The Perfect Hero

I must be a perfectionist, because I am on a roll with this "perfect" theme. So what the heck. What makes a perfect hero--to you?

Because my perfect hero isn't yours and isn't yours. I find this kind of character to be the most intensely personal of all sometimes. I like my heroes to be crazy-smart (as in, so smart that they're almost in that weird category). Lewis LeBarge in my Billie Quinn books comes to mind. So smart he couldn't fit in anywhere EXCEPT with the left-of-center eccentrics he surrounded himself with.

He doesn't have to be strong. MacGyver is a good example. Getting by with his brain. I like the ordinary archeologist, like Indiana Jones who figures out the escape route by smarts, not brute force.

And my hero will never, and I mean never ever, be a laywer or a cop or a D.A. But most especially a cop. In fact, in my books, if you want to know the bad guy, look for the person in the uniform.

Now, I realize that's ME. There is a whole subset, for example, of Harlequin books with cop heroes. I know lots of people whose dads were cops and D.A.s and so on and were terrific men (think Atticus Finch--now THAT was a lawyer you could believe in!). But I believe, to the very core of my being, what John Acton believed:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

I believe that. Which is why I cheered in V for Vendetta. Which is why I love the anti-hero most of all. My feelings this way mean if I see a cop in real life, I hyperventilate. If a cop car pulls in back of me, I usually look for the nearest exit on the highway or the nearest store parking lot to pull in until the cop passes. I believe power corrupts in religion and in the military, and in politics. And so perhaps, in the end, I am an anarchist.

BUT . . . my hero--and perhaps mine alone--disdains power and he fights for the little guy. He's Robin Hood. He's the smart guy who takes on the bully.

I realize my feelings about politics and authority figures colors my hero. But that's why I think it's such a subjective thing. My HERO is just as likely to be a bookie or a criminal. Which is perhaps different--I know it is in romance or women's fiction. My hero is also likely to be not the handsomest man in the room. In fact, he's the one with the bad nose that's been broken in too many bar fights or Golden Gloves matches. Maybe it's shaped by my dad, who never met an authority figure he liked and never backed down from a fight. And his nose is left of center a little.

So tell me . . . who is your Perfect Hero?