rob-roy

First-Class Males in Fiction

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Elijah Wood as Frodo and Sean Astin as Sam in The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003).

Last week, I wrote about fictional female characters who are brave, strong-willed, etc. This week, I’ll do the same for fictional male characters – whether their courage is physical, mental, and/or moral.

One such inspiring guy is Sydney Carton of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. In that 1859 novel, Carton is a less-than-admirable man who wants to do better – which moves him to make an almost unfathomably heroic sacrifice during the French Revolution.

Ten years later, R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 novel Lorna Doone co-starred John Ridd, who does all kinds of courageous things after falling in love with the title character. Romance can be an incentive that way. 🙂

Staying with 19th-century literature, Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) features a title character partly based on real-life outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor – who has been called “the Scottish Robin Hood.”

Moving to the 20th century, we of course have various heroic males in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955) – including the hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. Impressive when physically small-of-stature beings are valiant against larger foes.

A lesser-known novel is Louis L’Amour’s Last of the Breed (1986) starring Native-American military pilot Joe Mack as he makes a daring on-foot escape from capture in the vast Siberian wilderness.  

A much-better-known novel is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), in which Alabama attorney Atticus Finch bravely defends an innocent Black man in the racist 1930s American South.

Moving to 21st-century fiction, African-American attorney Malcolm Bannister is incredibly clever and resourceful after being wrongly charged and jailed in John Grisham’s 2012 novel The Racketeer.

Count Alexander Rostov of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is stoic and quietly courageous while serving a lifetime sentence of house arrest in a hotel.

Private investigator Cormoran Strike of J.K. Rowling’s series of eight (so far) crime novels published between 2013 and 2025 is far from timid as he pursues wrongdoers while dealing with the painful partial loss of a leg from when he was deployed in Afghanistan. 

Straddling the 20th and 21st centuries:

Walter Mosley’s private investigator Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, star of the ongoing series that began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990, is quite gutsy in a low-key way. 

Lee Child’s roving Jack Reacher character, who was first introduced to readers in 1997, is fearless as he deals with various bad guys in 30 (and counting) novels.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?

In our dimly lit garage, Misty the cat says: “Here’s where Joseph Conrad wrote ‘Heart of Darkness.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece – about high housing costs, the end of free tuition, and a failed candidacy — is here.

What Is So Rare as a Cat Post in June?

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SO ready for my close-up. (Photo by some human.)

I, Misty the cat, am back for my every-two-month guest blog post — this time starting with a book-related complaint. Is my beef the fact that few males in literature are as handsome as my feline self? Well, that’s an issue, but my complaint actually involves libraries not always having every book in a series — causing me to slap photos of not-there novels on milk cartons under the word MISSING.

Sure, I realize some of those novels are being borrowed by library users, but my cat intuition suspects that in other cases the whole series were not ordered by acquisitions departments. If Amnesty International didn’t have infinitely more important things to do, they’d investigate.

I most recently wrestled with missing-book syndrome after looking several times for Y Is for Yesterday, the 25th and final installment of Sue Grafton’s wonderful series of alphabet mysteries (the author unfortunately died before authoring Z). I decided not to write 25 strongly worded…letters.

Then, after reading Peter May’s riveting thriller The Blackhouse and its equally intense sequel The Lewis Man (unexpectedly not about Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor), I returned to the library several times with hopeful tail in air looking for the third installment: The Chessmen. But it was never there. Not even a single cheap plastic pawn, rook, or bishop. Sure, I could try to get on a waiting list (if my local library had those books) or do the interlibrary loan thing, but I have so many books on my to-read list that I just ended up borrowing other novels. After briefly sobbing for multiple days.

During my last library visit vainly seeking The Chessmen, I randomly chose a different Peter May novel called Lockdown. Didn’t like it at all; I abandoned the book after struggling through nearly 100 pages — though I kindly gave the library some clues about where I had abandoned said book. (Hint: it’s buried near where labor leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975.) Even the best authors can write the occasional clunker, and their prison terms for doing so tend to be only several years.

More clunkers by otherwise excellent authors who are not cats like me? Stephen King’s Cell, Kristin Hannah’s Fly Away, Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows, to name four. I’d love to see what’s in the parent-name boxes on that snow daughter’s birth certificate.

Nary a clunker among George Eliot’s big-five novels published in this chronological order: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Oddly, Mary Ann Evans wrote the same five novels — meaning she and Eliot may have been smoking noms de plume.

Daniel Deronda reminds me — the intermittently meowing Misty — that many fictional works have alliterative titles: Black Beauty (Anna Sewell), Captains Courageous (Rudyard Kipling), Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut), Golden Girl (Elin Hilderbrand), Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Make Me (Lee Child), Marjorie Morningstar (Herman Wouk), Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens), Perestroika in Paris (Jane Smiley), Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie), Rob Roy (Walter Scott), The Cuckoo’s Calling (J.K. Rowling), The Custom of the Country (Edith Wharton), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov), The Boys from Biloxi (John Grisham), The Plains of Passage (Jean M. Auel), etc. Oh, and Crime and Crunishment.

What does “crunishment” mean? I think it has something to do with being bombarded by croutons.

It’s June and the sun is often out, so I would like to conclude this post with some novels that have “Sun” in their titles. The Sun Also Rises, of course, which I feel is overrated Hemingway — although he was a big fan of never-overrated cats. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. And so on. I, Misty the cat, do not live in “The House of the Rising Sun” but instead dwell in “The Apartment of the Rising Sun” — from which I emerge every morning for my daily leashed walk to do more reading: STOP signs, street signs, graffiti, license plates, T-shirt logos, and the occasional plane skywriting “Where’s the final alphabet mystery?”

My human Dave will reply to all comments because “crunishment” is not a word.

Misty the cat says: “I’m inches from garden-bag greatness.”

My (and Dave’s) comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )


This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — with primary election results, a governor’s mixed reaction to protests against an awful immigrant detention center, and more — is here.