Vigilante literature

When people feel that justice has been denied to them, sometimes they take the law into their own hands & become judge, jury & executor rolled into one. Literature has also many examples of vigilantes, mostly portraying them favourably.

One of the earliest & most famous of such books is "The Four Just Men" by Edgar Wallace. This book so impressed Martin Edwards, who produced the magisterial study of the Golden Age of Detection called "The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books" that he included it that book, even though he overlooked the books having the genuine detective J. G. Reeder, created by Wallace himself. 

Wallace was one of the most prolific writers of the first part of the twentieth century but has rather fallen out of fashion now. But his first book was launched amidst a flurry of fanfare, which though it guaranteed best seller status to the book, was financial ruin to Wallace. Undeterred, he wrote five sequels to the book, all of which were well received. All the six books are issued in an omnibus edition by the publishers of economy editions, Wordsworth Publishers.

Even Agatha Christie's classic "Murder on the Orient Express" featuring her detective Hercule Poirot, he of the "little grey cells" & also filmed many times, is a vigilante novel, where an assorted dozen of them assasinate a child murderer.