Sam Vimes


His Grace, The Duke of Ankh, Commander Sir Samuel "Sam" Vimes is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Vimes is depicted in the novels as somewhere between an Inspector Morse-type 'old-school' British policeman, and a film noir-esque grizzled detective. His appearances throughout the Discworld sequence show him slowly and grudgingly rising through the ranks of both police force and society.
As of his latest promotion, his full name and title is stated as being "His Grace, His Excellency, The 1st Duke of Ankh; Commander Sir Samuel Vimes". When serving as Ambassador for Ankh-Morpork, he is also referred to simply as "His Excellency", and is also nicknamed "Blackboard Monitor Vimes", "Vimes the Butcher" and "Vetinari's Terrier". According to his wife, [|Sybil], Vimes is recognised by many as Lord Vetinari's right-hand man.
He first appeared in the novel Guards! Guards!. While no detailed description of his physical appearance shows up in any of the Discworld novels, Pratchett says in the companion work The Art of Discworld that he has always imagined Vimes as a younger, slightly bulkier version of late British actor Pete Postlethwaite. Longtime collaborative artist Paul Kidby, who has worked with Pratchett on several works, portrays him instead as resembling Clint Eastwood.
Vimes is the Commander of the City Watch, the burgeoning police force of the Discworld's largest city, Ankh-Morpork. His rise from drunk policeman to respected member of the aristocracy, and the simultaneous growth and development of the Watch under his command, have together been one of the major threads of the Discworld series. Born into poverty, he became a highly reluctant member of modern Ankh-Morpork nobility, having been made both a knight and a duke, as well as an ambassador. He is married to Sybil Ramkin, the richest woman in the city. They have a son, The Honourable Samuel Vimes II.

Works

Beginning with Guards! Guards! in 1989, the main Discworld books featuring Sam Vimes are:
  • Guards! Guards! – 1989
  • Men at Arms – 1993
  • Feet of Clay – 1996
  • Jingo – 1997
  • The Fifth Elephant – 1999
  • The Truth – 2000
  • Night Watch – 2002
  • Monstrous Regiment – 2003
  • Thud! – 2005
  • Where's My Cow? – 2005
  • Making Money – 2007
  • Unseen Academicals – 2009
  • Snuff – 2011
  • Raising Steam – 2013

    Background

Sam Vimes was born in Cockbill Street as the son of Thomas Vimes, in the poorest area of Ankh-Morpork, so poor that there was little crime, though Sam was part of a street gang with Lupine Wonse, who later became secretary to Lord Vetinari.
Vimes was educated at a dame school, where he was once blackboard monitor for a whole term, before he had to drop out and concentrate on learning about life out on the streets. It is mentioned in Jingo that Sam Vimes' father, Thomas Vimes, had been a watchman prior to his death. His mother would go on to tell young Sam that his father was 'run down by a cart when he was crossing the street'. He privately thinks later that his father was a drunk: "Vimes had never known his father. His mum told him that the man had been run over by a cart, but Vimes suspected that if this were true at all, then it was probably a brewer's cart, which had 'run him over' a bit at a time for years". She raised young Sam on her own, died about twenty years after the events of Night Watch and is buried in the city's Small Gods Cemetery. In Night Watch Sam remembers that his mother made 'the very best' Distressed Pudding.
The Vimes family is mentioned as historically being closely linked with the City Watch, with many members serving in it through its history. It has been suggested that Sam is a descendant of Suffer-Not-Injustice "Old Stoneface" Vimes, the Watch Commander who instigated the rebellion against, and subsequently beheaded, Lorenzo the Kind, the last king of the city, a sadistic torturer described as "very fond of children." As a consequence, the Vimes family was stripped of its nobility. For three centuries afterwards, the memory of "Old Stoneface" has lived on in infamy and Vimes has frequently endured suspicious mutterings from the aristocracy. Vimes is implied to heavily resemble his ancestor and they share a nickname: Old Stoneface. The Annotated Pratchett File notes that Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes is closely modelled on Oliver Cromwell, and that the name of his supporters, the Ironheads, is a portmanteau of Ironsides and Roundheads, Cromwell's regiment and faction, respectively.
Vimes was sixteen when he joined the Watch. He was part of that section of the Watch which played a large role in the rebellion against Homicidal Lord Winder. Around this time, he was taught all he knew by Sergeant-At-Arms John Keel, which is where his cynical outlook on life and his firm belief in justice comes from.
In the newest stories, Keel is Vimes himself transported back in time by thirty years. As Lu-Tze explains to Vimes in Night Watch, both pasts are true. Vimes was transported back in time in the company of a criminal named Carcer, whom he was trying to apprehend. Carcer robbed and killed the real John Keel, and Vimes had to replace him in order for his role in history to be fulfilled.
Vimes' age is never explicitly given, and is not always consistent. Night Watch states that Vimes was sixteen years old when he joined the City Watch. Men at Arms mentions that Vimes had been in the Watch for 25 years, making him 41 at the time of that novel. The main events of Night Watch, set only a few weeks after Vimes joined the Watch, are stated as occurring more than thirty years prior to the present from which Vimes came, this makes Samuel Vimes at least 46 years old at the time of that book. Thud! gives the age of Vimes' son,, born during the climax of Night Watch, as being fourteen months, which would put Vimes at a minimum of 47 or 48 years old during the events of the book. When Vimes discusses his time as a blackboard monitor, he thinks about it being "more than 45 years ago" and that he was six years old at the time, putting his age at least 51 years; this is confirmed when he refers to the new vampire officer, age given as 51, as being "not that much younger than him". It is also mentioned in Night Watch, that at the time of the "Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May", both Sam Vimes and Havelock Vetinari were 16 years old, meaning that they are both the same age.

The Watch

During the first 25 years of his term in the Watch, Vimes rose to Captain of the Night Watch, a position that he attained about ten years prior to the events of Guards! Guards!, as it dwindled to a tiny stub - while the power of the Thieves' Guild grew. This insult to Vimes' sense of justice, together with his being naturally knurd and other events, led towards heavy drinking. At this time, he lived in near poverty, giving away almost all of his salary to widows and orphans of watchmen, and spending what was left on alcohol and cheap boots.
All that changed when Carrot Ironfoundersson came to the city. A human raised by dwarfs, Carrot joined the Watch and set out to help the city. Around the same time, a dragon assaulted the city, and the Watch was instrumental in its defeat. The whole series of events forced Vimes to sober-up long enough to uncover who was responsible for summoning the Dragon, after which the [|changes in his personal life] led to him coming off of the drink and switching to smoking cigars, and occasionally, taking snuff.
Vimes, who was about to retire following his marriage to Lady Sybil, was given the resurrected rank of Commander, putting him in charge of the Night Watch and the Day Watch. He also received a knighthood.
The Watch was given a new headquarters, Pseudopolis Yard, by Lady Sybil Ramkin after the dragon destroyed their original base at Treacle Mine Road. It had been her childhood home, and in Thud! it is revealed that some of her family's possessions are still stored in the attic of the building - in this instance they retrieved a copy of Methodia Rascal's Koom Valley painting, made by Sybil as a child, after the original is stolen.
As part of an equal-opportunities drive required by the Patrician, the Watch under Vimes eventually took on extra staff in the form of a werewolf, a dwarf and a troll. They were instrumental in foiling an attempt on the Patrician's life, and were rewarded. The Watch was rapidly revived and became increasingly important in the city.
Vimes took a great interest in the restructuring of the Watch, placing new Watch Houses where they were needed and supervising the creation of both a Watch Academy and a forensics section. His reform of the City Watch has been so successful that by Night Watch, Vimes-trained policemen are in high demand in cities across the Disc. They are known as Sammies, even to the people who may have never actually heard of Samuel Vimes himself. In his expanding international and diplomatic role, Vimes appreciates the fact that police officers from Sto Lat to Genua have been trained to salute him, and remain in unofficial contact across the Disc.

Character

Vimes is a very conflicted character. An incorruptible idealist with deep beliefs in justice and an abiding love of his city, he is also a committed cynic whose knowledge of human nature constantly reminds him how far off those ideals are. Having married into the upper classes, he still possesses an innate dislike of inherited wealth and an instinctive revulsion towards social inequality. The Patrician observes that Vimes is anti-authoritarian even though he is, himself, an authority figure, which is "practically Zen". The conflict within Vimes is between his virtuous nature and what he calls "the Beast". In The Art of Discworld, Pratchett explains that Vimes protects himself from the Beast with the symbol of his own badge, which prevents him from becoming the criminal he despises, at least in his own mind. Although in Guards! Guards! Vimes is all but shocked at Vetinari's disturbingly cynical view of the world, he in turn has been called "the most cynical bastard that ever walked under the sun". Although widely differing characters, Vimes and Vetinari can be called similar in that they both have very cynical worldviews, but fairly idealistic aims.
Vimes has once been described as a speciesist, though this habit slowly dies away; most of his officers rationalize this bias as simply not being particularly fond of anyone. However, he will warm up to anyone he considers a "good copper" regardless of their unusual background and has allowed the Watch to become one of the most species-blind employers in the city. Initially, Vimes is jokingly described as only fond of rural dwarfs and wizards, the former who only commit crimes underground and away from him and the latter ironically sharing his respectful distaste for using magic irresponsibly. A notable exception is his explicit dislike of vampires. He explained to the abstaining vampire Lady Margolotta in The Fifth Elephant, this is because, teetotal or not, 'a vampire will always seek to dominate a human being'.
Despite being viewed by many of the Discworld's more Machiavellian power brokers as easy to fool, Vimes is more cunning than he appears. His years of practical experience give him a foundation of hard-headed realism on which he bases much of his more idealistic beliefs. A running gag in the series is his thwarting of several attempts on his life by the Assassins' Guild, due to his knowledge of their rigid code of conduct. Thanks to the funds now available to him through marriage, his mansion is set with numerous traps so that the Assassins, who must always offer a sporting chance, cannot get close to him without suffering a severe mishap. Traps include roof tiles set on greased rails, sawn roof joists over the dragon pens and bear traps in the shrubbery. Vimes also personally makes sure that all of the brickwork is kept in good repair, with no convenient handholds. In addition, Vimes' office at Pseudopolis Yard has "everything that his ingenuity could devise", including sharp ornamental railings, "which are pretty, and make the house look nice, but are, above all, spiky."
Whenever he thwarts an Assassin in an attempt, he usually lets them go after taking their share of the payment for his inhumation, and subjecting them to a little humiliation. Though he finds it to be annoying, Vimes takes these continued attempts on his life as a sign that he's angering somebody, and so must be doing something right. In every book in the series, the fee for his assassination has risen until he has been removed from the Guild register, meaning that contracts on his life are no longer accepted. Vimes was made aware of this by a young female student from the guild, who had been tasked with merely getting a glimpse of Vimes at his home. Vimes is considering appealing the decision. In The Fifth Elephant, Vimes managed to evade, fight off, and 'kill' part of a pack of werewolves in "the game", a werewolf tradition of chasing a human back to civilization that humans did not often win. Vimes also reflects on killing a werewolf in Night Watch and Vetinari mentions him killing a werewolf in Thud!. He eventually did actually kill Wolfgang
While not otherwise well-traveled, in the days of Guards! Guards! he could tell exactly where he was anywhere within the city limits of Ankh-Morpork just by the feel of the cobbles beneath his feet, due to the thinness of his boots at the time, having walked the streets of the city for thirty years and a knowledge of the difference of the cobbles therein. When he is returned to the past in Night Watch, he uses this ability to locate a group of monks he needs in order to return to his present. Later in the series, the expensive, good quality boots his wife persists in buying for him restrict this ability.
Vimes' firm grasp of basic human nature, and of the Ankh-Morpork psyche in particular, led to him spending some years as a drunk, and Fred Colon postulates that this was because Vimes' body didn't produce any "natural alcohol", and he estimates that Vimes was about "two drinks below par". This meant that when he hadn't been drinking, he was beyond sober - he was "knurd". Thus, he saw reality as it really was ; stripped of all the mental illusions that most people construct in their minds to get to sleep at night. This horrifying state of mind caused Vimes to try to balance it out through drinking, but he would get the dosage wrong and would just end up drunk. Vimes gave up alcohol after his marriage to Sybil, and now smokes foul-smelling cigars instead. He still keeps an unopened bottle of 'Bearhugger's Whisky' in his bottom desk drawer as a 'permanent test'.
Terry Pratchett noted the following about Vimes on Usenet: "Vimes is fundamentally a person. He fears he may be a bad person because he knows what he thinks rather than just what he says and does. He chokes off all of those little reactions and impulses, but he knows what they are. So he tries to act like a good person, often in situations where the map is unclear." This, along with the Discworld habit of pushing any theory as hard as it goes, appears to have culminated in Vimes' psyche creating its own 'internal policeman' to "Guard the Guardsmen",, and Vimes' own sense of justice being so strong that, in Thud!, it was even able to fend off the attempts to possess him by a 'quasi-demonic thing of pure vengeance'.
It has also been noted that in personality and mental setup, Vimes bears some similarity to Granny Weatherwax.Both are effectively 'good' characters, who nevertheless both secretly fear the darkness inside themselves, and constantly strive to control the darker sides of their nature.
Vimes often has to go to report to Lord Vetinari, although most of the time he keeps a poker-face and answers very simply to avoid Vetinari's probing questions. When given bad news, he has a tendency to, on his way out, pound his fist against a certain spot of wall near the office door. Though he sometimes has to call in a plasterer when Vimes is particularly angry, Vetinari doesn't worry about it—a sign that he intentionally angers Vimes so as to goad him into a desired action. When Vimes was temporarily relieved of command in Men at Arms, the fact that Vimes didn't pound the wall led Vetinari to realize that he 'may have gone too far'.
Sometimes this darker side comes out when Vimes loses control of his anger and he effectively 'goes spare'. In Men at Arms, he temporarily gains possession of the Gonne, a malevolent firearm which drives him to violence, but he restrains the urge to "make things right", enough to eventually let it go without seriously hurting anyone. In Feet of Clay, Corporal Nobby Nobbs refuses the position of King of Ankh-Morpork, primarily due to the fear of incurring Vimes's general wrath and hatred of royalty.
In Thud!, after an attempted assassination of his family, Vimes becomes furious at the 'deep-down dwarves' responsible for the attack on his family - a problem only made worse by the presence of a dark entity of pure vengeance within his mind. Both of those factors, and a near-Death experience that forced him to miss his 6:00pm story-time with his son, culminate in Vimes snapping, temporarily losing control to "the Beast", and single-handedly storming the deep-downers responsible, all the while roaring out the lines to Where's My Cow?; with such ferocity that their personal guard come to the conclusion that "they had sworn to fight to the death, but not to this death," and run away. As he is about to massacre the now-defenceless deep-downers, Vimes hesitates thanks to "the Watchman" in his head and begins to struggle with himself, which buys enough time for Sergeant Angua to arrive at the scene and force him down. Even under the worst provocation Vimes is shown to never completely loses control, always managing to restrain himself in the end.
Revealed in the events of Thud!, after years of night-time patrols, Vimes' mindscape is described as the city of Ankh-Morpork-itself, streets and all, in the dead of night, whilst the rains are bucketing down over your head. Whenever Vimes is angry, doors of some of the houses open. While the Summoning Dark had trespassed into his mind, needing a host in order to track down the Deep-Downer Dwarves, would try to enter through one of the doors that opened when Vimes became angry, only to be pulled away at every time. It is later revealed that the force that was preventing the Summoning Dark from making any progress in possessing Vimes was Vimes' own 'inner guardsman', who patrols the streets of his mind.
Vimes is an effective and brutal hand-to-hand fighter, who specialises in "dirty fighting". He also prefers non-lethal takedowns whenever possible.
During heightened states of mind, such as when confronting his darker side and/or when near death, he is able to see Death,. Death himself is unsure whether Vimes should die or not in these cases, citing "quantum" as an explanation. At one point Death notes that if Vimes is having a 'near-Death' experience, Death is also forced to have a 'near Vimes' experience.
On rare occasions, Sam Vimes has been described as completely happy, even if it's only for a brief period; such occasions include alone time with his wife, the birth of his son, and whenever a case has reached a satisfactory conclusion. At the end of the events of Snuff, Vimes was also genuinely amazed to learn that a new book, "Pride and Extreme Prejudice", had been dedicated to him.