Cranberry
| Cranberry | |
 | |
| Name | Cranberry |
| Race | Human |
| Age | |
| Occupation | Professional killer in the pay of Cosmo Lavish |
| Physical appearance | Bald |
| Residence | |
| Death | Most unusual and alarming |
| Parents | |
| Relatives | |
| Children | |
| Marital Status | |
| Appearances | |
| Books | Making Money |
| Cameos | |
"Professor" Cranberry is the Assassin hired by Cosmo Lavish, who mops up all the possible threads that could lead to Cosmo's involvement in certain things, such as rings made of Stygium or swordsticks.
Despite the honorific, Cranberry is not a Professor of the Assassins' Guild, though he had been a scholarship boy there once upon a time. He had been awarded the title, by the simple fact that when not out on business he spends his time reading.
Disturbingly, Cranberry is in no way an illiterate thug but a well-read, highly intelligent man who looks after business very well indeed - to the delight of Cosmo and the horror of Heretofore, Lavish's servant. Heretofore has a few deaths on his hands, because his schemes seem always to end with Cranberry being sent in to inhume whomsoever helped him out.
He came to a violent end at the hands of a most unlikely person in Mavolio Bent, who killed him in a most unusual way. For details, see Making Money.
Annotation
In the French film Nikita by Jean-Luc Besson, there is a character called Victor le Nettoyeur (Victor the Cleaner), played by Jean Reno. This insalubrious character has the same traits. He is sent in by the French Government to erase any mistakes they may have made, killing anyone who may have seen anything untoward. Harvey Keitel reprises this role in the American remake and then goes on to play Winstone "the Wolf" Wolfe in Pulp Fiction who does a similar role cleaning up "problems".
In le Tour de France, doesn't the "cleaning wagon" carry out a similar tidying-up function, picking up riders too exhausted to complete the stage or otherwise dropping out of the race, and ensuring there are no "corpses" left in the wake of the tour?
The Hitman franchise, a Cranberry source? The inspiration for Cranberry might also be taken from the computer game franchise "Hitman". Cranberry is described by Heretofore as " The man apparently had no body hair, too, and the gleam from his head could blind you in sunlight." (page 78). Hitman 47 is also bald with no body hair ((Hitman artwork).). Indeed Moist refers to Cranberry as, unusually, a hitman rather than an assassin (page 128).
