A Prince of Swindlers - Softcover

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Guy Boothby (1867–1905) was born to a prominent Australian political family. He wrote more than fifty books before his death at age thirty-seven.

Gary Hoppenstand is a professor of English at Michigan State University and wrote the introduction to Penguin Classics edition of An African Millionaire. He lives in East Lansing, Michigan.

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Introduction

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes in the 1893 story “The Final Problem,” the proposed demise of Holmes was perhaps also a symbolic death knell for the amateur detective in popular crime fiction. At that moment, the amateur detective hero was undergoing some substantial formulaic revision and was being split into two different narrative directions.

The first of these narrative directions landed in the gothic supernatural genre, where the amateur detective became the amateur occult detective. The early source of this transformational development began in the work of the Irish-born gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, in his collection of tales In a Glass Darkly (1872), published as the posthumous files of the fictitious occult investigator Dr. Martin Hesselius. Irish author Bram Stoker sculpted Le Fanu’s reflective Dr. Hesselius into a fearless vampire killer in his novel Dracula (1897), which features an occult professor named Abraham Van Helsing, who functions as Stoker’s rational voice in the story by explaining and justifying the supernatural powers of Dracula both to other characters and to the reader. English writer Algernon Blackwood continued this trend in John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), a short story collection containing an assortment of tales that highlight a consulting occult physician as an interconnected framing device for the stories. British-born William Hope Hodgson contributed his own version of the ghost hunter in his collection Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913), thus completing the conversion of Conan Doyle’s pragmatic, hyper-rational amateur detective into the “supernatural sleuth.” This character type continued through the twentieth century in the American pulp fiction magazines to the contemporary writers of urban fantasy, arguably reaching its cultural zenith in the comic mode with the 1980s film franchise Ghostbusters, and remaining popular today in films like The Conjuring.

The second narrative direction resulted in the creation of the gentleman thief protagonist, a culmination of the hero-turned-villain. Indeed, as reader interest heightened through the second half of the nineteenth century for the villain-as-protagonist, the brilliant sleuth who made fools of the professional police was no longer the detective hero, but instead the gentleman thief. While the late-Victorian occult detective was essentially a product of Irish and British writers, the gentleman thief possessed a French readership in addition to a British and American audience. The most important of the French gentleman thief protagonists was Arsène Lupin, penned by the prolific French novelist Maurice Leblanc, while the most famous, or infamous, of these British and American gentleman thief protagonists included Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, Frederick Irving Anderson’s Infallible Godahl, and, of course, Guy Boothby’s Simon Carne.

The origins of the gentleman thief protagonist in popular crime fiction began in a series of interconnected short stories featuring the master crook Colonel Clay, written by author Grant Allen and appearing in The Strand Magazine from June 1896 through May 1897. These stories were later collected in a book entitled An African Millionaire, published in 1897, interestingly the same year that Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared. Canadian-born Grant Allen (1848–1899) began a career as a full-time writer in 1876. Most of his early work was in the sciences, but he eventually turned to writing fiction, and between 1884 and 1899 he wrote prolifically. The only novel (or more correctly, collection of interconnected short stories) Allen wrote that continues to be read today is An African Millionaire. His seminal character, Colonel Clay, in addition to being a gentleman thief, was also a master of disguise (hence his professional sobriquet). He could alter his face and manners at will, fooling both the authorities and his intended target, Sir Charles Vandrift. Sir Charles, the reader quickly learns, is the African millionaire of the book’s title, an obtuse man housing the capitalistic character faults of greed and stupidity, faults that, of course, left him at the mercy of the trickster Colonel Clay. Each short story in the series recounted a new scheme of Clay’s to relieve Vandrift of his great wealth, employing disguise and Vandrift’s greedy ambition to his successful advantage. Colonel Clay was a robber stealing from a “robber baron” figure, in essence stealing from one who steals from others.

British-born Ernest William Hornung (1866–1921), a literary contemporary of Grant Allen’s in England, was a successful and prolific writer of gaslight-era melodrama and thrillers. He began his writing career as a journalist and a poet, and then later became a popular novelist. Though the majority of Hornung’s literary efforts are forgotten today, the adventures of his gentleman thief protagonist, A. J. Raffles, continue to be read (and imitated in a number of pastiches by authors such as Graham Greene, Peter Tremayne, and Barry Perowne). Raffles appeared in three collections of short stories—The Amateur Cracksman (1899), The Black Mask (1901), and A Thief in the Night (1905)—as well as in one novel, Mr. Justice Raffles (1909). During the course of his ten-year career in crime, Raffles evolved from an “amateur” thief, to a professional thief, to a war hero who dies in battle during the Boer War. Hornung intended to kill off Raffles at the conclusion of The Black Mask, but reader demand seemingly compelled Hornung to resurrect his popular gentleman thief in the novel Mr. Justice Raffles, a story set before the Boer War. Raffles is thus similar to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: both characters appeared to be killed by their creators, and then were brought back to life for additional adventures by the influence of their distraught readers when economic pressure was exerted on the authors. However, unlike Raffles, who remained buried the second time around, Sherlock Holmes was revealed not to have perished at the conclusion of the tale “The Final Problem” and—following the interlude of a previous adventure recorded in The Hound of the Baskervilles—reappeared alive and healthy in the story “The Adventure of the Empty House.”

George Orwell saw a certain virtue in Raffles. In his essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Orwell offers a comparison between the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung and the James Hadley Chase novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939). The latter does not compare favorably in Orwell’s view, because it embraces the “sadistic” and “masochistic” elements found in the American pulp magazines of that era, even though Chase was a British author writing for a British audience enduring the London Blitz. Specifically, Orwell objects to the morally equivocal representation of crime in the story, where “being a criminal is only reprehensible in the sense that it does not pay.” The police employ criminal methods in Chase’s novel, Orwell explains, so that there is little moral difference between crook and cop. Orwell states: “This is a new departure for English sensational fiction, in which till recently there has always been a sharp distinction between right and wrong and a general agreement that virtue must triumph in the last chapter.” Indeed, Raffles, along with many of the gentleman crooks and con artists coexisting with Hornung’s creation, decidedly avoided the hearty strain of violence typically found in the British pulp fiction...