Go ahead, make my day

Whom do you consider the greatest hero you’ve read, and why?

by Dietrich

The answer to that has changed over the years. Early in my reading life I would have named Robin Hood, Zoro, Tarzan, Shane, and Hawkeye. As I got a little older, it became True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn. I think I liked that he had an extra dimension that my previous heroes — he wasn’t all good, in fact he had some pretty rough edges — like real people.

Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch was wise and a straight shooter. He didn’t lose his head while all around him others did. And I admired that. And Steinbeck’s Tom Joad — a man with an inner toughness who rose to whatever life handed him, or didn’t hand him.

I first met Harry Callahan on the screen in Dirty Harry, ’71 I think. I instantly liked his way of standing for right, and going against the rules to get things done. I had an African Grey parrot at the time who I taught to say “Go ahead, make my day.” Like Dirty Harry, the parrot was pretty tough too — bit a Doberman on the nose when it got too close, giving him some of his own big dog attitude. Anyway, there were novelizations of the four films, Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, and Sudden Impact, all published between 1971 and 1983. Afterwards Warner Books published twelve additional novels between 1981 and 1983, all by author Dane Hartman, a pen name attributed to several authors.

Marge Gunderson from Fargo was another one of my film hero favorites. So down to earth, an expectant mother with a badge, making short work of a buffet and all the while solving crime.

You can’t have a great hero without having an equally great villain. Someone that gets under the reader’s skin enough to make them want the writer to send in the hero and take care of business. Again, through the years, I might have come up with Batman and the Joker, Darth and Luke, Harry and Lord Voldemort, Dorothy and the Wicked Witch, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation in Mary Shelly’s masterpiece. Among my favorite heroes and villains from books I’ve enjoyed since adulthood: Randle Patrick McMurphy and Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s wonderful One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Clarice and Hannibal from Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. And there’s Martin Brody and the Shark from Peter Benchley’s Jaws. And there’s Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which is one of the best examples of man vs. nature that comes to mind.