by Reeva S. Simon

This perennial Western fear, that of a resurgent Islam, is a part of the Western historical memory. The sword-wielding Muslim thundering across the Straits of Gibraltar or laying siege to Vienna, the Old Man of the Mountain’s Assassins high on drugs launched to kill political leaders, white slavers, and Barbary pirates have been reincarnated as plane hijackers, embassy bombers, and nefarious creators of long gas lines. In the fiction of the “paranoid” and “vicious” categories, the conspiracy, the hero, and the villain are basic elements for thriller/spy novel success…

Thus, in fiction, anyone’s life can have meaning in the anonymous industrial and terrifying nuclear age. The reader identifies with the hero whose exploits become his own, and the fictional conspiracy becomes a personal threat on a world scale. Beating the gas lines during an oil embargo is transformed via fiction into vicarious vengeance against the villains, perceived as wealthy petrosheikhs who have created the oil crisis. But identification of the villain alone is not enough. In order to be thoroughly imbued with evil and to maintain credibility as a villain, the villain must be an impersonal figure; he is a stereotype; he mirrors the reader’s personal prejudices and fears. Only then is the reader hooked his villainy as he must also be on the hero’s noble character to such a degree that he can instantly and unconsciously root for the salvation of one and the damnation of the other.

Novels about the defeat of terrorists, of white slavers and dope peddlers, of Communists and right-wing fanatics have become very popular because these plots relate personally to the reader either by experience or political events experienced through the media. At noon, the cowboy hero guns down the bad guy assassin and saves the town from disaster.

Despite the fact that Middle Easterners have appeared in fictional mystery and thriller plots since World War I, it was not until real events and subconscious historical stereotypes coincided that they became popular as villains. It was “not that the Arabs had re-entered history, where they been all along,” writes William Leuchtenberg on the American Perception of the Arab world, “but that they had entered the American orbit of awareness” after the 1973 oil crisis.

The Chinese have undergone similar swings between respect and loathing. “The appearance of the Sinister Oriental as hero or villain in Western thriller and detective/spy fiction has coincided with a period in which China, or latterly Japan, played a role in world affairs.” Thus, because Americans had little interest in South Asia, Robin Winks tell us in “Sinister Orientals,” few American thrillers were set in Asia. Because the Yellow Pearl and racism were most strident around the time of World War I, Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, “sprang into diabolical life” and a Canadian writer could warn against the danger of admitting “too many Jappy-chappies, Chinks, and little Brown Brothers.” By 1939, the “Sinister Oriental” looked increasingly Japanese, but in the 1950s they had changed to Chicoms.

Arabs, and the bulk of the novels set in the Middle East after the 1960s concern Arabs, are but one in a long line of villains, brought to a present fore because of political events and the new vogue in terrorism. Has anyone read of the villainous Incas or Eskimos recently? One might if they blew up an airplane or two or otherwise menaced the Western way of life. That seems to be how people work themselves in to popular novels these days.

Thus, when readers tire of oil sheihks and Palestinians, or cry for revenge of the Iranian hostages, they may become interested in Shiite terrorists, the current vogue. Already novels have been written with Mullahs as starring villains, and Iranians and Shiites are joining Russians, Chinese Communists, Cubans, and Nazis in the accumulated list of villainy. Middle Easterners will continue to populate the casts of villains and conspirators, in popular fiction because authors know that today, after watching the evening news and reports of bombed American embassies, kidnapped or killed diplomats, and the latest exploits of religious fanatics, the public will readily read about the Middle Eastern conspirators, and that books about the area will sell well.

[Excerpt from Reeva S. Simon, The Middle East in Crime Fiction(New York, Lilian Barber Press, 1989), pp. 53, 138-140. Although many more examples of crime fiction have been published since Dr. Simon published this survey, it is well worth returning to the classics, including Agatha Christie’s (1951) prophetic They Came to Baghdad.]