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"Admit it," whispers Julia Roberts into the ear of Clive Owen, in the new caper movie Duplicity. "You don't trust me, either." The rule in this wonderful movie is simple: Doubt everyone, including the director. I think I grinned from the opening sequence through the song that accompanies the closing credits-"Being Bad Never Felt So Good."

I was happily back in the (admittedly weird) place in my mind where I think of great thieves as elegant, attractive, witty, intelligent-and creative. After all, we call them con artists. And talented cat burglars have a certain cachet in my mind, too. Just think of Cary Grant in Hitchcock's lightweight mid-50s movie To Catch a Thief.

I have limited enthusiasm for thrillers, whether book or film; I already find real life suspenseful enough, thanks. Also, like everyone else, I'm not fond of real-life thieves, who are too often of the Bernie Madoff stripe. And I think all political con artists should be placed in the same leaky boat and set adrift. But I can't resist a caper. I love to watch the characters tricking each other and I like knowing that the author or director is tricking me as well. It's the same reason I love magicians. Conjuring and confidence games are both feats of imagination. I expect to be tricked. I paid good money to be tricked and I damn well better be tricked.

Artists like to claim that all paintings are self-portraits-that everything we do reveals more about us than we realize. I know that this is true of my own books about nature and science, but recently I've discovered that even editing an anthology of century-old crime stories can reveal surprising glimpses of autobiography. Unfortunately, I had this revelation not while meditating in the lotus asana but while blathering away during a radio interview.

The syndicated radio series "Viewpoints" was interviewing me about The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime when I heard myself describing the great thieves of the Victorian and Edwardian era as, God help me, "freelancers." Uh-oh. The book is my selection of the best stories about, as the anthology's subtitle says, "Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes." We're talking capers, heists, and scams. There's no wiggle room: these people are crooks. But here I was describing them as basically, oh, golly, just kinda outside the system. Yet I suspect that the police do not regard them as merely freelance entrepreneurs.

Where did I get this idea? Long ago, in January 1968, when I was proudly reporting that I was going on ten years old, ABC premiered a new TV series called It Takes a Thief, starring a suave young Robert Wagner. Inspired by the Hitchcock/Cary Grant burglar movie, and taking the other half of the same old axiom for its title, It Takes a Thief implanted in my impressionable young mind the notion that nonviolent thievery could be a kind of creativity-that locks were merely obstacles to imaginative thinking. (Also it helped me get the idea that romantically involved men and women ought to communicate strictly in repartee.)

Perhaps I ought to mention that not only did I not become a thief; I never even shoplifted candy. I'm afraid to cheat on my income tax. I have never been arrested, although I was stopped once by a cop because I was trying to peel a banana while driving and my car was weaving. Clearly the immoral antiheroes of fiction and film haven't quite dragged me down the path of crime. But then I'm also not interested in encountering vengeful ghosts or talking animals or any of the other characters in my favorite kinds of fiction.

This experience with the Gaslight stories made me realize that I think of creativity in rather broad terms-as herd-free thinking. An artist may take bodies apart on canvas and piece them back together in new arrangements; a scientist may explore how animals changed over time, rather than accepting that they've always been just as they are now since God first snapped his fingers; and a politician may risk his congressional career by voting against a popular war-and then find himself elected president. Apparently since childhood I've had a naive affection for people-apparently even fictional thieves-who live by their wits outside a system or who make the system work for them. No doubt I stole this idea somewhere.

Michael Sims, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, Penguin Classic, Penguin Books