Wilhuff Tarkin is a human male from Eriadu, Grand Moff of the Outer Rim Territories and commander of the first Death Star. He was introduced in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977) and played by Peter Cushing.
The doctrine
Tarkin's importance is intellectual rather than dramatic. He is the author of the Empire's governing theory — that a sufficiently credible threat of annihilation removes the need to actually govern — and the destruction of Alderaan is that theory being field-tested. Every Imperial-era novel written since — Catalyst most explicitly — is, in some sense, about whether it works.
Luceno's Tarkin
James Luceno's Tarkin (Del Rey, 2014) is the essential book. (The given name Wilhuff long predates it — it goes back to West End Games' The Star Wars Sourcebook in 1987.) It braids his Outer Rim upbringing — a family that trained its children through deliberate hardship — with an early-Empire investigation conducted alongside Vader, and it makes the case that Tarkin is not a bureaucrat who acquired power but a hunter who acquired a bureaucracy.
Legends and canon
The Legends shelf gave him a comparable role and a rather different back catalogue, including a substantial presence in the older Death Star fiction. The 2014 novel supersedes most of it in current canon while keeping the shape intact. Unusually, the two versions of Tarkin want the same things for the same reasons.
Reading note
He is the best available answer to a question the films never quite ask: what does the Empire think it is for? Tarkin has an answer, states it plainly, and is the only senior Imperial who does.
