Police Sketches of Fictional Characters

A rad new Tumblr, The Composites, has been making the rounds the last few days that uses police software to create sketches of famous literary characters, such as The Misfit from Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to the left. The site’s creator, Brian Joseph Davis, plugs in information from passages in novels or stories to create the images. For example, the following bits from Dashiell Hammett:

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

So far the site has sketches of characters from Charlotte Brontë, Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, Gustave Flaubert, Flannery O’Connor, JG Ballard, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Dashiell Hammett. Davis is openly looking for more suggestions, so email yours in!

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