Unforgiven <\/em>is one of my favorite films. Westerns often rely on antiheroes, the gunslinger turned avenger who protects the weak and vulnerable.<\/p>\nHowever, it is the good thieves I return to time and again.<\/p>\n
Never underestimate the rhetorical power of fiction.<\/b> The entertainment we call crime dramas, police procedurals, noir detective tales, \u00a0and so on, perform the dual rhetorical tasks of reinforcing social values and nudging values in new directions.<\/p>\n
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\u2026 or justice.<\/p>\n
Though people often associate the antiheroes with Robin Hood, that legendary character isn\u2019t an antihero. He was retaking confiscatory taxes and giving those back to the people. The Saint was not technically the \u201cRobin Hood of Crime\u201d \u2014 he was a thief and con artist who just happened to have some curious sense of right and wrong.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfriend to those who have no friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simon Templar kills people. He keeps a \u201csmall fee\u201d of ten percent when he helps someone recover property or money\u2026 and sometimes he keeps anything extra he happens to recover. The Saint wasn\u2019t the first such figure in literature, though I consider the character among the most influential of antiheroes.\u00a0Leslie Charteris\u00a0ranks with Raymond Chandler and\u00a0\u00a0Dashiell Hammett.<\/p>\n
The Saint<\/em>\u00a0of television gave us Leverage.<\/p>\nI grew up loving The Saint<\/em> so much that my favorite car remains the Volvo P1800 driven by Roger Moore\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nThe Third Man<\/em>, a cinematic masterpiece, gave us Harry Lime and it’s hard not to connect Lime to Raymond Reddington of\u00a0The Blacklist<\/em>.<\/p>\nHarry Lime is not a good person. He\u2019s a con man, the villain of The Third Man<\/em>. We\u2019re talking about a man willing to steal penicillin and then resell it, diluted, to children\u2019s hospitals. Yet, in The Lives of Harry Lime<\/em>, he\u2019s often the \u201cgood\u201d 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\u2019t want someone else to have the negatives. Fear, he reminds us, is power and influence.<\/p>\nThe Leverage<\/em> crew are the least \u201cbad\u201d of the antiheroes I enjoy. They don\u2019t use guns. They don\u2019t seek to physically harm anyone, though they do engage in some property damage occasionally and comic-book violence.\u00a0These characters are not vigilantes, at least not of the superhero sort. They are still criminals, willing to steal and cheat for their own gains.<\/p>\nMaybe we all want\u00a0The Shadow<\/em> on our side. Sure, he bends rules and even kills. But, he\u2019s the good guy, righting wrongs. Few people realize that Kent Allard extorted Lamont Cranston to steal the wealthy playboy\u2019s identity. Over time, readers and listeners forgot the Cranston we followed in the stories was Allard. In fact, most reboots of\u00a0The Shadow<\/em> drop the complicated backstory, yet that story reveals how willing Allard is to use other people for his dispensing of justice.<\/p>\nIn their classical forms, Philosophy and rhetoric seek to teach us and guide us towards \u201cthe good life.\u201d But what does that mean? What is it to be \u201cgood\u201d as a person?<\/p>\n
We know the world isn\u2019t fair and justice is often elusive. Justice comes from the shadows, delivered by sinful saints and con artists.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What does it say about our cynicism when criminals deliver what we consider \u201creal\u201d justice in popular fiction? The fictional antiheroes I enjoy raise many…<\/p>\n
Continue readingWhy I Enjoy Tales of Good Thieves<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":27,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[31,50,93,106,149,150,189,193,227,265,325],"class_list":["post-933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-philosophy","tag-antiheroes","tag-books","tag-crime","tag-detectives","tag-fictional-characters","tag-film","tag-justice","tag-law","tag-old-time-radio","tag-radio","tag-television","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2024\/01\/RogueRhet_1200x630.png?fit=1200%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfiwhV-f3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/933\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/roguerhet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}