Rogues

Introduction

EVERYBODY LOVES A ROGUE

by George R. R. Martin

… though sometimes we live to regret it.

Scoundrels, con men, and scalawags. Ne’er-do-wells, thieves, cheats, and rascals. Bad boys and bad girls. Swindlers, seducers, deceivers, flimflam men, imposters, frauds, fakes, liars, cads, tricksters … they go by many names, and they turn up in stories of all sorts, in every genre under the sun, in myth and legend … and, oh, everywhere in history as well. They are the children of Loki, the brothers of Coyote. Sometimes they are heroes. Sometimes they are villains. More often they are something in between, grey characters … and grey has long been my favorite color. It is so much more interesting than black or white.

I guess I have always been partial to rogues. When I was a boy in the fifties, it sometimes seemed that half of prime-time television was sitcoms, and the other half was Westerns. My father loved Westerns, so growing up, I saw them all, an unending parade of strong-jawed sheriffs and frontier marshals, each more heroic than the last. Marshal Dillon was a rock, Wyatt Earp was brave, courageous, and bold (it said so right in the theme song), and the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, and Roy Rogers were heroic, noble, upstanding, the most perfect role models any lad could want … but none of them ever seemed quite real to me. My favorite Western heroes were the two who broke the mold: Paladin, who dressed in black (like a villain) when on the trail and like some sissified dandy when in San Francisco, “kept company” (ahem) with a different pretty woman every week, and hired out his services for money (heroes did not care about money); and the Maverick brothers (especially Bret), charming scoundrels who preferred the gambler’s attire of black suit, string tie, and fancy waistcoat to the traditional marshal’s garb of vest and badge and white hat, and were more likely to be found at a poker table than in a gunfight.

And, you know, when viewed today, Maverick and Have Gun—Will Travel hold up much better than the more traditional Westerns of their time. You can argue that they had better writing, better acting, and better directors than most of the other horse operas in the stable, and you would not be wrong … but I think the rogue factor has something to do with it as well.

But it’s not just fans of old television Westerns who appreciate a good rogue. Truth is, this is a character archetype that cuts across all mediums and genres.

Clint Eastwood became a star by playing characters like Rowdy Yates, Dirty Harry, and the Man With No Name, rogues all. If instead he had been cast as Goody Yates, By-the-Book Billy, and the Man with Two Forms of Identification, no one would ever have heard of him. Now, it’s true, when I was in college I knew a girl who preferred Ashley Wilkes, so noble and self-sacrificing, to that cad Rhett Butler, gambler, blockade-runner … but I think she’s the only one. Every other woman I’ve ever met would take Rhett over Ashley in a hot minute, and let’s not even talk about Frank Kennedy and Charles Wilkes. Harrison Ford comes across rather roguishly in every part he plays, but of course it all started with Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Is there anyone who truly prefers Luke Skywalker to Han Solo? Sure, Han is only in it for the money, he makes that plain right from the start … which makes it all the more thrilling when he returns at the end of Star Wars to put that rocket up Darth Vader’s butt. (Oh, and he DOES shoot first, no matter how George Lucas retcons that first movie.) And Indy … Indy is the very definition of rogue. Pulling out his gun to shoot that swordsman wasn’t fair at all … but my, didn’t we love him for it?

But it’s not just television and film where rogues rule. Look at the books.

Consider epic fantasy.

Now, fantasy often gets characterized as a genre in which absolute good battles absolute evil, and certainly that sort of thing is plentiful, especially in the hands of the legions of Tolkien imitators with their endless dark lords, evil minions, and square-jawed heroes. But there is an older subgenre of fantasy that absolutely teems with rogues, called sword and sorcery. Conan of Cimmeria is sometimes characterized as a hero, but let us not forget, he was also a thief, a reaver, a pirate, a mercenary, and ultimately a usurper who installed himself on a stolen throne … and slept with every attractive woman he met along the way. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are even more roguish, albeit somewhat less successful. It is unlikely either one will end up a king. And then we have Jack Vance’s thoroughly amoral (and thoroughly delightful) Cugel the Clever, whose scheming never quite seems to produce the desired results, but still …

Historical fiction has its share of dashing, devious, untrustworthy scalawags as well. The Three Musketeers certainly had their roguish qualities. (You cannot really buckle a swash without some.) Rhett Butler was as big a rogue in the novel as he was in the film. Michael Chabon gave us two splendid new rogues in Amram and Zelikman, the stars of his historical novella Gentlemen of the Road, and I for one hope we see a lot more of that pair. And of course there is George MacDonald Fraser’s immortal Harry Flashman (that’s Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC KCB KCIE to you, please), a character kinda sorta borrowed from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes’s classic British-boarding-school novel (sort of like Harry Potter without quidditch, magic, or girls). If you haven’t read MacDonald’s Flashman books (you can skip the Hughes, unless you’re into Victorian moralizing), you have yet to meet one of literature’s great rogues. I envy you the experience.

Western? Hell, the whole Wild West teemed with rogues. The outlaw hero is just as common as the outlaw villain, if not more so. Billy the Kid? Jesse James and his gang? Doc Holliday, rogue dentist extraordinaire? And if we may glance back at television once again—pay cable this time, though—we also have HBO’s fabulous and much-lamented Deadwood, and the dastard at the center of it, Al Swearengen. As played by Ian McShane, Swearengen completely stole that show from its putative hero, the sheriff. But then, rogues are good at stealing. It’s one of the things that they do best.

What about the romance genre? Hoo. The rogue almost always gets the girl in a romance. These days the rogue IS the girl, oft as not, which can be even cooler. It is always nice to see conventions standing on their heads.

Mystery fiction has entire subgenres about rogues. Private eyes have always had that aspect to them; if they were straight-up, by-the-book, just-the-facts-ma’am sort of guys, they would be cops. They’re not.

I could go on. Literary fiction, gothics, paranormal romance, chick lit, horror, cyberpunk, steampunk, urban fantasy, nurse novels, tragedy, comedy, erotica, thrillers, space opera, horse opera, sports stories, military fiction, ranch romances … every genre and subgenre has its rogues; as often as not they’re the characters most cherished and best remembered.

All those genres are not represented in this anthology, alas … but there is part of me that wishes that they were. Maybe it’s the rogue in me, the part of me that loves to color outside the line, but the truth is, I don’t have much respect for genre barriers. These days I am best known as a fantasy writer, but Rogues is not meant to be a fantasy anthology … though it does have some good fantasy in it. My co-editor, Gardner Dozois, edited a science-fiction magazine for a couple of decades, but Rogues is not a science-fiction anthology either … though it does feature some SF stories as good as anything you’ll find in the monthly magazines.

Like Warriors and Dangerous Women, our previous crossgenre anthologies, Rogues is meant to cut across all genre lines. Our theme is universal, and Gardner and I both love good stories of all sorts, no matter what time, place, or genre they are set in, so we went out and invited well-known authors from the worlds of mystery, epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, science fiction, romance, mainstream, mystery (cozy or hard-boiled), thriller, historical, romance, Western, noir, horror … you name it. Not all of them accepted, but many did, and the results are on the pages that follow. Our contributors make up an all-star lineup of award-winning and bestselling writers, representing a dozen different publishers and as many genres. We asked each of them for the same thing—a story about a rogue, full of deft twists, cunning plans, and reversals. No genre limits were imposed upon on any of our writers. Some chose to write in the genre they’re best known for. Some decided to try something different.

In my introduction to Warriors, the first of our crossgenre anthologies, I talked about growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, in the 1950s, a city without a single bookstore. I bought all my reading material at newsstands and the corner “candy shops,” from wire spinner racks. The paperbacks on those spinner racks were not segregated by genre. Everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D. Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland. A. E. van Vogt, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, Westerns, gothics, ghost stories, classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary” novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could find it all on that spinner rack, and ten thousand others like it.

I liked it that way. I still do. But in the decades since (too many decades, I fear), publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that’s a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.

We think we have some good ones here. You will find rogues of every size, shape, and color in these pages, with a broad variety of settings, representing a healthy mix of different genres and subgenres. But you won’t know which genres and subgenres until you’ve read them, for Gardner and I, in the tradition of that old wire spinner rack, have mixed them all up. Some of the tales herein were written by your favorite writers, we expect; others are by writers you may never have heard of (yet). It’s our hope that by the time you finish Rogues, a few of the latter may have become the former.

Enjoy the read … but do be careful. Some of the gentlemen and lovely ladies in these pages are not entirely to be trusted.