Quote:
Originally Posted by Cliff Ball
Sometimes, I wonder if some terrorist out there read Debt of Honor and decided to see if they couldn't fly a jumbo jet into the Capital, but, thankfully that didn't happen.
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One of those things that I always wonder about
: when I see "Don't talk about that, a bad guy might get ideas" I have to wonder why people think that criminals aren't as good at crime, and terrorists aren't as good at terror, as random writers who have never done more than read about either one. You wouldn't expect a successful bank robber to be automatically able to write a better novel than a professional novelist, so why does there seem to be the assumption that a novelist can plan a better crime than a professional criminal? I may just be cynical here, but I'm wondering if there isn't a certain element of arrogance on the writers' side. That's the only way "I can write a book, so I must be able to plan a crime" seems to compute.
Perhaps I think too optimistically of the IQ of the human race, but I just can't see all those criminals sitting around waiting for writers to think up crimes for them to commit; I suspect they can figure out how to do bad things without any help at all.
I know it doesn't do any good for the "world's dumbest criminal" types -- the kind who make the news in ridiculous ways. They have, after all, an entire world full of more successful, and
much more competent criminals, whose crimes are written up in detail in the newspapers, and they still do painfully stupid things. If they can't learn from the real exploits of real fellow criminals how not to be idiots, novels aren't going to help them any; they've already demonstrated an unwillingness or inability to learn.