Paul Tobin
The topic of this post is near and dear to me, because I’ve seen way too many outright bad guys portrayed as heroes… meaning absolute merciless killers considered as “anti-heroes” rather than as… well… merciless killers. When an author (for prose, film, comics, television, etc) wants an anti-hero, the most common (and laziest) way to portray that is by having the hero commit countless numbers of variably-leveled crimes, and that’s fine. But only to a point. For me, one of the quintessential anti-heroes is Dashiell Hammett’s “Continental Op” character, especially in Red Harvest. He’s always forced to lie in his reports to the agency… he has a string of petty crimes and a string of fairly major crimes as well. He’s broken a couple hearts he knew damn well he was breaking. He’s broken a few men that he took a measure of pleasure in breaking. He’s broken a few bottles after a long night of drinking. He’s broken the law and he’s broken nearly every moral code. But he has a line that he doesn’t cross. He’s not an outright murderer. He doesn’t torture. He’s doing a job that he thinks needs to be done. He’s moving the world in a direction that he thinks it needs to move and he’s willing to die not for the glory of it all, and not even because he necessarily thinks it’s the way of justice, but simply because that’s who he is. It’s what he does.
And then there’s the other side of the coin.
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