Top 5 Tough Bastards

[Nick Seymour]

Who are your Top 5 favourite literary heavies? These can be good guys, bad guys, or barely featured extras from recent or classic crime fiction. Mine would be:
1) Sam Spade from Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" - wont play the sap for anyone, always one step ahead, comes at you like a runaway train.
2) Mick Stranahan from Carl Hiaasen's "Skin Tight" (returned in "Skinny Dip") - "Short fuse?" "NO fuse!" He's a crazy bastard, a loose cannon, but with a cast iron sense of justice.
3) Rankin's John Rebus. Drunk Scottish detective. Enough said.
4) Another Scot, Francis Begbie from Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting". Not a crime book exactly, but Begbie is the ultimate nutter.
and 5)... thought about Phil Marlowe, but he get so bloody introspective sometimes. So my number 5 has to be Hammett's Continental Op, and especially from "Red Harvest". He is a real bad-ass in that one, to the point where he fears he is becoming 'blood simple' with all the murder he is orchestrating.

[Jude Hardin]

1. Travis Magee
2. Jack Reacher
3. Dave Robicheaux
4. Alex Cross
5. Spenser

[Jack Getze]

I love Stranahan, too. How about Crais's Joe Pike?

[Eric Christopherson]

Pike, that guy is scary bad!

[B.R.Stateham]

There's a Navaho indian character by the name of Joe Leaphorn from the Hillerman novels I think is tough. He does nothing physical. . . and he's not the tough guy talker. But there's a sense about him that he could be really hard as nails if he had to be.

And don't forget Archie Goodwin from the Nero Wolfe series. Again, you never really see him get physical. But . . .

But for me, hands down, in a tight situation I want Jason Bourne on my side. I'll take Bourne over Bond or anyone else.

[I. J. Parker]

Jack Reacher

Some others that were mentioned are among my favorites but don't qualify as tough guys (John Rebus and Leaphorn, for example)

[Jon Loomis]

I like Travis McGee, although Jude and I seem like the last two guys in the world who still read/remember him. I like Dave Robicheaux, too, but isn't his sidekick Clete more the loose cannon, tough guy type? I don't get the appeal of the Reacher books; a flatter character was never written, IMO. How about James Bond? Not crime, exactly, but Fleming's version of him is tough and ruthless indeed. I'd add Marlowe to the list, too--a guy can be both introspective and tough, I think. Any tough women out there, other than my sidekick, Lola Winters?

[I. J. Parker]

I sometimes suspect there are more tough women than men. All those liberated women authors. And Jack Reacher isn't all that flat, just a tad flattish. Tough guys tend to be that way.

[Jon Loomis]

Maybe I got a bad one--Reacher's big and beats people up. He likes coffee, and is mildly interested in the size, shape and thickness of coffee cups. He doesn't wash his clothes--ever. qUiRkY!!! He has absolutely no internal conflict, though, and his observations are entirely matter-of-fact. The general flatness of the writing doesn't help. I believe Child when he says he writes for an audience of 9th graders.

[I. J. Parker]

Oh, but all the successful books are written for 9th graders. Check any successful genre novel. Even look at Alexander McCall Smith (who can write on a more elevated level), but his African series (charming though it is) consists of sentences on the par with "see Spot run."

Jack Reacher is a damaged man who has dropped out. He no longer participates in the social sphere. Yes, the books are fairly simple (sometimes even silly), but if you want someone to succeed who shouldn't by all logic, it's Reacher. And some of that is just persistence and not giving a damn about himself. He does go after bad guys, so he's not just beating up people.

[Albert Tucher]

I think that toughness is women characters tends to take the form of endurance and tenacity. I haven't reread Liza Cody's books since I discovered them twenty years ago, but I remember her character Anna Lee having those qualities.

[D. C. Hawkins]

You are not alone. I have the entire set of McGees and re-read them every couple years.
In a fit of perversity, I would like to write something in that style, but just end in the middle of a fight. Although to be fair to the reader, I suppose that it would need an epilogue to tie up the details of the protagonist's demise.

[Michael Matthews]

To Jon's question on tough women - Parker's Sunny Randell, Lehane's Angela Gennaro, Rucka's Bridgette Logan, and any of the heroines of Megan Abbott and Christa Faust.

And I remember McGee and the Busted Flush docked at Slip F18 with great fondness.