Rogues are fun to read about. Richard Sharpe, Mr. Wickham, Flashman, the various demi-monde detectives, the “heist” genre (works like Ocean’s 11 and the Dortmunder novels), the Gray Mouser, Falstaff, even, say, the Duke and the Dauphin, they have all attracted a wide and avid public. Yours truly being part of it. Yours truly is also a Mormon, with a commitment to order and virtue being at the very beating heart of things.

Do you see my problem, my poppets?

Here are some preliminary thoughts:

Let’s concede right off that we like rogues partly because we like the prospect of wickedness being happiness. We want to think that someone can lie, cheat, steal, rowdy and fornicate with dash and aplomb and without fatal consequences. We want to escape from the grating endurance to the end of our lives. There are definitely non-good or likely bad reasons to read and enjoy rogue fiction.

But almost all rogues and anti-heroes do have heroic qualities; they wouldn’t be attractive characters without them. They have pluck, intelligence, fortitude, or creativity, or some set of inadequate but still worthwhile private stock of principle to which they adhere. In fact, quite a number of fictional rogue protagonists don’t escape consequence free. They escape their adventures with their skin and little more, yet they are no less popular.

So rogues can be likable by the Christian reader, and not just the natural-man reader, for two reasons. First, they can sometimes represent in a pure form virtues or admirable characteristics or joys that we can never practically see in a pure form in mortality but that are still desirable. Second, more commonly, they are bad folks, but they have good and even admirable qualities mixed in which their bad qualities set off. In this second way, rogue fiction is really a testimonial of the Mormon doctrine of the telestial kingdom. The popularity of rogue fiction shows that even rotten men can have qualities that God would want to preserve to himself.