What does it say about our cynicism when criminals deliver what we consider “real” justice in popular fiction?
The fictional antiheroes I enjoy raise many questions about what it is to be a good person.
The premise of the short stories, books, radio dramas, and screenplays with these rogues is simple: sometimes the justice system, the law and order of our society, fails to deliver the promised justice. It is left to antiheroes who don’t rely on what is legal to determine what is right.
Simon Templar, Boston Blackie, Harry Lime, and the heist crew of Leverage. These are among my favorite characters. Raffles, the Gentleman Thief, is yet another. (Raffles was created by E. W. Hornung, the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle. Imagine those dinner discussions.)
I watch The Blacklist waiting for Raymond Reddington’s inner goodness to be affirmed, despite the body count left in the character’s wake. Give me enough time and I could probably list 100 antiheroes I enjoy.
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven is one of my favorite films. Westerns often rely on antiheroes, the gunslinger turned avenger who protects the weak and vulnerable.
However, it is the good thieves I return to time and again.
Never underestimate the rhetorical power of fiction. The entertainment we call crime dramas, police procedurals, noir detective tales, and so on, perform the dual rhetorical tasks of reinforcing social values and nudging values in new directions.
The good con artist and gentleman thief archetypes suggest most people have a moral compass. Criminals, characters we know have broken laws and violated social norms, seek redemption… or justice.
Though people often associate the antiheroes with Robin Hood, that legendary character isn’t an antihero. He was retaking confiscatory taxes and giving those back to the people. The Saint was not technically the “Robin Hood of Crime” — he was a thief and con artist who just happened to have some curious sense of right and wrong.
Simon Templar? Certainly not a saint. Raffles? A forerunner of Templar. The slightly darker variation was safecracker extraordinaire Boston Blackie, who toyed with the police for sport while being a “friend to those who have no friends.”
Simon Templar kills people. He keeps a “small fee” of ten percent when he helps someone recover property or money… and sometimes he keeps anything extra he happens to recover. The Saint wasn’t the first such figure in literature, though I consider the character among the most influential of antiheroes. Leslie Charteris ranks with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
The Saint of television gave us Leverage.
I grew up loving The Saint so much that my favorite car remains the Volvo P1800 driven by Roger Moore’s incarnation of the character (followed by the Lotus Esprit Turbo models driven by James Bond). The Saint of Vincent Price, the classical radio incarnation of Simon Templar, still entertains me several times a week.
The Third Man, a cinematic masterpiece, gave us Harry Lime and it’s hard not to connect Lime to Raymond Reddington of The Blacklist.
Harry Lime is not a good person. He’s a con man, the villain of The Third Man. We’re talking about a man willing to steal penicillin and then resell it, diluted, to children’s hospitals. Yet, in The Lives of Harry Lime, he’s often the “good” guy. He delivers justice to criminals, including crooked politicians and greedy businessmen. Of course, when he recovers compromising negatives or letters used in an extortion scheme Lime keeps the materials as leverage. In one story, Lime destroys compromising negatives yet lets the politician believe the evidence still exists. Why? Because Lime doesn’t want someone else to have the negatives. Fear, he reminds us, is power and influence.
The Leverage crew are the least “bad” of the antiheroes I enjoy. They don’t use guns. They don’t seek to physically harm anyone, though they do engage in some property damage occasionally and comic-book violence. These characters are not vigilantes, at least not of the superhero sort. They are still criminals, willing to steal and cheat for their own gains.
Maybe we all want The Shadow on our side. Sure, he bends rules and even kills. But, he’s the good guy, righting wrongs. Few people realize that Kent Allard extorted Lamont Cranston to steal the wealthy playboy’s identity. Over time, readers and listeners forgot the Cranston we followed in the stories was Allard. In fact, most reboots of The Shadow drop the complicated backstory, yet that story reveals how willing Allard is to use other people for his dispensing of justice.
In their classical forms, Philosophy and rhetoric seek to teach us and guide us towards “the good life.” But what does that mean? What is it to be “good” as a person?
We know the world isn’t fair and justice is often elusive. Justice comes from the shadows, delivered by sinful saints and con artists.