Simon Mason – Anti-heroes in Literature and Why We Like Them

Simon Mason is a writer of fiction. At first, he wrote books for adults, then books for children, which grew up at roughly the same rate his own children grew up, and now he is back writing books for adults again. In addition to his fiction he has also written a work of non-fiction, The Rough Guide to Classic Novels. More recently, he has been writing a series of crime thrillers featuring a mismatched pair of detectives in Oxford, beginning with A Killing in November (shortlisted for the Golden Dagger) in 2022 and including, most recently, The Dangerous Stranger (2026). He is also writing a series of ‘missing persons’ mysteries: Alice: Missing Person and The Case of the Lonely Accountant (both 2024) and The Woman Who Laughed (2025).

Tom Ripley, Long John Silver, Becky Sharp, Mr Toad . . . literature is full of badly behaved characters we love to read about. In crime fiction, anti-heroes are not infrequently the detectives who are meant to be bringing the badly behaved to justice – think of Sherlock Holmes with his magnificent disregard for the law, or, more recently, Jack Reacher, avenging angel whose notion of justice is out of the Old Testament. Why do we love to read about them? What does this say about our relationship to good and bad behaviour, issues of wrong-doing, justice, punishment and the law? Simon Mason, whose books feature the sixteen-year-old dope-smoking, truanting slacker Garvie Smith (who sees solving crimes as an interesting way to annoy the police) and DI Ryan Wilkins (mannerless trailer-park urchin constantly contravening the police code of conduct), considers some possible answers, drawing widely on examples of characters who make us both shudder and applaud.