thinks he is manipulating. His pursuit of Mrs. Verloc, and his terror of being implicated in what her husband has done, make him the novel's most queasily human conduit between the drawing room and the police.

Stevie

major

Also known as poor Stevie, Stephen, the innocent Stevie, the docile Stevie

Stevie is Winnie's younger brother, a boyish figure with a horror of cruelty and a habit of drawing circles on paper when his feelings overwhelm him. He adores Mr. Verloc with a doglike devotion that his brother-in-law finds merely inconvenient, and he is easily worked upon by anyone who speaks to him kindly. His innocence is the moral measure of the book: the anarchists and the police alike treat him as a tool, and the reader is made to feel the cost of that carelessness long before the plot makes it explicit.

Chief Inspector Heat

supporting

Also known as Inspector Heat, Heat

Heat has spent decades building a quiet network of informers and a settled conviction about how the revolutionary underworld should be policed, and he resents interference from above. He regards Verloc as his own property, a tool to be used rather than surrendered to the department as a whole, and his professional pride is bound up with that arrangement. When the Greenwich affair forces him to explain himself to a superior who sees the case differently, Heat's certainty becomes the story's sharpest instrument for exposing how the machinery of order actually works.

Mr. Vladimir

supporting

Vladimir is the First Secretary of a foreign embassy, a man of polished manners and genuine scorn for the exiles he is supposed to be managing. He regards the British police as complacent and the revolutionists as fat and useless, and he demands an outrage that will embarrass the government and justify harsher measures. His cold insistence on a specific target, and his willingness to humiliate the agent he employs, sets the entire plot in motion and gives the book its particular chill.

Michaelis

supporting

Also known as the mild Michaelis, the convict Michaelis, Mr. Michaelis

Michaelis moves through the anarchist circles of London as a figure of gentleness rather than menace, his long imprisonment having left him passive and contemplative. He depends on the hospitality of a rich lady who takes an interest in his welfare, a relationship that makes him both pitied and suspected by comrades who find his mildness suspect. His presence in the story's early and middle stretches offers a quiet counterpoint to the louder, more desperate conspirators around him.

Sir Ethelred

minor

A high-ranking government official overseeing the police investigation.

Toodles

minor

Also known as the sympathetic Toodles, the experienced Toodles

Sir Ethelred's private secretary, a minor functionary.

Baron Stott-Wartenheim

minor

Also known as the late Baron Stott-Wartenheim, old Stott-Wartenheim

The deceased former ambassador, mentioned in the author's note.

Karl Yundt

minor

Also known as Yundt, Karl Yundts

An elderly, toothless anarchist who talks of violence but is inactive.

Adolf

minor

A minor character, possibly a waiter or assistant at the anarchist meeting place.

The Perfect Anarchist

minor

A theoretical figure discussed by the anarchists, not a real character.

Mother

minor

Mrs. Verloc's mother, who moves out to a charity home.

Mrs. Neale

minor

The Verlocs' charwoman, a poor woman with many children.

Annie

minor

A young girl briefly mentioned in the Verloc household.