The Penguin Book Of Gaslight Crime
Table of Contents
penguinCLASSICS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
GRANT ALLEN
THE EPISODE OF THE DIAMOND LINKS
GUY BOOTHBY
THE DUCHESS OF WILTSHIRE’S DIAMONDS
E. W. HORNUNG
NINE POINTS OF THE LAW
ROBERT BARR
THE MYSTERY OF THE FIVE HUNDRED DIAMONDS
ARNOLD BENNETT
A COMEDY ON THE GOLD COAST
WILLIAM LE QUEUX
THE STORY OF A SECRET
O. HENRY
THE CHAIR OF PHILANTHROMATHEMATICS
GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER
GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD
FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON
BLIND MAN’S BUFF
WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON
THE DIAMOND SPY
SINCLAIR LEWIS
THE WILLOW WALK
EDGAR WALLACE
FOUR SQUARE JANE
THE STORY OF PENGUIN CLASSICS
penguinCLASSICS
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF GASLIGHT CRIME
MICHAEL SIMS has edited two other collections for Penguin Classics: The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel and Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief. His research for the latter inspired The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. His most recent nonfiction book is Apollo’s Fire: A Journey through the Extraordinary Wonders of an Ordinary Day, which National Public Radio chose as one of the Best Science Books of 2007. He is also the author of Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book; and Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts. His writing has appeared in New Statesman, Gourmet, Orion, the Washington Post, and many other periodicals in the United States and abroad. Learn more at www.michaelsimsbooks.com.
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First published in Penguin Books 2009
Selection, introduction and notes copyright © Michael Sims, 2009 All rights reserved
library of congress CATALOGING in PUBLICATION DATA
The Penguin book of Gaslight crime : con artists, burglars, rogues, and scoundrels from the time of
Sherlock Holmes / edited with an introduction and notes by Michael Sims.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-02912-1
1. Criminals—Fiction. 2. Thieves—Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories, English. 4. Detective
and mystery stories, American. 5. English fiction—19th century. 6. English fiction—20th century.
7. American fiction—19th century. 8. American fiction—20th century. I. Sims, Michael, 1958-
PR1309.C7P46 2009
823’.0872—dc22 2008037363
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Acknowledgments
First I want to thank the anthologists and scholars who helped lure me into this entertaining subset of crime fiction, primarily Ellery Queen and Otto Penzler. Throughout my work on this collection, Otto advised and encouraged. I also especially want to thank anthologist Douglas G. Greene; Roger Johnson, BSI, editor of The Sherlock Holmes Journal in England; Steven Womack, detective novelist and always the best man; and Larry Woods, longtime friend, encyclopedia of mystery fiction, and co-owner (with the charming Saralee) of BookMan/BookWoman in Nashville, where I first discovered some of these authors and characters. For other help, including comments on the text or the story lineup, my thanks to Alan Bostick, Maria Browning, Michael Dirda, Jon Erickson, Casey Gill, Karissa Kilgore, Jane Langton, Michele Slung, and Art Taylor. Thanks to Cesare Muccari and his excellent staff at the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library, especially those indefatigable book detectives, Cindy Dull and Linda Matey. As always, the enterprising crew at Penguin has been superb. My thanks to executive editor Elda Rotor, editorial assistant Lauren Fanelli, publicity director Maureen Donnelly, production editor Jennifer Tait, copy editor Randee Marullo, and publicist Courtney Allison (not to be confused with the private eye). And perpetual gratitude to my wife, Laura Sloan Patterson, the actual trained scholar in the family, who continues to encourage and assist my forays into dusty corners of literary history.
Introduction
Fools and Their Money
“A fool and his money are soon parted,” wrote Thomas Tusser, the sixteenth-century Englishman who also made the astute observation that Christmas comes but once a year. As history and the daily news demonstrate, there are as many species of thieves in the world as there are of foolishness. Not surprisingly, one is often drawn to the other. The book you hold in your hand is populated with clever thieves who make their living by separating fools from their money as efficiently and as often as possible.
When I first became interested in crime fiction’s little sub-genre of caper stories, I went looking for an anthology about these charming miscreants. To my surprise, I searched in vain. No such volume existed. Although the important detectives of the era had been herded into a lineup again and again, the great con artists and burglars had mostly eluded capture. So eventually I suggested to Penguin that together we remedy this oversight. In the present volume, for the first time, the best crooks of the gaslight era are gathered in one place.
Our party includes distinguished guests from outside the field of mystery and detection. Who but the dustiest of scholars remembers that American Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis and British novelist Arnold Bennett wrote an occasional crime story? Most collections of short fiction by O. Henry omit his crime stories, other than the sentimental account of safecracker Jimmy Valentine, and thereby miss the adventures of his itinerant con men in small-town America. William Hope Hodgson, renowned for his supernatural fiction, also wrote a volume of stories about a wily smuggler.
Fans of Victorian and Edwardian detective stories may find their favorite authors working here on the other side of the law. Some of the great thieves of this era were chronicled by people known for their popular crime fighters. For example, the prolific Edgar Wallace, nowadays remembered mostly for his detective J. G. Reeder, provides one of the adventures of a con woman nicknamed Four Square Jane. And of course the le
gendary thieves are here—A. J. Raffles, Colonel Clay, Simon Carne, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, the Infallible Godahl. I omit the suave Arsène Lupin because I have already devoted an entire volume to his adventures: Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (Penguin Books, 2007). I have included a single quirky detective story, the first adventure of Robert Barr’s Frenchman Eugene Valmont, because all the action in it is masterminded by an offstage thief.
This volume gathers stories about the thieves of the gaslight era, so I ought to define both gaslight and thief. The taxonomy of genre fiction is no more precise than that of the larger world of literature. Such terms as gaslight, noir, and hard-boiled—like modernist or surreal—are labels applied after the fact and for diverse reasons. One writer may employ “gaslight era” to represent the heyday of Arthur Conan Doyle and the next writer may use it to approximate Queen Victoria’s entire reign from 1837 to 1901. Technically, the real-life period of gas lighting began in 1807, when London’s Pall Mall first lit up like a fairy-tale kingdom. Edison invented the incandescent bulb—the filament lamp that replaced gas lighting—in 1879, but probably no city finished replacing all its gas lamps until after World War I. Some places (London, Berlin, even Cincinnati) still employ gaslight streetlamps in certain historical neighborhoods.
Therefore I felt comfortable using the term to cover stories that appeared between the mid-1890s and the early 1920s—pretty much the era of Sherlock Holmes. For me gaslight invokes a mood and a voice, both of them romantically luminous with distilled scenes from Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The term implies an urban setting, minus the honking stench of our modern highways; sophisticated characters, but not twenty-first-century cynics. The moment I envision a gaslight lamp, the special-effects department in my brain surrounds it with London fog. Then it cues the rattle of a hansom cab across cobblestones and the whinny of a horse—even though several stories in this volume occur elsewhere in Europe or in the United States, and the later adventures include telephones and motorcars.
In these pages our own daily world fades away: no television, no jet planes, no computers. Escapism? Of course. Can it be that we are nostalgic for an era that none of us experienced? After all, “Nostalgia,” says the Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet, “has nothing to do with memory.” From our perspective we know what awaits these characters around the curve in the twentieth century: airborne bombing, genocide, poison gas, nuclear weapons. The gaslight era is close enough to seem familiar and far enough away to feel safe. Furthermore, the authors wrote with enviable freedom from technical research. “Stories from that era,” observes the crime-fiction collector Larry Woods, “legitimately avoid the mystery/detective structural problems of technology, since almost all the forensic technology known to the modern reader was then in its infancy or had not yet achieved wide practical application.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that, in the (fictional) heyday of criminal masterminds, the pinnacle of crime-fighting technology was Sherlock Holmes’s magnifying glass.
And what about the term thief? These pages are decidedly not populated with the usual suspects. The criminals herein arm themselves with wit rather than with guns. You will run into con games and burglaries, art forgery and diamond smuggling, but you will not stumble over a corpse in the library. I exclude Percival Pollard’s character Lingo Dan, for example, because he is not only a thief but also a murderer. Likewise Fantomas, as well as Madame Sara & Co. The threat of death requires no talent. As the term con artist implies, these tales are about skill and imagination; this is a gathering of rogues, not villains. You need not be afraid to invite them to dinner—but don’t let them wander about the house unattended.
Prior to the earliest story here, which appeared in 1896, there had been burglars who claimed gentlemanly status, but whose quick revolvers disqualified them for the present volume. As far back as 1882, The Silver King, the first popular success by the later renowned playwright Henry Arthur Jones (in collaboration with Henry Herman), featured a gentleman cracksman nicknamed The Spider. He strolls onstage in “faultless evening dress” but is quick to shoot when threatened. Another well-armed burglar, calling himself Jack Sheppard in honor of the eighteenth-century London brigand immortalized in novels and even in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, appeared in a single story in 1895. Not that my ethics on this point are unimpeachable. While mostly eschewing personal violence, some of these characters are not above despicable machinations that put people at risk. In one story, the con man even goes so far as to create an international incident that might have led to war.
Although this anthology emerges from my wide reading in the genre and era, supplemented by advice from scholars in the field, the contents page reflects my own taste. I barred the door against a few once-popular thieves because I found them, well, boring. Authors who lack sophistication themselves have a difficult time convincing us of their characters’ urbanity. Between World War I and World War II, for example, Frank L. Packard recounted the rough-and-tumble adventures of Jimmie Dale (alias the Gray Seal) in a painfully inept style. Consider this sample: “Tight-lipped, Jimmie Dale’s eyes travelled from Burton’s shaking shoulders to the motionless form on the floor.” Mr. Dale’s athletic eyes were not invited to our party. Other characters who did not pass muster include Bertram Atkey’s Smiler Bunn and John Kendrick Bangs’s Mrs. Raffles.
Some once-popular characters turned out to work better on-screen than on the page. The year 1919 brought Jack Boyle’s sole novel about Boston Blackie, a half-reformed criminal and secret crusader for justice; his decades of fame grew out of ongoing film adaptations. In the mid-1920s, Englishman Bruce Graeme launched a series about Richard Verrell, a masked cracksman nicknamed Blackshirt. A bestselling author, he steals for fun—until a woman discovers his identity and calls him up to make him steal (and solve crimes) on demand. Blackshirt too gained in translation to the screen.
Surprisingly, in this anthology you will find only one story about a female thief. During the gaslight era there were plenty of female detectives. C. L. (Catherine Louisa) Pirkis launched the career of Loveday Brooke in 1894. Three years later George R. Sims introduced Dorcas Dene. Around the turn of the century, the prolific L. T. Meade, in collaboration with Robert Eustace, published several stories about Miss Florence Cusack. Baroness Orczy, creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, published the collection Lady Molly of Scotland Yard in 1910. Orczy also created the villainess Madame Sara, while Meade gave us the equally dastardly Madame Koluchy. Apparently, in the unwritten rules of the time, women could write about or commit or solve murders, but lesser crimes were left mostly to men. The only female thief in our collection—not counting a collaborator whose identity must remain secret until you stumble upon it as you read—is the brilliant Four Square Jane, who was created by a man, Edgar Wallace. Soon afterward, but a bit beyond the purview of this collection, came Sophie Lang, Fidelity Dove, and their colleagues.
The majority of these stories come from a series about the character. In most cases I have read and reread every entry in the series to determine which one best represents the character and author. A note placing both in context precedes each story, so that you won’t have to flip back and forth between the story and this introduction to fish around for background information. Stories appear in order of publication.
Although this era’s stories make us think of the term gentleman thief, not every malefactor in The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime is an aristocrat (and, of course, the last thief in the book isn’t male). J. Rufus Wallingford raised himself from poverty; Captain Gault commands a ship. Author O. Henry, in particular, portrays the more working-class side of the criminal life.
Part of the fun of these capers lies in the way that they reflect the growing skepticism about official Victorian virtues. Some of our lawbreaking protagonists are explicitly critical of the business and social worlds on which they prey. O. Henry, who was adept at skewering Gilded Age business-speak, once described a meeting of a burglar, a con man, and a financier
as a conference of “labor and trade and capital.” In his malapropriate way, O. Henry’s con man Jeff Peters remarks about his partner Andy Tucker that nowhere in the world could you find three people “with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated.” In one story, Peters deliberately sets out to hunt Midas americanus, the Pittsburgh millionaire.
Aside from profit, incidentally, motives in these stories include financing true love and balancing the scales of justice. A few of the criminals are actually vexed by a Robin Hood urge to redistribute wealth beyond their own coffers. Four Square Jane robs “people with bloated bank balances.”
“Thieves respect property,” wrote G. K. Chesterton a century ago. “They merely wish the property to become their property that they may the more perfectly respect it.” Chesterton, creator of the popular detective Father Brown, was himself a man of stern morals in his fiction. While trying to convert the criminal Flambeau from his life of thievery, Father Brown assures him that “There is still youth and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. . . . Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped with slime.”
Although one or two of the characters in this book wind up slimed, most would disagree with the priest. They remain quite merry despite—or perhaps because of—years of robbing the rich. Theirs was the first great era in which fictional crime was allowed to pay. Impatient with Victorian ideals of proper behavior, Edwardian-era crime fiction permitted a whole range of outrageous behavior, and along the way it lampooned the crass values of an increasingly materialistic society. “I think a lot of people were happy about those who could get something for nothing,” remarks the noted anthologist and scholar Otto Penzler. “Anarchy was in the air.”