Loving the Bad Guy in Film and Fiction
For me there’s almost nothing as good as a good heist/theft/con flick. Five Ocean movies (one with Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, three with George Clooney, and one all-female cast), two Italian Job films, two Thomas Crown movies, and the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta-Jones film Entrapment prove that we love to cheer for the bad guy especially when he (or she) is the underdog. If you don’t mind sub-titles there’s also the fabulous film Nine Queens in Spanish. It’s a con movie that I’d put up against The Sting any day of the week.
It’s easy to cheer for the heroes – those handsome, intelligent, honest, never cross the line, brave fighters for right. Well, villains come in all shades of bad. There’s your out-right, down and dirty nasty bad guy. The sociopath: the thought of doing ‘the right thing’ isn’t even in his/her vocabulary. We don’t cheer for them. Ever. We sometimes cheer for the anti-villain, the protagonists who do bad things (steals, kills, lies) but their motives are good. They’re the pragmatic ‘end justifies the means’ folk. They carry with them a moral code. It might not be the same code you or I would endorse, but they hold to it. It’s also possible to cheer for the anti-hero – the plain joe, going through life doing the right thing even though it’s not always for the right reason. And there are our reluctant heroes, so full of self-doubt they can’t imagine anything they can do will make a difference. Bilbo Baggins was one such. Gandolf knew that when it was needed, Bilbo would be a successful burglar.
Our love of the larcenist isn’t a new thing. Who was the first robber most of us cheered for? Robin Hood! Stories and ballads about Robin are found as early as the 13th and 14th centuries. (Long before Walt Disney got a hold of him!) Robin shared a trait with his later comrades. As we all know – he stole from the rich and the powerful who abused their power, and gave to the poor.
Sherlock Holmes appreciated the fact that his efforts served justice and country, but what motivated him was the challenge to his superior intelligence. So you could argue that he did the right thing, but not always for the right reason. He did it for the thrill of outwitting the criminal. It was a game. While Holmes was enjoying his popularity and displaying his intelligence along came two crooks (Raffles & Lupin) determined to prick his self-assured image.
Raffles:
In 1898, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W Hornung, wrote The Ides of March and introduced his character A. J. Raffles. Raffles was a ‘gentleman thief’. Not born into the higher levels of society, he was accepted by this crowd because of his cricket-playing ability. He was the perpetual house guest and his moral code prevented him from stealing from his hosts, but fellow guests were open game. He used the money he obtained in this manner to help sustain his life style, but money was never the motive. Like Sherlock, it was the challenge. Once he stole a gold cup from the British Museum, for the challenge, and then returned it by sending it to the Queen as a Diamond Jubilee present. What’s not to love about a guy like that?
Like Sherlock, he had a sidekick, Bunny Manders. While Hornung clearly patterned Raffles and Bunny after Holmes and Watson, scholars also claim that their relationship was patterned after that of Oscar Wilde and Lord Douglas. Raffles was like Sherlock in that he uses and comments on scientific and medical developments, class disparities, and the role of women. And like Sherlock he was killed, by his writer, and then brought back.
Doyle was not appreciative of Hornung’s character and said, “You must never make the criminal the hero.” Raffles became the second most popular fictional character in England after Sherlock Holmes, but he had his detractors. The Spectator wrote, “…this sort of book presents crime in a form too entertaining and attractive to be moral.” The comments might be understood due to the fact that, at the time, Jack the Ripper was roaming the streets of London.
Raffles appeared in numerous short stories and one novel. The stories were then gathered into books. The Amateur Cracksman, had eight stories and together with The Black Mask, which also had eight stories which were published in Cassells Magazine and Scribner’s Magazine. The third book contained ten stories which had been published in Colliers Weekly and the Pall Mall Magazine. He also appeared in several films, the most notable being two movies – one in 1930 starring Ronald Coleman and one in 1939 starring David Niven. He also makes an appearance in Jasper Fforde’s magnificent mystery Lost in a Good Book, when he and Bunny are pulled out of their stories to help open a safe.
Arsene Lupin:
The other criminal giving Holmes a run in popularity was Lupin, the fox, written by Maurice Leblanc in France beginning in 1905. Leblanc gave up law studies to become a pulp crime writer when a friend of his, Pierre Lafitte, wanted to launch a new magazine Je sais tout. He asked Leblanc to create a character that would do for his magazine what Holmes had done for The Strand. Leblanc came up with Arsene Lupin. Lupin was instantly popular and became known as the Sherlock Holmes of crime. Leblanc was awarded the French Legion of Honor.
Lupin was a gentleman thief, like Raffles. Like Raffles and Holmes, he was suave, intelligent, and a master of disguises. His capers were carefully planned and exquisitely elaborate. Like Raffles, he never robbed the poor. Lupin’s narrator, unlike Watson and Manders, was Leblanc himself. S.S. Van Dine used this narrative technique in the Philo Vance stories.
One of Lupin’s hallmarks was to leave a card with his name on it when he had completed his heist – much like the Pink Panther leaving a glove. The habit of leaving his card was incorporated into the Oceans 12 film. Vincent Cassel plays Francois Toulour, a thief known as the Night Fox. The Oceans crew break into a safe only to find the Night Fox has left his card in it. (Does all this give you a glimpse into how difficult it is for a writer to come up with something new in a story?)
If you want to carry Lupin fandom to its extreme, you can purchase a 3.3 ounce bottle of Arsene Lupin Voyou eau de parfum by Guerlain for $250. It was released in 2010 in honor of the Lupin stories.
Zorro:
Shades of my youth! Here was a hero to match Robin Hood! A fighter of injustice who robs the rich and unjust and helps the poor. He’s the anti-villain of all anti-villains. Created by the American pulp writer Johnston McCulley in 1919, in what he assumed would be a stand alone novel The Curse of Capistrano, Zorro went on to appear in short stories for over forty years, as well as in films and television series.
Zorro had a disguise (like Holmes, Raffles, and Lupin). In real life he was Don Diego de la Vega. Don Diego was a wealthy landowner who didn’t like fighting, never wore a sword unless formality demanded it, and was generally not a threat to the powers that be. But when he needed to fight injustice, he donned a cape and a mask before riding out of his hidden cave as Zorro. (Sound a bit like Batman?) Zorro is very athletic, unlike Don Diego, and is a master fighter with his sword. Like Lupin before him, he leaves his calling card – a Z cut into the clothing or skin of his victim.
Simon Templar:
The James Bond of thieves appeared in Meet the Tiger by Leslie Charteris in 1928. He’s also been called the Robin Hood of criminals. Simon Templar, known as The Saint, comes without social credentials: he has no proper family name, no proper school tie, no proper well-placed friends. But like the other thieves in this article, he was smart, courageous, and targeted those who preyed on the defenseless.
He’s a good thief with beautifully planned capers, and he now enjoys Saville Row suits, memberships in the finest clubs, and sporty fast cars. He keeps 10% of his take from crime and distributes the rest. He is another gentleman thief who wants his victims to know who has robbed them, leaving a calling card with the image of a stickman with a halo over his head.
Templar has a relationship with his writer, like Lupin and Philo Vance, although Charteris is not the narrator, Templar sometimes refers to him. “’This,’ the Saint said to nobody in particular, ‘sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write.” (The Saint Errant) Charteris, in turn, spoke about The Saint: “Fantastic, improbable – perhaps. Quite worthless, quite irritating, if you feel that way. Or a slightly cockeyed idealist, if you feel that way.”
Readers going through the Great Depression of the 1930s needed escapist stories with a bit of ‘joie de vivre’ in their lives and The Saint provided that.
John Dortmunder:
John is the brilliant planner of elaborate heists that never go right. He’s a career criminal, with a gang. His schemes start out straight forward and so simple, how could anything go wrong? And yet, it does. It does so often that when things are going smoothly, he actually gets worried. One burglary goes so wrong that the owner of the house actually steals Dortmunder’s pinky ring.
Written by Donald Westlake, Dortmunder first appears in The Hot Rock, published in 1970. This has got to be among the top books on my list of Books That Made Me Laugh ‘Till I Cried. Robert Redford stars in the film. There are 14 Dortmunder novels and 11 short stories. Too few.
Bernie Rhodenbarr:
Lawrence Block brought us Bernie in 1977. We meet him in Burglar’s Can’t be Choosers and learn that he’s as funny as Dortmunder. He’s addicted to the thrill of carrying out a great heist and is a careful planner, including the escape plans. Where his plans go wrong is that too often, he discovers a dead body along with the loot he was after. With the police on his trail, he must turn detective and find the killer in order to clear himself.
Bernie owns a used bookstore, which he uses to process the cash from his more illegal endeavours. In homage to another great gentleman thief, he has a cat named Raffles. He likes girls and single malt scotch whisky.
Charlie Howard:
We first meet Charlie in 2007 when he appears in The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam by Chris Ewan. (He later goes to Venice, Vegas, Berlin, and Paris) He’s a published crime writer, who happens to be a crook. Like Rhodenbarr, his problem is that a dead body often interferes with what would be a great heist and, like Rhodenbarr, he must find the guilty party. The dead bodies that both Rhodenbarr and Howard find during their burglaries reminds one of Simenon and The Burglar’s Wife. The wife of a burglar known to Simenon as not a violent man comes to Simenon with a tale of her husband entering a house to burglar and finding a dead body. Charlie doesn’t like violence, but he winds up taking more than a few lumps. While the books aren’t as funny as the Rhodenbarr or Block books, the flavor of the cities is an added bonus to a very enjoyable series.
These rather likeable villains are a nod to that little touch of larceny that possibly resides in all of us, our wish that the really evil bad guys of the world would get their due, and our hope that the anti-villains catch a break. He might be a suave gentleman thief, a modern day Robin Hood, or a hapless bumbler, but they all are protagonists after our hearts.