We hear heist tales from the time we’re children, don’t we? World mythology and folklore are filled with clever, tricky humans who steal items of value from demons and gods. Even Disneyesque fairy tales have them. Once Jack goes up that beanstalk, what is the rest of the story but a heist?
The fantasy genre embraces heists in all flavors and textures. Here are five of my favorites. To share yours, steal into the comments and leave us a note.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Bilbo, a hobbit living a comfortable life in the land of Shire, is manipulated into joining a group of dwarves who plan to steal a treasure from a dragon. Along the way, the gang of heisters encounter both external and internal obstacles. Bilbo, separated from the others deep in some goblin tunnels, conducts a “mini-heist” when he finds a magical ring and outwits the weird, sinister creature who has challenged him to a riddle contest. Bilbo is forced to call upon his own wit and skill, as well as the power of the ring, to survive, let alone prevail, first with the riddles and then with the dragon. Call it a prequel if you want, call it a quest, call it a there-and-back-again journey. It’s a heist, baby.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
In the first of the Gentlemen Bastards series, we meet Locke Lamora, an orphan who rises to become the leader of his elite group of con artists, thieves and pickpockets, called, of course, the Gentlemen Bastards. In the midst of a caper against a pair of aristocratic marks, the Bastards meet another player, the Gray King. They partner with the King, only to face betrayal, ruin and probable death. The banter, the action, and the characterization of Locke and his second-in-command Jean make this a wonderful read. The descriptions of the strange and beautiful world they inhabit are extra sprinkles on the cupcake.
California Bones by Greg van Eekhout
Before we met Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon and Harrow, we found osteomancy in the Kingdom of California, ruled by the tyrannical, magical Hierophant. The Hierophant murdered bone magician Sebastian Blackland in front of Blackland’s son Daniel. Now Daniel is a petty thief working for his crime lord uncle. Daniel has no plans to confront the Hierophant, because he likes being alive, but his uncle wants Daniel and his crew to steal the ruler’s magical sword—a sword Daniel’s father made. The crew is pursued by the cold and relentless Gabriel Argent, the Hierophant’s nephew. Daniel is a complicated character and an engaging one, the relationships are powerful and tangled, and the concept of bone as a repository of magical power brings a wonderful creepy strangeness to a book that throws in California’s La Brea Tar Pits for good measure.
Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
I think Bennett’s The Divine Cities trilogy is a masterpiece, but The Founders Trilogy may give it a run for its money. The series kicks off with Foundryside, introducing us to Sancia, who escaped enslavement and now steals for a living. Sancia has a metal plate in her head that allows her to listen to magically inscribed or “scrived” objects. When she steals an oddly-shaped gold key, she sets in motion a chain reaction that will literally change the reality of her world, but not before she participates in more than one heist. The magic and politics of Foundryside, with its oligarchical “campo” families controlling scriving, are complex, multi-layered and dazzling. The characters are heartbreakingly deep and complicated, and one of the truly original notes in the heist aspect is that the “gang” that forms are all adversaries of each other first. Trust is hard to come by, and even harder to maintain when things start going wrong. Come for the magic and the heist, stay for the philosophical and political observations.
Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Glamorists series started with homage to Jane Austen, but by the fourth book, Jane and Vincent have lost nearly all their material possessions and must out-swindle a swindler to keep from losing their secret magical glamourist process. The book is packed with beautiful settings—Murano and the Venetian lagoon—and wonderful elements like pirates, puppets and Lord Byron swimming naked in a canal, but the heart of the story is the relationship between our two main characters. Jane and Vincent finally reveal fears and issues to each other, and the relationship teeters under the stress of their situation. Is that why I include this book on the list? It is not. This is the only book on the list with heister nuns. Yes, Valour and Vanity includes a convent of feisty nuns who help with the heist. Need I say more?
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Heist books give us puzzles and tricks, and protagonists who turn the tables on the arrogant and powerful. To my mind, there’s little better than settling in with a bowl of popcorn and a heist book, and watching the lawless ones do their bit to put the world right.
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Comeuppance Served Cold
Marion Deeds was born in Santa Barbara, California and moved to northern California when she was five. She loves the redwoods, the ocean, dogs and crows. She’s fascinated by the unexplained, and curious about power: who has it, who gets it, what is the best way to wield it. These questions inform her stories. Deeds has published Aluminum Leaves and Copper Road from Falstaff Books, with short works in Podcastle and several anthologies. She reviews fiction and writes a column for the review site Fantasy Literature.
One nit to pick: The Hobbit was published 15 years before The Lord of the Rings, so calling it a prequel is just wrong. The reality is that The Lord of the Rings is the sequel to The Hobbit.
Jim Butcher has said that every author wants to write at least one heist novel. His was SKIN GAME. Mine was THE GAME WE PLAY, now sadly out of print.
Hi Marion –
Just wanted to say that I binged through “Comeuppance…” earlier this week and loved it. I fervently hope there will be more tales in this universe and with these characters! Is there an origin story for Comeuppance (the character) out there somewhere? I got the sense from a little googling that there might be.
@Mark. You are correct, sir. I hear it called a “prequel” a lot, though.
@@@@@ KC,
As a matter of fact, Comeuppance shares her version of her origins in a story called “Never Truly Yours,” which Podcastle published. Oh, look! Here’s a link!
https://podcastle.org/2017/04/11/pc-465-never-truly-yours/
Six of Crows and its sequel Crooked Kingdom, by Leigh Bardugo, comprise my favorite heist story. I love its protagonist cast of six demographically-diverse* young people firmly on the wrong side of the law — extraordinarily talented but deeply flawed people who can and will do anything to protect each other and take down the true villains who had put each of them through a separate living hell. They’re wonderfully snarky, an essential ingredient for my enjoyment of characters these days, and their intricately detailed home base is an Amsterdam-like city where the citizenry literally worships commerce and money.
I read the Gentleman Bastards series (The Lies of Locke Lamora and its sequels) in search of something akin to the aforementioned duology, and didn’t like it as much. The setting is nastier — Ketterdam is ruthless in pursuit of profit, but Camorr apparently flourishes on pain and cruelty from end to end and the other cities aren’t much better. The characters are incessantly snarky — which is the main reason I kept reading, along with occasional passages of beautiful prose — but I personally found them far less likable and relatable
*Only one of them is a fully-abled heterosexual white man.
I love a good heist. I love it I even tolerate a genre I didn’t know I disliked [Grimdark] to read The Lies of Locke Lamora.
“The Blacktongue Thief” by Christopher Buehlman.
No one pulls a weird heist like Vlad Taltos; except perhaps Garrett. (Brust and Cook, respectively)
@mndrew, Vlad is a great thief, but I think I’d rather have him cook me dinner. ;)
@9 Jhereg is essentially a heist story, viewed unconventionally.
I’d also put forward Sanderson’s Mistborn – The Final Empire, which is an awesome heist book with theft, revolution and assassinating the unkillable Lord Ruler elements.
I don’t know about unconventional, but I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Kadrey’s The Everything Box. And then looking at this list and comments, I have read a lot of heist stories!
For unconventional heists (one of my favorite fantasy subgenres!), I love Patrick Weekes’ “The Palace Job” series – two former prisoners, a failed illusionist, an acrobat, a horny unicorn and her hunky virgin farm boy, and a death priestess with a talking warhammer set out on a revenge heist that involves family dysfunction, magical mayhem, snappy dialog, a lot of laughs, and Very. Scary. Elves. So much fun!
(And, of course, “Foundryside” by Robert Jackson Bennett, “The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids” by Michael McClung, “The Gutter Prayer” by Gareth Hanrahan, and “The Spirit Thief” by Rachel Aaron)
Oh! And I forgot “The Hammer and the Blade” by Paul Kemp (excellent; reminds me of Fafhred & the Grey Mouser) and “The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn” by Tyler Whitesides (magical components made from dragon poop, celebrated con men & political intrigue).
The Big Boost, book one of The A.I. War, by Daniel Keys Moran.
When the most wanted thief of the year 2080 is asked to go up against the Unified Earth to destroy a spaceship intended to forcibly unify the rest of the Solar System, well, read the title again.
For unconventional I’d recommend Roshani Chokshi’s Gilded Wolves trilogy. Set in the 19th century, initially in Paris, a found family of six diverse people attempts to steal a variety of magical artifacts which their leader, Severin, considers his stolen birthright.
Martha Wells’s The Death of the Necromancer starts out with a heist connected to a long-term revenge. The heist gets complicated and the rest of the book is dealing with those consequences.
Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series has Gen (Eugenides) either stealing something or having someone else steal something in just about every book.
If The Big Boost looks interesting, you may want to read The Long Run first where Trent deals with several heists over the course of the story.
@melita, I loved all THE QUEEN’S THIEF books.
My TBR list is expanding like bread dough on a warm stove!
Let’s go old-school: anyone remember the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison? “Slippery Jim” DiGriz, his somewhat homicidal wife Angelica, and his two sons Simon and Bolivar, are the best con artists and thieves in the galaxy. They occasionally ply their trade to set wrongs right, and frequently enrich themselves in the process.
Marshall Ryan Maresca has explored this sub-genre nicely with his “Streets of Maradaine” trilogy as part of his overall Maradaine sequence of books. It’s essentially Fantasy Ocean’s 11, and I loved it.
I can’t believe you left “Skin Game” off the list. Except for The Hobbit, it has no equal.
Drake Maijstral is an Allowed Burglar, but I‘d say he sometimes heists instead of burglaring. ;-)
@bilbodad2 and @MByerly, SKIN GAME is definitely unconventional, if only for the location of the vault. Not too many thieves try to break into Hell unless Richard Kadrey writes them.
+1 to the trilogy by Patrick Weekes that starts with The Palace Job. Multiple heists per book, they are a lot of fun. I like to say “Firefly meets The Wizard of Oz”.
+100 to “The Big Boost”’s author, Daniel Keys Moran, but you could start that series with The Long Run, which is a finished, fantastic novel. Or start one book earlier, at the beginning of the series, with Emerald Eyes (no heist in that one). All of them are sadly hard to find these days.
@TheMadLibrarian: I may even still have my Stainless Steel Rat books. My best friend and I still refer to McD’s products as “McPorcuswine burgers.”
The Kantovan Vault by Joel Shepherd https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32199241-kantovan-vault is probably a fairly conventional heist, which only depends on getting members of a few warring species and AIs to work together.
Finder by Suzanne Palmer
Loooove the cover of Comeuppance! AND IT’S ONLY 5 DOLLARS!!!!
Weirdly, I can only draw horses to the left. And not very good ones at that, but there you go. My medicine bear isn’t bad. The thief books I love tend to be more on the cozy mystery side, but I love them nonetheless! I’ve read several of the books mentioned above; some were too dark for me, but there’s some very good suggestions!
Charles Stross’ Halting State begins with a bank heist of some large amount of gold by a group of orcs aided buy a dragon…in a shared, on-line, rôle-playing game’s world.
Fool’s Gold by Jon Hollins
Sanderson’s Mistborn?