Friday, December 27, 2013

Devil by the Deed













This is part of a series of posts on Matt Wagner's Grendel series. There are spoilers for each individual story and for the series as a whole. I recommend reading the series before reading any of these posts.


When the crime lord Whitey Bulger was captured, I saw a woman from his neighborhood on a news program. She seemed like an average, middle-class, middle-aged respectable woman. But it was clear from the interview that she admired Bulger. When the interviewer asked her about his crimes, his murders, she said “That was his profession. Every one has a profession.”

It seems unthinkable that someone would make an excuse for a stranger guilty of multiple profit driven murders, and yet, here we see it clearly. And the attitude is common. Remember how regularly you could spot Scarface t-shirts among teens and young adults a few years back?

Back to Bulger, crime novelist Dennis Lehane gave an excellent interview about the man with Steve Inskeep of NPR in which he explained the fascination quite well:

INSKEEP: Well, what do you think it says about us, collectively, that we, the public - or at least Hollywood types and people in Boston - are really, really fascinated by a character like this?
LEHANE: The gangster story is a fascinating story in general. It tickles something in us that we believe that we don't speak of, which is this idea that maybe the whole thing is rigged. Maybe this faith we have in governments, maybe this belief we have in the electoral process, maybe this belief we have in this idea that some people are better than others is all a lie, and that a gangster, at the very least, is upfront about this. I mean, anybody who can tell me the difference between a gangster and a feudal lord, I'd like to meet them, because I can't find it.

I found this observation incredibly insightful, and it colored my reading of the entire Grendel cycle. As the series transitions from Hunter Rose to the far future and from crime and horror to political drama (and back again) I will refer back to this idea of organized crime as feudalism.

As for Devil by the Deed itself, it is enough that we know that many of us admire criminals, at least on some level, and in this world there is enough admiration for Hunter Rose that a biography is being written many years later. Hunter Rose is handsome suave, sophisticated, witty, intelligent, and, it seems, a gentleman, at least when he isn't wearing his mask. He also has that quality our modern values demand in any character on either side of the law who warrants our admiration: he never hurts, and is indeed protective of children.

We also see his opponent, Argent, as a grotesque, violent, asocial monster. From this and future stories it is clear that Argent is not loved by the public, despite being the only creature seemingly able to pose a legitimate threat to Grendel and his operations.

The story is told through a combination of imagery and text more akin to a storybook than a comic. Even with its fantastic elements, the story has an air of believability given by the strong voice of the fictional author writing the biography that makes up the text. It seems there is a society that lived through the events described herein, and now, with enough time, has returned to them with curiosity and fascination.

We know this is truth. In our own world, the Italian mafia in the United States barely remains in existence, yet is continually used in fiction of all types in modern and period pieces. New non fiction accounts are also common. We may not want to hear about the suffering caused by modern organized crime affecting our lives in the current day, and often ignore the distressing news about gang violence in our major cities and the ongoing drug war against the narcos in Mexico, but a flashback to the romanticized days of ethnically European gang warfare in the United States is a constant source of interest. It is true that in the Hispanic community in the United States narcos are glamorized in song and other media, but the general public still reacts with disgust. For the purposes of our discussion of Devil by the Deed we will ignore the ethnic element to our tolerance and admiration for criminals and assign the largest factor in their acceptance by the general public to time.

So, despite his reign of terror over New York, we are to marvel at his accomplishments. Despite being the murderer of the orphaned Stacy Palumbo's guardian, we are to admire his affection and care for her. We empathize with, or, at least, can understand, his jealousy of Argent's relationship with Stacy. Ultimately, it will be Stacy who leads to his death at the hands of Argent, and then she herself will meet a grisly fate in a mental institution.

And the one writing this history, the one the most fascinated by it, is the direct descendant of Stacy, Christine Spar. Despite a life directly affected by the violent history she describes, she ends the text of Devil by the Deed with open appreciation of Hunter Rose's abilities, ultimately describing Grendel as “the demon of society's mediocrity.”

Next: Devil's Legacy

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