In fiction, I’ve always been drawn to the brains rather than the brawn of the operation. The individual who tries to think their way out of a situation before resorting to violence. This archetype comes in three distinct flavors although occasionally the roles do bleed into each other. The first is the Advisor, the one lurking behind the proverbial throne, whispering in the boss’s ear how to anticipate problems before they become actual threats. The second is the Fixer who is only called in once a threat becomes existential. The third pane of this devious triptych is the Cleaner. Never pleasant, the Cleaner only makes an appearance once the first two’s schemes have utterly failed and there’s nothing left to do but wipe everything down and dispose of the bodies.
Of the three, my personal favorite is the Fixer. The Fixer operates from the shadows, seeing the whole board twelve moves deep, and moving the pieces to their best advantage. If they don’t own a dog-eared copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince, they would certainly second his most famous maxim: the ends justify the means. They are deeply cynical about human nature but consider themselves realists. To them, people are merely predicable systems of weights and counterbalances to be measured, manipulated, and ultimately led by the nose to the Fixer’s preferred outcome. It requires incredible arrogance to be a Fixer, because they believe it’s possible to bring order to a chaotic world. Their tragedy is that sometimes they are right.
Friar Lawrence / Romeo and Juliet / William Shakespeare 1597
Shakespeare’s meddling Friar Lawrence is the Model T of Fixers. The setup is perfect and has been copied endlessly. Two criminal families, the Montagues and Capulets, are terrorizing fair Verona where we set our scene, and the law is helpless to stop their bloody war. When young Juliet of the Capulets falls in love with Romeo of the Montagues, she knows the romance is forbidden. When Romeo kills her cousin, Tybalt, she knows it is doomed unless she acts. Out of desperation, she enlists Friar Lawrence to outwit the two families who would keep the lovers apart. Friar Lawrence, as any reliable Fixer would, orchestrates an intricate plan to convince both families that their children are dead. When the plan goes horribly wrong, leading to the death of both Romeo and Juliet (cue the Cleaner), the Friar confesses everything to the Prince of Verona. Somehow, despite being a grown man who gave drugs to children, the Friar successfully shifts all responsibility for the tragedy onto the Montagues and Capulets and gets off scot-free. A classic Fixer move.
Carson Wells / No Country For Old Men / Cormac McCarthy 2005
If a Fixer is only called in once a threat has become existential, well, there are few more existential threats in literature than Anton Chigurh. In the novel, Chigurh is an engine of chaos and the dumb luck that is life. The more someone believes they are immune to the vagaries of chance, the more ruthlessly Chigurh disabuse them of their illusions. Call it, he will tell them and flip the coin that will decide if they live or die. Just dumb luck in the end.
Chigurh is the worst kind of adversary for a man like Carson Wells, the Fixer brought in when the outfit that hired Chigurh realizes he is beyond their control. Carson Wells is a man of reason, a man of rules. He sees the board. He maneuvers. He finds Llewelyn Moss and offers him a deal. He intuits where the satchel of money is hidden. He comes achingly close to containing the threat. Unfortunately, Anton Chigurh finds Wells first. Again, Wells tries to maneuver. Again he offers deals and attempts to reason with Chigurh. Wells believes that by being patient and methodical that he can bring order to a chaotic world, but Chigurh is chaos, and chaos doesn’t listen to reason. Before killing Wells, Chigurh poses a question that every Fixer fears in their bones: If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?
Mae Pruett / Everybody Knows / Jordan Harper / 2023
There are two different kinds of readers: the ones who hope the good guys triumph over the bad guys, and the ones who think the whole notion of good guys and bad guys is nothing but wistful thinking. Enter noir, stage left. This latter group prefers a story told in greyscale and stocked with damaged, jaded, and cynical characters. There are no heroes and no redemption to be found here. Their bookshelves are thick with first editions of James Ellroy novels.
Picking up on themes from L.A. Confidential, Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows gives us the latest and greatest entry in the Fixer pantheon: Mae Pruett. It isn’t hard to imagine Mae as a distant relative of Jack Vincennes. Leaping forward to present day Los Angeles, she skillfully navigates a city where nothing has fundamentally changed in seventy years apart from the sophistication of the tactics that shield the powerful from repercussions or responsibility. Mae Pruett would be equally at home in either time period. Though young, she is calculating and eye-wateringly cynical. Qualities that make her exceptional but also come at a steep price. The price that all Fixers pay: her profound isolation. In the end, Fixers are prisoners of their own cynicism since the last thing they will risk is showing genuine vulnerability and getting played the way they’ve played so many others. For the Fixer that is a fate worse than death.
Nena Knight / Her Name is Knight / Yasmin Angoe / 2021
Is there a difference between the Fixer and the Assassin? The line between the two is fine and likely comes down to the application of force. A great example of a character that straddles that line is Yasmin Angoe’s Nena Knight, an elite Ghanian assassin stolen from her village as a child who now works for a business syndicate known as The Tribe. While comfortable resorting to violence, it’s Knight’s intelligence that sets her apart. She’s always weighing all the options on her mission to topple a human trafficking ring while also avenging the death of her family. She’s a survivor. No mere blunt instrument, she believes it’s possible to bring order to a chaotic world but to literally fix the broken places as well.
***
