Introduction: Stealing the Shire
Mark Finn
Many years ago, I heard a quote that was misattributed to Alfred Hitchcock, wherein he was speaking about Americans’ inherent Puritanism, and was said to have remarked, “An American audience will accept any horrible person as a protagonist, provided he’s good at his job.” I have no idea who really said it and it’s entirely possible that the person who told me the quote got it wrong, but this idea has stuck with me for three decades. Cue the theme song from The Sopranos, or Breaking Bad, or any other example, past or present, that you’d care to cite. Hitch may not have said it, or in exactly that way, but the theory seems to hold true.
We need thieves in our stories. The legacy of American humor is full of such characters, from Br’er Rabbit to Bugs Bunny. We’re fascinated with scofflaws, thumbing their noses at authority and sticking it to “The Man” whenever they can. Just look at our folk heroes. Some of our most colorful historical characters were criminals: bootleggers, racketeers, gangsters, and bank robbers. The 1920s and 1930s saw these dastards plying their trade and being written about in newspapers, talked about on the radio, and even made into movies. Arnold Rothstein. Baby Face Nelson. Bonnie & Clyde. John Dillinger. They operated with a freedom most of the country didn’t have, and while they all died in prison or in a hail of gunfire, that was secondary to the fact that they got away with it.
Knavery and roguishness are hardwired into the American character. The authors who defined and shaped modern fantasy knew it, as well. In The Hobbit, Gandalf recruits Bilbo Baggins because they need a burglar to best the dragon. Robert E. Howard’s redoubtable Conan the Cimmerian started his path to a kingship as a lowly thief, scaling towers in search of fabled riches. Both of Fritz Leiber’s rogues, the barbarian Fafhrd and his quick-witted partner, the Gray Mouser, were unapologetic thieves and frequently crossed swords with the law and rival thieves in the fabled city of Lankhmar.
There’s a great word for the kinds of stories that are short and episodic in nature, featuring a dishonest, but likeable, protagonist or two: picaresque. You can apply it to classic literature, such as Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, or you can slap it on the handful of American fantasy authors who wrote short stories for the pulps featuring swashbuckling action, fascinating characters, grim sorcery, and, of course, stacks of gold and other riches.
Why weren’t there more of these? Long before pop culture coined the term “mash-up,” movies and TV had no trouble with this idea. Consider the John Wayne western The War Wagon, which was nothing more than an armored car heist in the Wild West. And what about From Dusk Till Dawn, wherein two bank robbers trying to make a “getaway” (get it?) to the sanctuary city of El Rey, Mexico, end up in an Aztec vampire movie instead?
Fantasy was, perhaps, the last genre to cross over, due to the (normally) stronger moral center the genre embraces—beatific good turning away vile evil make for elemental, if simple, reasons for why our band of heroes needs to ride out at full speed. A number of fantasy authors in the 1980s (analogous to the success of Dungeons & Dragons) began experimenting with “low fantasy,” an expression I’ve come to hate, as it implies there’s an equivalence of quality. High fantasy is about big concepts: good versus evil, noble quests, sacrifice. Low fantasy, it would seem, is the opposite of that.
I quite disagree. Much like how American authors such as Dashiell Hammett, according to his peer, Raymond Chandler, “took murder out of the drawing room and put it back in the gutter where it belonged,” American fantasists moved away from kings and quests and started writing about common men doing uncommon things, or uncommon men doing heroic things, not for queen and country, but for gold and food, or to halt a tyrant’s progress across an already blasted land. What Hammett, Chandler, Horace McCoy, and the other Black Mask Boys did for detective fiction, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, and the rest of the Weird Tales writers did for fantasy fiction.
It’s tempting to overthink it, but with the coming of the twenty-first century we’ve seen an uptick in heists and capers in fiction and film, and not just stories set in the modern era. Other genres are throwing their lot in, planning perfect crimes and daring robberies without the help of Mission: Impossible-style technology to help. Any time period or setting that has an excess of wealth, a few haves and a lot of have-nots, and some enterprising folks with an utter lack of regard for the law, that’s a situation ripe for a heist.
Heists and capers have moved out of the genre of crime fiction and become a type of story being told in whatever genre the author is working. Fantasy, in particular, is enjoying a bit of a Renaissance in that respect. Sword and sorcery is making a comeback. There are more thief characters and fantastic-criminal stories on the bookshelves than we’ve seen in a long time, going back to the 1980s, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we had to walk twelve miles in the snow to get to Waldenbooks, in the mall, just to buy our mass-market paperbacks and AD&D books. That the role-playing games that used to get us shoved into lockers in high school have now become a driving cultural vector in popular culture, thanks to giant media conglomerates and video game manufacturers, is not lost on anyone.
It’s in the midst of this resurgence that we find ourselves, with you holding this book in your hands. The authors who were kind enough to go along with myself and my coeditor David Afsharirad are no strangers to fantasy, sword and sorcery, and bizarre magic, but you may be surprised to find how quickly they agreed to break bad and plan a variety of heists and capers for this collection. As exciting as world-building can be, especially fantasy worlds, we wanted the focus of these stories to be The Job. After all, the star of a heist story is the act of committing the robbery and all of the pieces and parts that go into it.
It starts by assembling the team, which is where we meet the lovable band of misfits going to pull this particular job. The plan is discussed, and kinks are ironed out. Then we see the crew carrying on, and we delight in watching them overcome the various problems and obstacles that arise, planned and unplanned. Then there’s always that scene where the prize is plucked and/or delivered…and if there’s going to be a double cross, or a triple cross, it’ll happen at this point. Finally, do they get away with it? Live to steal another day? The crime genre likes to split the difference, wiping out some or all of the key players about half the time. Fantasy and sword and sorcery, for all of its grimdarkness, tends to be a little more hopeful that a hero will ride again. But make no mistake, none of these stories come with a guarantee. An untimely demise is a risk most rogues are willing to take.
And what about capers? The lighter, more madcap first cousin to the usually serious heist? I like to think of it this way: all capers are heists, but not all heists are capers. And you will note we have a good mix of both kinds of stories in this collection. You can also expect a handful of double crosses, too. I won’t say which stories, but you will note that all of the tales assembled here take one or more of those standard plot points for a heist or a caper and turn it on its pointed ear.
There’s nothing left for you to do now but turn the page and dive in. There’s a wide variety of stories in this collection: lightly comic offerings; historical worlds similar to our own, but with a bit of fae magic; dangerous and desperate schemes; and a few jobs that, through no fault of their own, go pear-shaped and change the mission parameters from “grab the loot” to “survive the night.” There’s something here for every taste. And should you find yourself reading one of these stories and thinking to yourself, “Hell, I can plan a better heist than that…” well, let’s just say I know some people who might be able to help you with that…for a cut of the take…
Here’s to Crime,
Mark Finn
Way Up in North Texas