This exercise was actually very time consuming, despite how straightforward it was. Just for reference, here was the provided extract:

The room was void and unquickened; it was like a room in a shop window but larger and emptier; and the middle-aged man who sat at the desk had never thought to impress himself upon what he entered every day. Comfort there was none nor discomfort; only did the occupant deign to qualify the pure neutrality of his surroundings, it would surely be austerity that would emerge. The spring sunshine turned bleak and functional as it passed the plate glass of the tall-uncurtained windows. 

The windows were large; the big desk lay islanded in a creeping parallelogram of light; across this and before the eyes of the man sitting motionless passed slantwise and slowly a massive shaft of shadow. 

Perhaps twenty times it passed to and fro, as if outside some great joy wheel oscillating idly in a derelict amusement park. And the man rose, clasped hands behind him and walked to a window – high up in New Scotland Yard. He looked out and war-time London lay beneath… on his brow was a fixed contraction; this he had carried from desk to window, and now there was neither hardening nor relaxation as he looked out… during 15 years he had controlled the file of police papers which dealt with the abduction and subsequent history of feeble minded girls. Here lay his anger as he looked out over London… year by year the anger had burst deeper until it was now the innermost principle of the man.

As instructed, I settled with the word “Mysterious”, which was me playing it simple.

I could collect that this was during World War II and that the man was a detective at Scotland Yard, peering down at war-time London. It is mentioned that he is a middle aged man, and one who has been in the police force for at least 15 years. I, thus, came to believe that he was an ordinary but experienced police detective from London in the 1940s. Based on these facts, I made my image. The process just involved me looking up 1940s men’s fashion and what a detective might look like in the 1940s. I found nothing particularly specific about the clothes of a detective, but I’d watched crime TV series, the knowledge from which assisted in the approximation.

What I was going for was now a middle aged man in the 1940s probably a little underdressed, considering he was working on something in a closed room, alone. I added a receding hairline just to emphasise on his experience. The problems arose when I began to render the image, which ended up distorting parts of the face a little, but it did eliminate the possibility of it looking unrealistically perfect.

To emphasise on the “Mystery”, I thought I would add some sort of ceiling light to the image, the kind one would find in an interrogation room. I, however, don’t believe I achieved effect.