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
Next: Devil's Legacy
