Just as with Trump’s election last month dovetailing into subjects I read, the recent shooting death of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by a vigilante killer coincided with me reading two consecutive books on vigilante justice. Going to review both vis-a-vis how they speak to the moment.
Even the Wicked
Growing up, vigilante justice was always right wing coded. Dirty Harry. Death Wish. I still remember the popular “Beer For My Horses” song in which Willie Nelson and Toby Keith talk about public hangings and “putting a few more in the ground.” Basically, vigilantism always revolved around drug dealers and rapists who always seemed to get off because of Johnnie Cochrans and technicalities. Drug dealers was usually just a dog whistle for anti-Blackness, while rapists usually go free because men don’t want to alter rape laws. But white men can never be satisfied with the world they’ve built.
Crime fiction is also often (not always) right wing coded in a sense that you have a person trying to right a wrong and reestablish order. Even with Matthew Scudder’s abiding empathy and care, I never forget the undertones of this particular genre.
Here, Matt is dealing with a vigilante who is predicting his crimes to a New York Post-esque Tell It Like It Is columnist (again with the right wing coding) and then carrying them out, claiming that he is the will of the people. Matt finds himself close to the killer, things happen, it’s not the strongest of Scudders, in fact, I’m docking it a star from my original 4-star review because the final third is a drag.
But I do think about how this book captured the populist sentiment of the 80s and 90s that there wasn’t enough being done to catch the bad guys. From a freed rapist to a violent anti-abortionist (maybe not totally right wing after all) to a Black identitarian Farrakhan-type (ok maybe so), Block selects folk that the population writ large would see as guilty and unworthy of life.
Block isn’t as interested in the question of who is and isn’t worthy of life; again, Matt’s existentialism is lo-fi. He more wants to figure out how Matt will put the pieces together in a violent world. Considering the large scale indifference to Brian Thompson’s death (or in some cases, outright celebration), it would appear that this sentiment is moving towards institutional figures rather than those that operate with either flagrant illegality or outside of the social order. How do we put the pieces together now?
Revelation
Even reading the premise of Revelation, I hadn’t considered that this would be a work of a vigilante killer as well but because of the weird socio-religious situation near the end of Henry VIII’s reign, it kind of is. Sansom does a fantastic job bringing the tensions to life between the reformers, the Catholics, and now a fundamentalist sect. Sound familiar to anyone?
Obviously the social circumstances are completely different but I think people may be surprised at how incoherent — or perhaps how disorganized — most of our views are and that people who commit heinous acts of murder have a mishmash of rationales. That’s certainly the case with this killer, though I won’t spoil it. But it seems to stem from the book of Revelation and everyone’s take on it.
Every Christian generation from Paul to Jerry Falwell has thought they were living in the end times. Capturing the zeal around this sentiment at a time where church and state are in a febrile relationship, and I think again of this perilous moment as our postwar neoliberal order continues to die. With climate change, nuclear proliferation, the rise of fascism, etc., it can feel like a return to the end of the world. How much is Thompson’s killer a product of that?
Again, had to dock this to three because I’ve come to suspect a little more from Sansom. There has to be seven murders to fulfill a set of prophecies in Revelation so there’s a lot of “Oh we caught the killer but he got away!” kinda nonsense. Also, again, the killer’s motives don’t make a lot of sense? And lastly, while Revelation was indeed a controversial book then and remains so today, many theologians even back then knew that 80-90% of it was referencing the church in Rome under Nero. The antichrist is almost quite literally Nero; there was a long-standing rumor in the Roman world that he had faked his death and would “return.” It’s fun to use Revelation as art; I just wish some lip service had been paid to its true nature.