Dexter and Philosophy

by Greene, Richard; Reisch, George A. ; Robison, Rachel

  Wallace’s Just Men are the crystallization of a common theme in popular fiction: the hero will sometimes break the law in a good cause. Sherlock Holmes, aside from such trivialities as burglarizing houses in search of evidence, sometimes lets killers go free. Unlike the irreproachable Just Men, Holmes also displays another common trait of the storybook hero: he has his Dark Passenger. His major motivation is the fascination of solving problems and if he has no criminological problems to occupy him, he injects himself with cocaine and plays inchoate dissonant chords on the violin.

  The Retribution of Raffles

  While Conan Doyle’s Holmes mostly upheld the law, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, created A.J. Raffles, a proper gentleman and “the greatest slow bowler of his generation.” Raffles has a public face and mingles with the rich and fashionable, but also leads a secret criminal life. He is a jewel thief constrained by an idiosyncratic code of honor.

  When Raffles’s confidant, accomplice, and narrator, Bunny Manders suggests that being a well-known cricketer would be a hindrance to a life of burglary, Raffles responds:

  My dear Bunny, that’s exactly where you make a mistake. To follow crime with reasonable impunity you simply must have a parallel ostensible career—the more public the better. . . . it’s my profound conviction that Jack the Ripper was a really eminent public man, whose speeches were very likely reported alongside his atrocities. (“Gentlemen and Players”)

  I suppose that in this day and age we do have to mention that Bunny is a member of the male sex, and to explain that to be most revered as a cricketer in those days, you had to be a gentleman, and therefore someone who was not paid to play.

  In Mr Justice Raffles, the great jewel thief steals no diamonds, but utilizes all his skills to bring retribution on an evil man and restitution to some of his victims. The retribution does not extend to the arch-villain’s death, but, presumably sensing that anything less than death would leave the reader’s sense of justice unsated, the bad guy is slain by someone else. Mr Justice Raffles is now the least anthologized and least reprinted of the Raffles stories, presumably because of its rather numerous unpleasant comments about the villain’s ethnicity.

  Enter the Bulldog

  Eighteen years after the Just Men made their appearance, along came Bulldog Drummond, in stories penned by the writer who wrote under the name ‘Sapper’. Drummond was the James Bond of his day, and later became Ian Fleming’s major inspiration for Bond, just as Drummond’s arch-villain Carl Peterson was the inspiration for Ernst Stavro Blofeld (if you’re rusty on your Bond movies, he’s the guy with the long-haired white cat).

  Drummond in 1920 is a former British army officer who finds life dull after World War I, but then stumbles on a secret conspiracy aiming at the total ruination and humiliation of Britain. Drummond briefly considers informing the police of Peterson’s foul plot and criminal deeds, but decides that he, Drummond, would be just as liable to prosecution as Peterson.

  The first four Drummond novels describe Drummond’s epic battle to thwart Peterson’s vile schemes. Drummond has a secret life like that of the Scarlet Pimpernel. He and his friends, all rich young men who seem to have nothing more on their minds than getting sozzled in the posh London clubs, have secret lives as ferocious fighters against evil.

  In The Black Gang, Drummond and his associates, all dressed in black, terrorize the evil-doers and run rings round the police. A vast malign conspiracy is afoot. Jews and Communists (the latter indifferently described as Bolsheviks or anarchists) figure prominently in the conspiracy, but these individuals, though degenerate and malevolent enough, are simple-minded dupes of the mastermind Carl Peterson, a German who can pass for English or American, and whose goals, aside from the obvious enormous piles of money and despotic power, include the destruction of the British Empire.

  Apart from administering executions, floggings, and other punishments, the Black Gang is responsible for the disappearance of many leftist agitators and the reader wonders what has become of them. Perhaps they have been chopped into pieces and . . . well, there were no plastic bags in those days, and no cordless circular saws. On the other hand, manual labor was cheap and forensics was pretty basic. However, near the end of the book, the disappeared ones turn up, in a rehabilitation camp run by the Black Gang. Here the former subversives are made to work hard under the fist of a drill-sergeant, thus teaching them (a touch of irony here, old chap) what socialism is really all about.

  In the climactic scene of The Black Gang, Drummond and the Gang have captured Peterson and his leading cronies. Peterson, a wizard with disguises, is in the persona of a sweet American clergyman.

  [Drummond] swung round on the cowering clergyman and gripped him once again by the throat, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat. . . . And still the motionless black figures round the wall gave no sign, . . . They knew their leader, and though they knew not what had happened to cause his dreadful rage they trusted him utterly and implicitly. Whether it was lawful or not was beside the point: it was just or Hugh Drummond would not have done it. And so they watched and waited, while Drummond, his face blazing, forced the clergyman to his knees, . . .

  It was Phyllis who opened her eyes suddenly, and, half-dazed still with the horror of the last few minutes, gazed round the room. She saw . . . the Black Gang silent and motionless like avenging judges round the walls. And then she saw her husband bending Carl Peterson’s neck farther and farther back, till at any moment it seemed as if it must crack.

  For a second she stared at Hugh’s face, and saw on it a look which she had never seen before—a look so terrible, that she gave a sharp, convulsive cry.

  “Let him go, Hugh: let him go. Don’t do it.”

  Her voice pierced his brain, though for a moment it made no impression on the muscles of his arms. A slightly bewildered look came into his eyes: he felt as a dog must feel who is called off his lawful prey by his master.

  So Drummond relents, and so (women never think about the trouble they cause by their sentimental interventions) we have another two novels in which Drummond battles the arch-fiend Peterson before finally seeing him off.

  What was it that dear little Phyllis saw in hubby’s eyes, and what was it doing there? We’re repeatedly reminded that Drummond had nothing but wholesome fun in the Great War, cruising through No-Man’s-Land in search of Germans whom he could savagely throttle. Presumably he had that look in his eyes then. And what’s the big deal, since Carl Peterson is more of a threat and more of a monster than Kaiser Willy?

  The incident may show feminine frailty, or it may show that even in the struggle against absolute evil, the decent Britisher is restrained by civilized inhibitions unknown to the filthy Hun. On the droll side, it seems to show that the immensely muscular Drummond takes a suspiciously long time to break someone’s neck. But what it most clearly shows is that Drummond, like Dexter, has his Dark Passenger. There’s a monster within, and somehow, it’s for the good if that monster is sometimes let loose.

  Enter the Saint

  At school in England, the young boy who would later be Leslie Charteris thought carefully about his optimal future career, a career that would suit his personality and make him rich, and eventually he hit on the answer: he would become a professional burglar. The record is silent on whether he actually tried out this profession, but he was a supremely practical person and we can draw our own conclusions.

  And then Charteris discovered that the writing which came easily to him was saleable. He gave up burglary for writing, and systematically developed a hero, Simon Templar, a fearsome vigilante who kills bad people (“the godless,” as he refers to them, though this is his only symptom of piety), and who continually has to outwit Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard. Teal, not knowing the whole story about Templar, considers him a dangerous criminal, and to be strictly accurate, Teal happens to be technically correct.

  Templar’s true purpose is proclaimed early on:

  “We Saints are normally souls o
f peace and goodwill. But we don’t like crooks, bloodsuckers, traders in vice and damnation. We’re going to beat you up and do you down, skin you, smash you, and scare you off the face of Europe. We are not bothered by the letter of the law, we act exactly as we please, we inflict what punishment we think suitable, and no one is going to escape us.” (Enter the Saint)

  As a typical example, in “The Death Penalty,” the Saint runs into Abdul Osman, a drug dealer and white slaver whom he’s already met some years before. On that earlier occasion, the Saint had contented himself with branding both of Osman’s cheeks with a nasty Arabic word. Now the story ends with Osman’s death, though at whose hands remains a mystery until the very end. The Saint has no qualms about forging evidence and presenting a fabricated story to the inquest on Osman, and laying the blame for Osman’s killing on another drug dealer and white slaver, who ends up being hanged for a crime he didn’t commit. Thus, the Saint hoodwinks the official machinery of law enforcement into killing a man because the Saint believes he deserves it. The Saint’s moniker is quite consciously ironic.

  In popular fiction before World War II, “white slavery” is a code term for prostitution. Prostitutes and pimps make appearances in these stories, but these words are generally considered too indelicate. By the 1940s, for instance in The Saint in Miami (1944), the word ‘pimp’, at least, has become permissible. Both Drummond and the Saint speak in a kind of chummy publicschool argot (the Saint’s owing something to Bertie Wooster) which a later generation might consider somewhat campy. But the concept of camp lay in the future, and if you could’ve explained what it meant to the Bulldog or the Saint, you’d earn yourself at least a sock in the jaw.

  The Saint is flamboyant, abrasive, and often inconsiderate of bystanders. These were the days of the great sports cars with magical names, the Hispano-Suiza and the Lagonda. The greatest of all these cars was the Hirondel, as driven by Simon Templar, terrorizing other drivers as well as pedestrians in his ruthless, high-velocity pursuit of his own brand of justice.

  Some who saw the passage of the Saint that night will remember it to the end of their lives; for the Hirondel, as though recognizing the hand of a master at its wheel, became almost a living thing. King of the Road its makers called it, but that night the Hirondel was more than a king: it was the incarnation and apotheosis of all cars. For the Saint drove with the devil at his shoulder, and the Hirondel took its mood from his. If this had been a superstitious age, those who saw it would have crossed themselves and sworn that it was no car at all they saw that night but a snarling silver fiend that roared through London on the wings of an unearthly wind. (The Saint Closes the Case, also sometimes titled The Last Hero)

  Now that’s a car. And that’s what we call writing. Those who have hoped to acquire a genuine old Hirondel have been disappointed, for this make of car lived entirely in the brains of Leslie Charteris and his millions of readers.

  What such passages illustrates is that we always (at least, since Lord Byron) like our heroes to have an anti-social streak. They have their Dark Passengers. If they’re too utterly sane, like R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, they lack an essential ingredient and come across as bloodless cyphers. Charteris often described the Saint as a “buccaneer,” but in later stories the Saint is co-opted by the authorities. In Angels of Doom (1931), he seems to be working with his old enemy, Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, then seems to have doublecrossed Teal and become an outlaw vigilante, then turns out to have been working for the Secret Service (thus outranking Teal) all along. But it wouldn’t do for him to become entirely respectable and above board. Part of the mystique of the Saint is that he’s a criminal, so this image is continually toyed with in subsequent stories.

  The Saint never had much success on the big screen, but a fairly close imitation, The Falcon, had a good run in the 1940s (Charteris sued the RKO studio for plagiarism and made contemptuous fun of the Falcon in The Saint Steps In). Charteris lived in the United States, but was unable to obtain permanent residency because of the Chinese Exclusion law (which kept out people with fifty percent or more Chinese ancestry). Charteris had a Chinese father and an English mother; his real name was Leslie Bowyer-Yin. Eventually a special Act of Congress was passed, just to enable Charteris to stay in the US. But after marrying his fourth wife, the Hollywood starlet Audrey Long, he moved back to England, and lived there till his death in 1993.

  Charteris wrote over a hundred lucrative books, mostly about the Saint. His last few Saint stories were mainly written by other people; he just looked them over and made a few changes before attaching his name. The writers chosen were highly competent, and the books remained excellent, but the Saint’s popular appeal was waning.

  Decline of the Vigilante Novel

  At first glance, if we look at what happened after World War II, we may get the impression that systematic private enforcement of justice went into eclipse. Even as the word ‘vigilante’ became popular, the vigilante novel almost disappeared. Simon Templar was now working for the government, at least some of the time. Bulldog Drummond’s fan following dwindled and his niche was filled by James Bond, a civil servant ‘licensed to kill’ by a government department.

  Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and the hero of the Death Wish movies, played by Charles Bronson, were exceptions, but in spirit they did not go very far beyond revenge. Revenge is a form of justice and has its own rules just as onerous as any other form, but revenge is personal retribution and does not extend to punishing offenders with whom the punisher has no personal connection. Still, some revengers may graduate to vigilantism.

  In the late twentieth century, private enforcement of justice is more usually presented as a fearsome threat. Harry Callahan, hero of Dirty Harry is sometimes idiotically called a vigilante. Magnum Force (1973), the second Dirty Harry movie, shows a group of cops who bump off evil-doers in their spare time. These vigilante cops are not presented at all sympathetically, and the law-abiding Callahan is compelled to waste them in order to uphold the law.

  In The Star Chamber movie (1983), a group of judges assassinate killers who have managed to escape official justice by legal technicalities. The true plot begins when they realize they have made a mistake and their hired executioner is already on his way to kill the designated target. One of the judges, played by Michael Douglas, decides to intervene personally to protect the target. At the end of the movie, Douglas is delivering up the other vigilante judges to the official police force.

  The movie’s point of view is one of bland confidence that the Star Chamber, the unofficial conclave of judges, is dangerous and indefensible. It does not explore the irony in the fact that the Star Chamber has made one rare mistake and that in all its other operations it is rectifying mistakes by the official system. Nor does it confront what should be done on those occasions when the official system makes the same mistake as the Star Chamber had made: punishing the innocent. Should a judge with a conscience then intervene physically to thwart the implementation of official justice?

  Despite appearances, vigilantism had not died. It had merely moved from the bookstores to the newsstands. Comic-book superheroes took over most of the illegal enforcement of justice. These new heroes have superhuman powers, not just figuratively, like the Saint’s amazing agility, quick-wittedness and extraordinary reflexes, but literally. The most outstanding of the superheroes not to have superhuman abilities is Batman, who—like the Just Men, Bulldog Drummond, and the Saint before him—is independently wealthy.

  The eviction of vigilantes from popular novels and their relegation to the disreputable underworld of comics does seem to reflect an increased hostility to vigilantism, connected with the growth of state-worship in the twentieth century, the age of totalitarianism.

  Dexter, Hero of Our Time

  In the early twenty-first century, the ideology of childhood trauma reached its peak in popular culture, even while psychological research had largely undermined it as scientifically acceptable.

  Loo
k at the difference between the first movie made of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and the remake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). The first movie, following the Roald Dahl story, presents Willy Wonka as a somewhat inscrutable, interestingly dangerous, quirky, but fundamentally benign person, a formidable godlike figure. The remake depicts Wonka as a dude with serious issues, a man who worships chocolate because his father, a dentist, did something terrible to him all those years ago, as well as forbidding him to eat chocolate. The director of the remake, Tim Burton, repeatedly voiced his opinion that Wonka just has to be seen as “screwed up” and that therefore some explanation of his mental disorder is required. The explanation, of course, has to be childhood trauma—what else?

  Another example is the 1997 movie, The Saint, with Val Kilmer, which borrows a few plot devices from Charteris but is basically about an entirely different character. The Saint of this movie has not dedicated his life to punishing bad guys, and instead of being selfassured and confident in his righteous mission, he is driven by—a childhood trauma. The Kilmer Saint is a professional thief who has become very wealthy and plans to retire after one more job. He is clever and resourceful, but helplessly possessed by an irrational compulsion, flowing from his childhood mistreatment by priests.

  Childhood trauma plays the same role in modern popular culture as used to be played, in traditional folk tales, by love potions. Like a love potion, a childhood trauma compels the hero to behave in an irresponsible way, takes possession of him and leaves him no choice. These magical effects of childhood trauma are as mythical as those of the love potion, but they seem to be passionately believed in by most of today’s writers.