Most people are familiar with the concept of a “heist,” which Merriam-Webster defines simply as “armed robbery: holdup; theft.” A team (usually of conflicting personalities) attempts a difficult crime—almost always stealing something from a place with high security. Their plans go awry, and they adjust in a show of intellectual or physical one-upmanship, until the heist is either a success or a failure.
The heist framework was popularized by film, but it’s a derivation of the caper story, a subgenre of crime fiction dating back at least to the 19th century, in which crimes are perpetrated by the main characters for the reader’s entertainment. The caper story is comedic, with eccentric main characters, bumbling cops, and convoluted schemes to commit crime. Caper stories can be subplots—for example, Huckleberry Finn features a scheme to break Jim out of slavery—but are always characterized by a lighthearted tone.
Though elements of Six of Crows are comedic, the novel draws more on the idea of a heist popularized by films. Heists, compared to capers, don’t need to be funny; their main characters are idiosyncratic and often geniuses, and the scheme must go awry, but not necessarily comedically. In 1903, a silent film called The Great Train Robbery has what critic Tim Robey identifies as the main features of a heist film: “the posse of bandits, the scheme being enacted, the mishaps threatening disaster.” Films like Ocean’s 11 (1960, remade into Ocean’s Eleven in 2001), Mission Impossible (1996), and Now You See Me (2013) are blockbuster examples of a genre that has been riffed on for over a century.
By establishing that Six of Crows is a heist from the outset, Leigh Bardugo uses a well-known genre to build expectations of where the novel will go. Doing so allows her to celebrate the caper and heist genres, as well as playing with those established elements.
