In Popular Culture
Novelist Donald E. Westlake, who wrote scores of books in which the caper heist is the central plot and who featured the popular fictional character John Dortmunder, a professional planner of thefts, did somewhat glamorize theft as a way of life. In Westlake's comedic novels, the fence is portrayed in extremely negative lights. Dortmunder's usual fence, Arnie Albright, "was a fellow with a distinct personality problem." He is so repellent that his own family members raise enough money for a "personality intervention" to take place at a Club Med resort in the Caribbean area. Arnie's cousin, Archie, explains that they want to cure him of "his obnoxiousness."
In a non-series novel, Westlake writes of another, even more repulsive character:
As fences go, Jersey Josh Kuskiosko was no more scuzzy than the average. As human beings go, of course, Jersey Josh was just about at the bottom of the barrel, down there in the muck and the filth and the fetid stink where thoughts just naturally arise of retroactive abortion. But as far as fences are concerned, he wasn't bad.Read more about this topic: Fence (criminal)
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)