Sadly, all the books bar the first seem to be out of print, but if you spot a dogeared copy in a second-hand bookshop or online, snap it up. With the current popularity of masked avengers, windswept heroes and historical violence, Syn and Thorndike are long overdue rediscovery and probably a BBC adaptation too.
It's an impressively selfish act of manipulation on the part of our protagonist – a dark inversion of A Tale of Two Cities – and one that reminds us he is not a good man. It would perhaps have been more interesting if that last part had remained a threat rather than an actual realisation – with Syn apparently leading the charge against his other selves – but you can't have everything.Īnd as it is the book ends on a deliciously evil note, with Syn's nemesis Black Nick going to the gallows as Captain Clegg in return for the vicar taking in his daughter. Towards the end of the book, the barriers begin to break down between Syn's three lives, as the enemies of Clegg and the Scarecrow begin to surmise they might be one and the same – as might mild-mannered Dr Syn. In one of the book's best scenes, our hero literally bids farewell to Captain Clegg and introduces him to his successor: Dr Syn, country vicar. "If a parson cannot override the devil, he's no use at his job." No wonder he needs three personas to contain all those contradictions. Syn is part Robin Hood, part Blackbeard champion of the oppressed and terror of the high seas simple honest parson and criminal mastermind. Dr Syn is one of those protean caped crusaders who appeared in the first few decades of the 20th century – alongside Zorro, John Carter and Hugo Danner – and serve as a connecting thread between the heroes of the 19th century and the superheroes we still know today.ĭoctor Syn Returns was published in 1935, just four years before Bruce Wayne made his first appearance in Detective Comics, and like the Dark Knight he is an intriguingly antiheroic figure. In this the third book (but second chronologically), Dr Syn adopts a third guise, that of the terrifying Scarecrow, to protect the smugglers of Kent from the forces of His Majesty's Customs and Excise. Published between 19, the novels tell the tales of Dr Christopher Syn, village parson driven to a life of piracy by a terrible lust for revenge. Poldark meets Batman in Russell Thorndike's adventures of Dr Syn.
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