rogues' gallery

See also: rogue's gallery and rogues gallery

English

rogue +‎ gallery. Popularized by American detectives Allan Pinkerton and Thomas F. Byrnes.

rogues' gallery (plural rogues' galleries)

A set of pictures of convicted or suspected criminals used in law enforcement investigations to help witnesses identify suspects.
- 1866, "Readings for the Young: The Rogues' Gallery," in The Christian Treasury, Johnstone, Hunter & Co. (Edinburgh), pp. 322-323:
  When the policemen arrest a man . . . if there is good reason to suspect him, they take his picture before they let him go. . . . Then they put the picture up in the rogues' gallery among the others, where everybody who comes there can see it.
- 1984, William Diehl, Hooligans, →ISBN, page 41:
  "Recognize these people?" Dutch asked, pointing to the rogues' gallery.
  I nodded. "All of 'em. Cutthroats to the man."
(idiomatic, by extension) Any group of lawbreakers or other disreputable characters.
- 1997, Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey, →ISBN, page 325:
  The old staple of every demonstration: gully gully may shor hai, Congress Party chor hai—the cry goes up in every alley, Congress Party is a 'rogues' gallery—was very much in evidence.
- 2006, "The Man Who Sold the Bomb," Time, 6 Feb.:
  For more than a decade, Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, masterminded a vast, clandestine and hugely profitable enterprise whose mission boiled down to this: selling to a rogues' gallery of nations the technology and equipment to make nuclear weapons.
(fiction) The set of supervillains associated with a particular superhero or comic book title.