In a 1997 interview Harry Harrison, when asked about DiGriz, said “I mean there's a history in fiction, of picaresque fiction, of the villain as hero and this follows through. And I carefully arranged the plot so he does more good than bad. I came up with some baddies for him to defeat and all his crime, if you look at it, is white collar crime or it’s like computer crime which nobody really seems to care about.” And he has called the first book an “action adventure story”. Oddly, he failed to point out that these are comedy/action stories, with some of the comedy being funnier than others. The far future in which the Rat works is so distant that people have forgotten they once came from the planet Earth, however their motives are just as dubious as those of the present day, their stupidity, duplicitousness and greed just as great, and, consequently, their systems of government and politics just as corrupt. A character like the Stainless Steel Rat is right at home on such worlds, in some senses unnoticeable, as he has many of the characteristics of the people about him, while he has somewhere, often hidden, his moral purpose – he will kill no one nor let anyone be killed – and, after those initial chapters, he has his police role, though that often seems forgotten. Harrison spoke of having “arranged the plot” but the series often seems to slip into a sequence of struggles, one after another – episodic rather than plotted works, but then can come a blow in which DiGriz, who has seemed to be addressing we readers rather disingenuously about his fight after fight and robbery after robbery, reveals his true plotted intent: such as the revelation in the last sentence of Chapter Fifteen of THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT: “Only reluctantly did I allow myself to be dragged to the place where I wanted to go”.

It was eight years after the Stainless Steel Rat’s first appearance that Harrison brought him back, giving him a female sidekick not obvious from the first volume, though signposted, and let him fight off a race struggling for interplanetary dominion – this seems to be the story that requires the title “saves the world” rather than any reference to revenge, because in the third volume, the Rat is sent time travelling to fight off the abominable “He”, and thus saves time rather than a world or place. However, the Rat’s time travel is limited to just two visits, both of them on Earth (after he corrects himself in calling the planet “Dirt”): a rather Nixonian 1984, and a much more puzzling England of the Napoleonic Wars. It is after being deposited somewhere in middle England, and a ride on a dung cart to the walls of Oxford, that DiGriz discovers that his calls for attention might have been premature, for the guard that answers speaks French. “He” has been able to change time. In places THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT SAVES THE WORLD seems to break the comedy-action mould of the series – the sf tropes seem stronger, such as the way that the French troops are controlled and registered, while the tortures loose their Punch and Judy slapstick - and those are huge variances compared to the earlier leaps, in which one moment the Rat might be landing from an luxury interstellar cruiser and then, within the time a short taxi ride might take, is distributing gas bombs and robbing banks of their cash, thanks to his nostril gasmask, as if he were the offspring of Bonnie and Clyde only a generation or two away from the pair.

Despite his temptations to write something harder Harry Harrison managed to turn a rather frigid form of sf into something softer and ultimately, as his sales have shown, more appealing. He was not unique among genre writers in recognising the possibilities of an anti-hero, but he was an early adopter: that eponymous first short story came only two years after Patricia Highsmith published THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY (1955), and was five years in advance of Richard Stark’s Parker, to take two examples from crime writing. The Stainless Steel Rat’s heirs are in thrillerdom, men such as Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, who might easily find himself in multiple crimes such bank robbery and scientifically planned genocide – combinations not untypical in the ongoing adventures of James DiGriz. And there is a place for THE STAINLESS STEEL RAT OMNIBUS on the shelves with their adventures still.