Swag and Temptation

If it were not for the intolerance of chronology to have the Order of Time broken, those lines from a 1987 song would have been an excellent epigraph in Elmore Leonard’s 1976 novel, Swag.

The set-up: Frank Ryan, a car salesman, partners with Ernest Stickley, Jr. (Stick, for short), an itinerant car thief, to embark upon a foolproof spree of armed robbery. Foolproof, I tell you. No danger at all. None.

It’s all laid out in Chapters 2 and 3. An utterly brilliantly constructed pair of chapters in which Frank explains the method to Stick. According to the ever authoritative Library of America, Leonard’s original title for the book was The Frank and Ernest Method, which is both a much better title and, as the publisher obviously noted, a title which would have doomed the book to poor sales. If you were browsing a bookstore in 1976, Swag catches your attention much more than The Frank and Ernest Method. Swag is 1970s cool. Frank and Earnest is something your parents said.

Despite the change in the title, it is the Method that is the key actor in this book. You see, Frank has been studying, really studying, things and he has this foolproof method and all he needs is a partner. Stick is a bit skeptical, naturally enough—if you are sitting in a bar with a car salesman telling you that he has cracked the Code of Crime, you too are skeptical. But, Frank explains: “Statistics show—man, I’m not just saying it, statistics show—armed robbery pays the most for the least amount of risk.”

Well, if statistics show it, how can you be skeptical?

You see most people involved in crime, well they don’t think things through. They get greedy and take unnecessary risks. But Frank, he knows better. “‘I can see how two guys who know what they’re doing and’re businesslike about it’—he paused, grinning a little—‘who’re frank with each other and earnest about their work, can pull down three to five grand a week.’”

Price comparison note: $3-5 grand a week in 1976 is roughly $15,000 to $25,000 in 2022. A week. Do this for a year and you make a million give or take a couple hundred grand. And it’s foolproof. Totally foolproof, I tell you.

All you have to do is follow The Rules! Frank has Ten Rules for success. As you can tell, Frank has been attending a lot of those business seminars on how to be successful in business without really trying. Take those well-established principles of success (based on statistics!) and apply them to armed robbery, and how can you go wrong?

Admit it, you want to know The Rules. You are thinking about rushing out to buy this book just to discover the rules. It’s even easy to buy the book—just click on the picture of the book cover above and it will take you right to the Amazon web page for the book and you can order it and in a day or two, you too will know The Rules!

Or you can just keep reading this here review—though, truth be told, if you do click on that link and buy the book, you will enjoy it; it is a really fun book.

What are Frank’s “ten rules for success and happiness”? The All Caps is in the original, presumably because this is, you know, really important:

1. ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB. SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU.
2. NEVER SAY MORE THAN NECESSARY.
3. NEVER CALL YOUR PARTNER BY NAME—UNLESS YOU USE A MADE-UP NAME.
4. DRESS WELL. NEVER LOOK SUSPICIOUS OR LIKE A BUM.
5. NEVER USE YOUR OWN CAR. (DETAILS TO COME.)
6. NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR.
7. NEVER FLASH MONEY IN A BAR OR WITH WOMEN.
8. NEVER GO BACK TO AN OLD BAR OR HANGOUT ONCE YOU HAVE MOVED UP.
9. NEVER TELL ANYONE YOUR BUSINESS. NEVER TELL A JUNKIE EVEN YOUR NAME.
10. NEVER ASSOCIATE WITH PEOPLE KNOWN TO BE IN CRIME.

There you have it. Follow those rules and you can’t go wrong.

When you look down that list, it doesn’t seem all that hard. Rules 1 and 4 are about how you look and act. Rules 2 and 3 remove the possibility of revealing information during the crime. Rule 5 also limits the possibility of someone identifying you. Rule 6 means you are focusing on getting away. Rules 7 through 10 just prevent you from getting entangled with someone who will reveal your identify to the police.

There is nothing in that set of rules which seems like it would be terribly hard to follow. This is the genius of the book. The Rules would work. You won’t get caught following those rules. The only thing stopping you from getting that equivalent of a million dollars a year is that you have some strange aversion to pointing a gun at somebody and demanding they give you all the cash in the safe or cash register or wherever it is. Presumably, that is not an easy aversion to overcome…I suppose that should say “Fortunately, that is not an easy aversion for most people to overcome.”

The reason that Swag is such an interesting novel is that by the end of chapter 3, you have seen this foolproof method for crime. Of course it could go wrong if you got really unlucky, but if you are careful, no problem at all. And yet, you, the Reader, have no doubt at all that things are not going to go well for Frank and Stick.

What’s the problem? Suppose you overcome your aversion to armed robbery and you start off following Frank’s rules, but then you realize that if you just bend one of those rules a bit, just a teensy little bit, you could easily increase your income. Say you drop the rule about saying “Please” and “Thank You.” That won’t hurt, will it? And you’ll get a higher income.

Oh, and rule 9 surely doesn’t apply to people you trust. And rule 5 only applies if anyone can see your car. And rule 10 obviously doesn’t apply to people in crime who are cautious and don’t get caught. And Rule….

Swag is a marvelous examination of human nature. Why do people do terrible things? It happens all the time. You see or hear of someone who is really mired in a horrible situation because of what they have done. The drug addict is the classic case. How does one become a heroin addict? It is rare for someone to wake up one fine morning and exclaim, “I think I want to be a junkie.” But, it is easy to imagine someone saying, “I’ll try heroin, just this once. Just a little bit. Nothing too crazy.” And then that little bit become a little bit more and then a little bit more and the end is not pretty.

This pattern of behavior is familiar to everyone. Drug and alcohol abuse, stealing from your employer, bribery or other forms of political corruption, they all start the same way: “Just a little bit.” We condemn such behavior.

We also routinely do the same thing ourselves. We don’t mean to be bad, but every now and then, being a little bit mean to someone, well, that’s OK, right? Sure I should help my neighbor (or my spouse), but just this one time, I’ll pretend I don’t notice my neighbor (or my spouse) could use some help. Just this one little lie, a white lie, honestly, just a little lie. I’ll just cut this small corner at work, just a tiny one. I can put off my work just for a minute to check Twitter, just for a minute. Oh, and Facebook too. And obviously Instagram. And Pinterest. And this nifty game. It’s not like I am deciding to avoid doing the things I should be doing. “I used ta do a little but a little wouldn’t do. So the little got more and more.”

Why do we do this? It is not hard to think of things you have done in the last week which cause you to wonder why you didn’t have more self-control. Why does temptation work so well? Why can’t Frank and Stick and you and I resist the temptation to just do a little bit more of that thing we know in our reflective moments we really should not be doing.

When we talk about the stamp of original sin which corrupts our very souls, we often instantly imagine the evidence of people who do really terrible things. But, terrible people doing terrible things may not be the best evidence of original sin at all.

Why does temptation seem to only run one way? I am constantly tempted to be a little bit worse than I am. Just a little. But, do I have a corresponding temptation to be a little bit better? I used to be a little bit good and then I got tempted to be a little bit better and then a bit better and then next thing you know I find out I am acting in really virtuous ways and I have no idea how I got here? Hmm. Behaving better than I used to behave seems like work. Behaving worse than I used to behave is really easy.

That is the reason to read a book like Swag. Even if you are not looking for a manual on how to become a more effective armed robber, imagining that you are is a useful exercise. How quickly would you go down the inevitable road that Frank and Stick travel? Could you resist the urge to bend those really easy rules? How often do you bend the really easy rules you make for your own life?

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