Nazis…
No, this isn’t one of my political blog posts (see pubprogressive.com if that’s what you like). It’s about villains in fiction—my fiction and others’.
The new Indiana Jones movie has the Alan Quatermain-like Indy battling Nazi villains once again. He’s made a career fighting them. Every sane person hates Nazis. (Exceptions are found among the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Boebert, Cruz, Gaetz, Greene, and other fascists, of course.) Even Putin used them as scapegoats, comparing Ukrainians to Nazis—quite unbelievable considering that everyone outside Russia knew Zelenskyy is Jewish! (You’d think the Russians would know that too. Or maybe they do, and it’s only a return to their anti-Semitic ways? Stalin-like pogroms anyone?)
Yes, those old Nazis are ideal villains, but a fiction writer has to create period stories to employ them in that way. (Even one of the best sci-fi tales, James Hogan’s The Proteus Operation, which is time travel done right, is a period story.) Hitler and all his evil cronies make great villains. Very few characters, real or otherwise, can be so evil. Their reincarnations depicted in tales about more recent times also provide villains. Neo-Nazis in Rembrandt’s Angel want to establish a Fourth Reich, for example. (Only cartel leaders’ evil can begin to compare—see the same novel.)
As an author, I prefer to use the Nazis as models, and real life now seems to do the same. Putin and Xi are fascists comparable to Hitler, for example (yes, Xi, you are a dictator!), and so I often use them as villains, men so evil that even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates their guts. (Kalinin appears in many of my mystery/thriller novels.)
Putin is more like a mafia don, though, while Xi is more practical in sagely wielding his dictatorial power in China than Hitler ever was in Germany. Putin, of course, is more like Hitler than Xi; he’s stupid, not clever, whereas Xi is a smart technocrat. (Perhaps his Western education made all the difference?) Yet Hitler is the fascist who blazed the trail for them all. No ethnic cleansing before or after (e.g. Ottoman Turkey with the Armenians and Myanmar’s junta with the Rohingya) can compare to the Hitler’s Holocaust against the Jews.
I feature Putin and Xi, both real-world fascist leaders, as villains in many of my later novels, most recently in the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series. (Putin’s oligarchs first appeared in Gaia and the Goliaths, though, book seven in the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series—that was long before they became such news items.) I will continue to use real-life villains whenever it suits my fancy.
Traditional publishers don’t like authors to use real-life people as characters, but these novels of mine are mostly self-published (all of Morgan’s, for example). Hence I can damn well use them as villains because there’s no way they could ever sue me! (Um, okay, if Trump is reelected, I might be in trouble.) I think that makes these novels (and others) come alive for readers. They relate to our real world today. And their villains are real-life dirtbags, not dead Nazis!
***
Comments are always welcome. (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)
“Inspector Steve Morgan.” Last week I featured an evergreen series. This shorter one (fairly new, compared to my others) containing three novels covers three aspects of evil. The first and third feature Putin and Xi as villains, respectively, who cause the clever inspector a lot of grief from their vultures’ perches far away. The direct threat comes from their lackeys, of course. (These villains always like to maintain deniability.) The second book in the series might remind readers of the cults organized by Koresh, Manson, and Jones (a Manson acolyte is about to be pardoned—why, I don’t know); an evil cult leader ruins his acolytes’ lives. Together the novels in this trilogy have enough evil villains to make the reader of mystery and suspense novels forget about Indy and the Nazis for a while.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
