Steerpike Titus, who blamed Steerpike for his sister's death, eventually finds and kills him. Stefan Vinzberg portrayed the character in the opera adaptation, and he was played by Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the BBC miniseries. "The Daily Telegraph" has described Steerpike as one of the greatest villains in English literature. They also proposed that post-war readers were not prepared to fully appreciate the character upon his initial appearance. Steerpike Steerpike is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's novels "Titus Groan" and "Gormenghast". Steerpike might be called the antagonist of the Gormenghast trilogy, but in truth he is more of
Maeve Gilmore Alone", the third novel in his series of Titus books, following "Titus Groan" (1946), and "Gormenghast" (1950), only with difficulty. When published in 1959 "Titus Alone" was less polished than he might have wished, but he was beyond correcting it. He had always planned a longer series, taking his hero up to his forties at least. On his death from Parkinson's disease in November 1968, Peake left a few pages of notes for a fourth book, of which fewer than a thousand words are legible. During the 1970s, Gilmore worked on the fourth Titus book herself, inspired partly by the