Unauthorized Crime Fighters II

Operation Luna, 15.

While traveling to meet FBI Agent Bob Shining Knife, Steve Matuchek reflects:

"Once in the past, we'd defied him, his agency, the whole United States government, to go get our Valeria Victrix back. Only the spectacular outcome kept serious charges from being brought against us. But that had been an exceptional pickle. Neither Ginny nor I believed that, as a general rule, untrained, unorganized, unauthorized individuals could really fight crime, whether or not they wore silly comic-book costumes. That way lay lynch law." (p. 140)

See:

Untrained Crime Fighters
Poul Anderson On Comics

Dornford Yates, through his characters, expresses the opposite view. Boy Pleydell's wife has been kidnapped and Boy speaks with his cousin, Jonathan ("Jonah") Mansel:

"'What about the police?' [Boy] said suddenly. 'Why don't you want them called in?'
"'Because I want my hands free. If battle and murder will help, I'm out to do both: but I can't do either, if I've got to apply for a warrant before I can force a door. We're six men armed: we know how to work together; and we're not afraid of lying out in the rain. Call in the police and you put us out of court.'"
-Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods (London, 1938), CHAPTER II, p. 46.

Yates wrote the blurbs for paperback editions of some of his novels. On the back of Perishable Goods, he quoted Mansel's words above, then, with characteristic pomposity, added, "There's something in that, you know."

Something in it? It would make me feel neither happy nor safe to know that Dornford Yates, two of his friends and their three servants, all armed, were lying in the undergrowth somewhere nearby, especially since two of Mansel's friends had been sent down from Oxford for violent behavior.