A good many years ago now, I wrote a post about the Spoiled Protagonist, who gets handed help they don’t deserve for no reason other than that they are the story’s protagonist. Recently, I’ve been reading a few books featuring a different kind of protagonist, which I want to call the Privileged Protagonist.

Now, in a sense all protagonists are privileged; they’re the focus of the story, and in order to be truly a protagonist and not just a main character, they have to have some agency in the world, which is not something that every person has in real life. But what I mean by “privileged protagonist” comes from the Latin roots of the word “privilege,” which translate roughly as “private law.” In other words, the privileged protagonist gets to live by different rules, at least in part because they’re the protagonist, though it is often the case that they get this benefit because they also belong to a group that has what we usually think of as “privilege.”

What triggered this post specifically was reading a few books in the once-popular subgenre of the “gentleman thief.” It’s a kind of reverse mystery, in which the interest is not in seeing the criminal caught by the efforts of the detective, but in seeing the criminal get away with his (it’s usually his) crimes.

I’m not going to make confident declarations of who was the first to come up with a “gentleman thief” character, but the earliest example Wikipedia gives is Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail, creator of Rocambole in the 1850s. Raffles, one of the most famous examples, came along in 1898, and Arsene Lupin in 1905, heralding a heyday for the subgenre. I’m currently reading the first book about Jimmie Dale, the Grey Seal, written in 1914 by Frank L. Packard, but there’s also Wyndham Martyn’s Anthony Trent, a less-well-known example from 1918. (Judging by the Project Gutenberg edition, it was published cheaply by a very bad publisher; there are hundreds of missing grammatical commas, making it hard to read, and the Gutenberg edition has a long list of obvious typos their editors have corrected. It’s a good story and deserves better editing, and someday I may issue my own edition.)

It was Martyn’s book that really got me thinking about the Privileged Protagonist. Some of these “gentlemen thieves” work for the greater good, at least for part of their careers; Jimmie Dale is one, committing his “crimes” to protect the downtrodden from the vicious and greedy, in more or less the manner later employed by vigilante superheroes. Lupin reforms later in his career and uses his criminal skills to start helping people, eventually becoming a detective. This follows in the tradition of Rocambole, who became a hero by his fourth book. Even Raffles, who doesn’t have any moral qualms to speak of, is enough of a patriot to volunteer to fight in the Boer War. Anthony Trent, who always had moral qualms and only ever robbed people who deserved it, follows his example by volunteering for World War I at the end of his first book, and in his second book decides to go straight and undertakes a dangerous mission aimed at preserving the post-World War I peace.

The thing is, while nothing is outright said, it’s clear at the end of the second Trent book that important people know, or very strongly suspect, that he is the mysterious thief being eagerly sought by US authorities, but decide to let this slide because he’s done something brave and seems to have reformed. There’s a similar moment at the beginning, rather than the end, of Cleek, Man of the 40 Faces, where someone who is known as a notorious criminal switches over to being a detective, using the same name, and nobody tries to prosecute him for his past crimes; a police inspector decides, seemingly on his own authority and without consulting anyone, that this is fine, and even issues him a special police ID.

This is what I mean by “privileged protagonist.” A privileged protagonist is someone who is firmly convinced, and perhaps convinces us, the readers, that anything they do is all right, even if it’s illegal, because it’s them doing it, and they are One of the Right Sort. Not only that, but they get away with it, essentially because they’re the protagonist. Harry Potter and his friends are privileged protagonists; they break the rules all the time, and end up being commended rather than punished. The authorities decide, for reasons which may well include the meta reason that “this is the book’s protagonist,” that they’ll look the other way as far as their transgressions are concerned, because it all came out all right in the end. It’s the (modern version of) the Robin Hood story, where King Richard pardons the outlaws because, after all, they were fighting evil men and robbing the rich to give to the poor.

This is all of a piece with those amateur detectives who, when they have found the criminal, decide that they will give the person an opportunity to escape (perhaps leaving a signed confession), or that because the crime removed an awful person and the murderer is One of Us, Don’t You Know, they should remain uncaught and unpunished. The police don’t have this latitude, for the very good reason that as a society we have decided that random individuals shouldn’t get to decide who deserves punishment and who doesn’t, and when it is OK to kill someone. But there’s a strong psychological bias towards self-justification, and justification of the acts of people who are “like us”, and often it overrides abstract principles that we claim to believe in.

This is a big part of the basis of the whole genre of the “gentleman thief,” and for that matter of vigilante superheroes. They don’t need to work within the law because they are working for the greater good, or, at least, are basically good sorts, not like those common criminals. In large part, it’s class prejudice; I’ve lost count of the number of times a British protagonist in one of the old books I read from Project Gutenberg is trusted and helped by complete strangers of all classes simply because he’s a “gentleman,” even though everything else about him is highly suspicious. Silently behind that is the inevitable reality that many lower-class people who were genuinely in need of help didn’t receive it, simply because they asked for it in a low-class accent. It’s about who gets to decide what’s right and wrong; the common people don’t get to decide this, but have it imposed on them from above, while the ruling classes, as individuals, do get to make those decisions for themselves.

I personally believe in the rule of law (with a few reservations about unjust judges and politicians and corrupt police), so even though I can enjoy the adventures of a privileged protagonist, I’m always conscious of the idea not quite sitting right. In my own book, The Rediscovery of Hardlac, the protagonists do something that threatens a very important peace treaty, and even though their reasons for doing it were sound and all the rest of it, they end up facing consequences. Perhaps not the full consequences their actions, in the abstract, deserved, but significant consequences nonetheless. That’s my own attempt to deal with the phenomenon of the privileged protagonist.