There are a lot of brilliant criminals in literature. 

You have the cunning Professor Moriarty, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle exclusively to kill off his famous character, Sherlock Holmes. (Doyle once wrote to his mother, “I think of slaying Holmes, … and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”) 

Thomas Harris crafted our favourite serial cannibal, psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. His character was so engaging that he practically leapt off the pages — and into a movie franchise, a television series … even an ‘inspired’ cookbook or two.

And who could forget frumpy Annie Wilkes, one of Stephen King’s most terrifyingly capable villains. Not only was she a devoted fan of a certain romance novelist, but she was also a trained nurse who got away with murder time and time again.

There are countless more examples out there. But, perhaps, the lure of a well-rounded villain has made us forget the sheer joy that comes in crafting a story that features a complete and utter numskull. Such characters not only insert a dose of humour into any genre, but they can also throw a reader off the scent in a good mystery. Think about what would happen if a detective accidentally loses the murder weapon to a silverware pinching granny. Maybe an assassin keeps killing the wrong target because his new handler has terrible penmanship? Or, perhaps, a third-rate shoplifter stumbles upon a heist worth millions…and nicks it just before a professional thief can.

There are more dunces in the criminal world than diamonds, and don’t fools have a strange type of luck? I would invite you to take the case of the 1995 Greater Pittsburgh bank robberies as an example of this. McArthur Wheeler and Clifton E. Johnson robbed not one but two banks at gunpoint in January of that year. Neither robber wore any sort of disguise save one thing: lemon juice. 

That’s right. They had covered their faces with lemon juice. Why? Well… Johnson had argued during the planning stage that since lemon juice was used to make invisible ink, then it would also make them invisible to security cameras. Wheeler, no doubt the brains of the operation, was skeptical. He decided it would be a good idea to test the concept first by taking a polaroid of himself, complete with lemon juice coating. The shot came out with him “missing”. 

(In hindsight, it probably should’ve occurred to him that the camera could’ve been defective, or the film was bad, but I digress.)

Wheeler, no longer finding any holes with Johnson’s suggestion, was all for this new disguise. So off the pair went to hold up a bank. Surveillance photographs led to Johnson's arrest six days after the heist, and tips resulted in Wheeler's arrest in April. When shown the evidence the police had against him — including photographs — Wheeler exclaimed, “But I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice.”

Obviously, a jury found the pair guilty. An interesting footnote to this bizarre event is that it lead to a professor of social psychology proposing that “If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his stupidity.” He and his graduate student ended up doing an entire research study about perceived competence. (If you are at all curious, look up the Dunning—Kruger Effect.)

At any rate, imagine what kind of story one can write by adding THAT amount of buffoonery in the mix?

I invite you to try. No doubt hilarity will ensue!