Bittercon panel: Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies

[kate_nepveu]

Last one; I really hadn't meant to spend my night doing this.

Thieves Guilds and Other Criminal Societies

The Thieves Guild is a common staple in fantasy novels. Terry Pratchett's Discworld books parody it; Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora critiques it; and Steven Brust's Taltos novels examine a more modern Mafia-style version. What's good, bad, interesting, boring, otherwise worth talking about when it comes to this idea?

Comments

[kate_nepveu]

One of the things I liked best about _The Lies of Locke Lamora_ was the way it dealt with this; it's one of those treatments that will forever change the way I look at the idea. (Spoiler rules still apply in this post, please.)

Now that I think about it, I suppose the criminal organization in that book might be closer to that of the Taltos books, but going to check almost certainly would lead to a re-read, and that way lies not getting done the other things I want to do with my weekend . . .

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think I must not have read enough books with Thieves Guilds in them; what was different about their treatment in Locke Lamora, other than the lack of sentimentality?

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

What a fantastic topic.

off to bed. v. sleepy.

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks! I have the feeling I've seen it on program before, but I probably wasn't that interested prior to _Lies_.

Sleep well & hope I may see you back here when awake--

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oooh, good one.

I loved the idea of thieves' guilds when I was a teen reader. They sounded dashing and daring, they were anti-establishment. Somehow the thieves just stole from icky people who really deserved being robbed, because they were good thieves.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

It's like the current fascination for pirates (which I share). It ain't just costumes and ships. THEY KILLED PEOPLE, DAMMIT (and still do). Something that Captain Jack Sparrow never does -- he just swans around.

Doesn't keep me from loving "The Highwayman", though, who was the landbound equivalent.

[kate_nepveu]

Capers don't bother me, because by definition they involve stealing really valuable things, which poor people aren't going to have, and rich people will have insurance. This runs up against something that I was also wanting to talk about, which is the musical of _Dirty Rotten Scoundrels_, which is about con jobs rather than capers, because that makes the narrative mistake of acknowledging that the people being conned have actual feelings, and then tries to dance away from it. Which sounds terrible, the idea acknowledging morality is a bad thing for a story, but there you are.

Anyway: capers. Much more fun and less prone to puncturing the fantasy.

[jorrie-spencer.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying these topics, even if I don't have much to add. In fact, I'm not sure I've a thieves guild book, though surely I must have. (Just not the ones you've mentioned. I'm one of those few odd people who don't enjoy Pratchett.)

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks! And obligatory Pratchett comment: if you don't like the Discworld books, you may nevertheless like his YAs, which are more serious. I believe they're just in print in the US. The Johnny books are _Only You Can Save Mankind_, _Johnny and the Dead_, _Johnny and the Bomb_; the Bromeliad is _Truckers_, _Diggers_, _Wings_.

If you've already tried them, or don't want to hear it, please feel free to disregard this comment.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Marvelous. Although I don't know how to talk about this without spoilers.

[kate_nepveu]

Spoiler protection methods: ROT13 ( http://www.rot13.com or the bookmarklet at http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/rot13.php ) or put them between <span style="color: #999999; background-color: #999999"> </span>

[shsilver.livejournal.com]

Off hand, the earliest Thieves' Guild references I can think of would be in Lankhmar, where our (anti-)heros are constantly getting into trouble because they are not members of the guild.

This was, of course, picked up by Gary Gygax when creating Dungeons and Dragons, which may be a major reason for the use of Thieves' Guilds in modern fantasy.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I once read some RPG thing which began, approximately, from memory: "Guilds. Now you're probably most familiar with the idea of a Thieves Guild, but in fact other professions had guilds too..."

[kate_nepveu]

Ah, thank you; I wasn't sure that the idea could be traced that specifically.

How is the guild depicted as an organization in Lankhmar?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Lynch yet, I'm waiting for a decent sized paperback -- all I've seen is the ghastly UK C-format thing. (Why does anyone buy them? Less durable than a mmpb, harder to hold than a hardback, and ridiculously expensive?)

Anyway, I think there's a boring D&D way of doing it, which does indeed derive from Lankhmar, and Brust does it brilliantly, and so does Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates.

The thing most worth talking about would be why this thing that never really existed in the form it typically exists in fantasy novels, and certainly not in a medieval world, is so common as to be a cliche. Why did Leiber's little bit of invention and extrapolation from C.18 London to Lankhmar become this standard piece of fantasy furniture?

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I find myself thinking of "benefit of clergy", and privilege in the original sense of private law, and the semi-myths of Prohibition-era gangsters.

Of course, the last also matches pretty well the legends of English smugglers: "Brandy for the parson, 'baccy for the clerk".

And that suggests a mechanism by people can be outside the law, but still within society. It's the socially acceptable face of the Barbarian. It's a way to gain respect without the dreary day-to-day monotony of the shopkeeper.

And, of course, it's just like Lord Veterinari to trap the Thieves' Guild with thweir own desire for respectability.

[kate_nepveu]

I don't remember a thing about _The Anubis Gates_ except "time travel that I found really confusing," so I'll have to put this down on the side of "reasons to re-read."

Well, the boring answer to your question is "lack of critical thought in worldbuilding," but from a story POV, I'm wondering if it's a way of creating tension but having an intrinsic limit on the level of it?

[(Anonymous)]

It's perfectly true that the thieves' guild never existed in the highly developed form in which it turns up in fantasy novels. However, it is the case that there is a text of 1552 that refers to the London cutpurses' having a 'corporation', or guild: it is one of the more reliable accounts of the early modern underworld, so I think we can assume that they had some kind of organisation, though probably a fairly loose one. And it is also the case that from the early seventeenth century fantasy elaborations of the idea of fraternities of beggars and thieves became extremely popular for a while. This is an old, old fantasy, not solely a modern one.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that comment about the 1552 reference to a real cutpurse guild, etc, was me. I hadn't noticed that I wasn't logged in.

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

I can't off-hand remember a thieves guild treatment I like, because not a single one of them rings true for me. "Okay, so there's this bunch of crooks, and they have this deal worked out with the police where as long as they follow these particular rules during and after their crimes, they're scott-free...." and then it all becomes a silly game.

It makes no sense. It's trite. It's grade school D&D-esque.

If you want to tell me a thieves-guild story, show me something like the modern mafia, which is powerful and ruthless, works legal loopholes but exists mainly by exercising fear over the populace, and where the authorities really want to shut those bastards down, but just can't quite do it.

[kate_nepveu]

It's the lack of jeopardy that bothers you, or the lack of realism? Or both?

And are you including _The Lies of Locke Lamora_ in this or no?

Francois Villon in space may be an alternative to Robin Hood

[cem.livejournal.com]

As Sean Connery duly noted Robin Hood was illiterate but Francois Villon is a perfect Gary Stu for any writer of romantic verse. I think true thieve's cant survived better in French as well - or perhaps the whole Cockney commmunity was bent and rhyming slang worked like any slang to establish a sense of community?

In that sense a thieve's guild is a way of incluing an ongoing community that lacking such justification would be unrealistic - can't have one's established characters be all ad hoc and getting executed all the time. In that connection the guild structure to open Citizen of the Galaxy allows Heinlein to say something about the specific frozen society while maintaining a POV from the bottom. Thorby as youth can't interact much with a skilled guild.

Re: Francois Villon in space may be an alternative to Robin Hood

[(Anonymous)]

Rhyming slang isn't a single code; it's a system with a good mnemonic for memorizing a code. The criminal elements can (and I'm sure did) just keep changing the rhymes to keep ahead of both the general populace and the police.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

The webcomic Lackadaisy (http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/archive.php) just updated, reminding me that it's appropriate for this thread; it's about Prohibition in St. Louis. With cats. The characters are fairly sympathetic, without any attempt to hide the fact they're murdering thugs.

[janni.livejournal.com]

The first fantasy novel with a thief with official sanction that I read and actually believed in was Megan Whelan Turner's The Thief, and he wasn't part of a guild, though he was in something of an inherited position.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Or, in SF, Herbert's use of BuSab. in Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment and one or two short stories. But that's more a case of the rebel being a formal part of a non-criminal system.

[clarentine]

Personally, I have always been fascinated by the parallels between the concept of the Thieves Guild and the modern intelligence establishment. There are more things to steal than cash and jewelry.

[kate_nepveu]

Hmm. Interesting. They don't really feel the same to me, since I'm used to reading about Thieves' Guilds where the members get to be open about what they do, but if they were a secret . . .