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Antihero
Edited by Fiona
Peters & Rebecca Stewart
Crime
Uncovered Series Bristol:
Intellect, 2015 Paperback.
218 p. ISBN 978-1783205296. £19.50
Reviewed by LeRoy Lad Panek McDaniel College,
Westminster (Maryland)
Antihero presents
the reader with fourteen essays plus an interview with writer Paul
Johnston. Their subjects challenge the
cataloger’s integrity and ingenuity for they not only include crime novels,
detective novels, films, and comic books, but also television series from
Britain, Denmark, and the United States. The editors divide the essays into “case
studies” and “reports.” Writers discussed in them include Patricia Highsmith,
James M. Cain, John Burdette, Jim Thompson, Julia Kristeva, and James Elroy. Contributors also include
the heroes of television crime dramas “The Sopranos,” “Ray Donovan,” “Luther,”
“Breaking Bad,” “Dexter,” “The Killing,” and “True Detective” as antiheroes. The
editors supply a general introduction that skims over each essay’s contents. It is not really
clear in this sort of work who the imagined reader is supposed to be—something
everyone who sets finger to keyboard is supposed to ask and answer. I suppose
that there are some who are familiar enough with all of the books and videos
discussed and intellectually limber enough to engage the varieties of literary
theory dispersed throughout the essays.
But not many. There is a tincture
of the academic convention about the whole work, sadly one of the banes of
contemporary academe where graduate students anxious to build their vitae scoop
out bits of their dissertations and members of the professoriate write up a
seminar session or two. The essays themselves—both those of the six grad
students and the nine academics— reflect intelligent and perceptive writers, the
kind of folks I would buy a beer for and with whom I would like to sit around
and talk books about and television. The
problem, for me, is the subject. In the worlds of
crime and detective fiction it is a lot harder to identify someone who is a
thorough-going hero than someone who is an antihero. Find a main character who actually
likes authority and the status quo. Pick
out a hero whose life is free from dysfunction.
Indeed, choose a physical or social dysfunction and a character in crime
and detective fiction can be found who possesses it. And does just being a
woman, Asian, African, Hispanic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, autistic, having PTSD,
etc. qualify a character as an
antihero? Because many of the essays deal with characters defined by the crimes
they commit, Antihero suggests that
crimes define them as antiheroes. And this definition works with Highsmith and
Cain and some of the characters from television series. But then there’s the
interview with Paul Johnson who comes out and says about his detective heroes
that “I wouldn’t go as far to say that my leads are antiheroes, though.” And even
though thoroughly messed up, the cops in “True Detective” hardly fit into the
category of Walter White from “Breaking Bad.” This sort of inconsistency and
lack of focus make Antihero more like
one volume of a journal devoted to popular culture than a study of a topic of
interest to readers of crime and detective fiction. And that’s too bad.
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