The Hired Killer in Fiction

Writing of David Fincher's film The Killer David Walsh remarked that "[h]ired killers like these . . . with their automaton-like precision and fanatical attention to detail," are fantasies, and about that Mr. Walsh is of course entirely right. Read up on the relevant subjects--crime, intelligence, covert operations--and you never find anything like these stock figures of so much thriller fiction. Ever.

So where did they come from?

I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.