The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus

By Harry Harrison

James Bolivar “Slippery Jim” diGriz a.k.a. The Stainless Steel Rat is a master criminal, adept with disguises, gadgets and cunning plans, he is an anomaly in a near-totalitarian future where criminal tendencies, once detected, are purged from the personality by less-than-savoury means. But when his latest con goes wrong, Slippery Jim finds himself outmanoeuvred and at the mercy of Harold Inskipp, Head of the Special Corps. Inskipp was himself a master criminal until recruited to the Special Corps to deal with the type of crime where it takes a thief to catch a thief and thus, he recruits diGriz, so that his unique skills can be put to better use.

With his criminal mind channelled on the right side of the law, Jim ends up on the trail of someone secretly building an interstellar battleship that can wreak havoc across the galaxies. Despite tracking them down and capturing them, the mastermind behind this particular ruse, the beautiful Angelina, escapes and Jim, totally against orders, gives the Special Corps the slip in order to find her and bring her to justice, but as he’s about to discover the hunter can also become the hunted….

Originally published in 1961 Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat was spun out of a short story and is a science fiction cross between James Bond and Simon Templar. Part superspy, part thief, rakish, charming, a master of disguise and lover of the latest technological gadgetry he is almost an interstellar Raffles. In his own morality the only victims of his crimes are large organisations or governments that he sees as bigger thieves than himself and he would never kill to get what he wants.

Classic science fiction is always fun to revisit and the three volumes in this omnibus – The Stainless Steel Rat, The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World – are great fun. The plots move along at a terrific pace, the over-the-top characters are funny, absurd and engaging in equal measure and the action crackles along at breakneck pace with wit and humour to spare which, after 40 years, is no mean feat. But there are problems here which I find hard to reconcile.

First, it’s hard to warm to the main character, James diGriz. He’s a mass of contradictions about how he justifies his crimes – he won’t commit murder, but he will injure, blackmail, threaten, destroy lives and steal – yet he still sees himself as a man of sound morals. It just doesn’t ring true, you’re either a criminal or you’re not, don’t try to wheedle out of it. Too often it sounds like Harrison is trying to make him likeable and it just comes across as false but it’s his quarry – and eventual love interest, Angelina – that is the more problematic. She never once shows remorse for her crimes, she turns to prostitution as easily as she steals, throughout the story she murders without hesitation, even shooting Jim at one point. She’s wholly unlikeable with not a single redeeming quality yet the author insists on trying to make her sympathetic as the story starts to close and you know it’s just so he can use her again in subsequent books. It doesn’t work and when she escapes the full justice of the law you cannot help but feel cheated….she tries to start a war for heavens sake!

Having said all that, they are products of their times. As you would expect the ‘science’ is hopelessly out of date and in some ways is not even prescient of current developments and maybe these kind of characters had a better survival rate in the 60’s heyday of Bond and The Saint, one thing is for certain though, they are distinctly action-oriented and if what you’re after is imaginative, futuristic adventure stories filled with romance, intrigue and derring-do then look no further.

The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus is published by Gollanz and is available from Amazon, Blackwell and all good book stores.

Harry Harrison’s website is here.