Among all the villains in Suicide Squad running in a theatre near you, is Harley Quinn. Dr Harleen Quinzel is a psychiatrist who throws the Hippocrates oath out of the window, falls in love with the Joker and joins him on the other side of sanity in tight little top and tighter shorts as Harley Quinn.
The colourful character reminds one of no, not Bob Dylan’s ‘Quinn the Eskimo’, who is supposedly inspired by Anthony Quinn though the counter culture icon insists the wildly popular folk rock song is just a simple nursery rhyme. Nor does she remind of the daring (for their time) Harlequin romances.
Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn brings to mind Agatha Christie’s Harley Quin who made his first appearance in The Mysterious Mr Quin, a collection of 12 short stories on April 14, 1930. In her autobiography Christie describes Quin as her favourite character as she wrote about him only when she felt like it. Each of the stories features a mystery, which is solved by Mr Satterthwaite, a 62-year man with “an intense and inordinate interest in other people’s lives.”
While Satterthwaite ostensibly solves the mysteries from his vantage point “of the front row of the stalls watching various dramas of human nature,” it is the mysterious Mr Quin who is the catalyst, who points Satterthwaite in the right direction, vanishing once his work is done. Reviewers have called the stories fairy tales, with a strong whimsical supernatural element.
Like Harley Quinn, the character of Mr Quin is based on the 16th century Italian Commedia Dell’ Arte—did anyone say comic books are shallow and unsophisticated? There are several clues linking Quin to harlequin’s costume of multihued diamond shapes and a dark mask. In his introduction, Quin is described as “tall and slender. To Mr Satterthwaite, watching, he appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow. Then, as he stepped forward, he showed himself to be a thin dark man dressed in motoring clothes.” Through the book, whenever Quin makes his sudden appearances and disappearances, there is an evocation of the harlequin, with his enchantments, his sympathy for lovers and also his darker side where he stands for death. Mr Quin also appears in two short stories ‘The Love Detectives’ and ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’ (from Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories).
In the Hercule Poirot short story, ‘The Affair of the Victory Ball’, Lord Cronshaw goes to the ball dressed as Harlequin while the beautiful actress Coco Courtenay as Columbine. Cronshaw is stabbed, Coco dies of a cocaine overdose and the costume is a vital clue, which helps Poirot solve the dastardly crime.
Who would have imagined a comic book villain would have her roots in 16th century Italy? What goes around, comes around.
