ILLUSTRATION COURTESY UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG VIA GETTY

In a widely beloved scene from late in Season 3 of “The Wire,” Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts) ambushes Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) at night. A fastidious, bow-tied Nation of Islam mercenary and a drug-dealer-targeting stickup artist, respectively, the pair stand at opposite ends of an alleyway. After dropping his bag as instructed, Omar declines to surrender his .45. Instead, he pulls it from his waist, slowly and openly, until he, too, is ready to fire. Mouzone wants to talk, it turns out, and he doesn’t flinch when Omar brandishes his gun. The pair weigh their competing advantages, relishing the ritual of it. (“This range? And this calibre? Even if I miss, I can’t miss,” Omar taunts.) In reputation and repartee, the two are well matched, and it seems they must either die or walk away friends.

The scene deliberately echoes a Western showdown, but that cinematic staple in turn echoes something older: the European duel. There, likewise, combatants paid each other the tribute of meeting as equals, and hoped to perform with panache. Duelling has been practically extinct for more than a century, but the custom’s life was widespread and long—far longer than would seem to make sense, considering the periods in which it thrived. Per V. G. Kiernan’s great study, “The Duel in European History: Honor and the Reign of Aristocracy,” the modern duel arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and reached full maturity in the eighteenth. It was first codified in Italy; France gave it celebrity; the Thirty Years’ War, from 1618 to 1648, sent it to Central and Eastern Europe. Kiernan sees the duel as a reaction against the Age of Reason, an anachronism born of a powerful class shift: as the aristocracy lost hold of a modernizing world, the duel was one way to reassert superiority and bolster internal ranks. No matter if the tradition of the duel was discontinuous and lineage claims were manufacturable: pistols at dawn!

The duel can look quaint from our present vantage point, an age of hollow tips and drone strife. But its toll was real, and the spell it cast, as the fictional clash between Omar and Mouzone illustrates, has not entirely diminished. In “Touché: The Duel in Literature,” John Leigh, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, examines how the duel operates in “Le Cid,” “Clarissa,” “The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.,” and many other titles, including a few from the twentieth century. Some familiar writers actually fought in duels—Pushkin and Lermontov had their lives cut short in them, and Ben Jonson killed an actor in one. With a project like “Touché,” the temptation to linger on anecdotes must be strong, but Leigh stays admirably focussed: he wants to understand why the duel was so pervasive in stories, and to uncover the meanings writers found or placed in it. It soon becomes clear that, in a variety of ways, the practice of duelling was wrapped up in writing about it.

Duelling had relatives and antecedents, including the ordeal by combat, the joust, and the German-university fencing known as Mensur. But the modern duel proper was set apart as private and dispassionate, “a strange blend of anarchic individualism with servile obedience to an unnatural rule,” in Kiernan’s words. Commoners brawled and avenged; the gentry requested “satisfaction” of one another. (That language may not have come naturally to everyone: “I’m not asking him to dinner,” Acres protests in Sheridan’s comedy “The Rivals,” trying to get the tone straight in a letter.) An attitude of witty indifference was idolized, though it’s hard to tell how often it was present and how often it remained aspirational.

It’s not surprising that imaginative writers would be drawn to the duel. It is, as Leigh points out, a natural literary subject, a source of suspense and gravity, with drawn-out ceremony and decisive closure built in. (Kiernan notes that the duel was strongest in places and times where tragic drama was also flourishing; Leigh calls tragedy and duelling “neighboring pursuits.”) Part of the pleasure of deploying the device was to give it new twists. As with mob movies today, even writers who condemned the violence could be seen as having been seduced by it.

And, without literature, there would be much less to go on, historically speaking. Duelling was usually illegal. It was often tolerated, but, still, discretion was an issue—duelling at dawn was popular for reasons of secrecy, and, in the aftermath of an “affair” or “encounter,” principals were known to flee for neighboring countries. One outcome of the silence surrounding the activity was that, for first-timers, the nearest guide to protocol might lie in fiction. “Gentlemen, who remembers how it’s described in Lermontov?” one of the confused parties asks in Chekhov’s “The Duel.” (The character is thinking of “A Hero of Our Time,” Lermontov’s masterful short novel from 1840.) Chekhov’s bracingly comic story—available in a series of duel-themed novellas reprinted by Melville House—is set after the custom had waned, but, according to Leigh, life really did imitate literature in this fashion. Other authorities seem to have agreed: when duelling took off in the American South, Mark Twain blamed Sir Walter Scott.

Duelling may seem ridiculous, brutal, and perplexing in hindsight; it also seemed that way to many of its contemporary observers. Those who inveighed against duelling themselves often appealed to history. The practice was “Gothic,” critics said, “medieval.” They didn’t mean that it was backward: their point was its lack of classical origins. (“Barbarous” was another standard epithet.) Earnest critiques frequently stressed the predicament of loved ones; if the case against duelling could be put into the mouth of a bereaved wife or parent, and so deflect a knee-jerk charge of cowardice against the unmanly author, better still. Meanwhile, satirical portrayals mocked duellists as drunks, incorrigible scrappers, or foreigners. An Irishman might be good as a three-in-one—though one of the best works to make fun of duelling, “The Rivals,” quoted above, was itself written by an Irishman. “Upon my conscience, Mr. Acres, your valour has oozed away with a vengeance!” Sir Lucius O’Trigger says in the 1775 play.

Did all this criticism have any noticeable effect? As Leigh tells it, not really. Whether a writer questioned duellists or duelling in general—i.e., “Don’t hate the player; hate the game”—his words were usually taken as confirmation that he either did not belong to the nobility or was unworthy of it. Principles of manhood and the upper class were at stake; given the times, honor per se. The duel’s basic vision—of disputes bearing down hard on reputation and being finalized through peril of death—maintained a dark and dramatic hold on the imagination.

Although class imperatives propped up many an encounter, a predictable host of other factors contributed—alcohol, idleness, short tempers, and the fashion of carrying weapons at all times. The results were sometimes deliciously trivial. The British writer William Hazlitt tells of a man challenged when, after losing at backgammon, he threw the board out the window and it struck a passerby. During Napoleon’s Polish campaign, in 1807, an Italian officer brought an affair on himself for yelling at an aide-de-camp who had stumbled over his sleeping body. (Both duels were never ultimately realized. In practice, many challenges ended without harm.)