A Prince of Swindlers

by Guy Boothby

Genres: Classics; Mystery; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

One of literature’s first, greatest, and most dastardly gentleman rogues finally joins the Penguin Classics crime list

First published in 1900, A Prince of Swindlers introduces Simon Carne, a gentleman thief predating both E. W. Hornung’s A. J. Raffles and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. The British Viceroy first meets Carne while traveling in India. Charmed, he invites the reclusive hunchbacked scholar to London, little suspecting that his guest is actually an adventurer and a master of disguise. Carne—aided by his loyal butler, Belton—embarks on a crime spree, stealing from London’s richest citizens and then making fools of them by posing as a detective investigating the thefts. Now back in print after over a century, Guy Boothby’s tale promises to delight a new generation of crime fans.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Release date: January 27, 2015

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 192

Sample

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 periodicals of the period, as well as in the nineteenth-century American dime novels and early twentieth-century pulp magazines that featured crime fiction.

While Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay and E. W. Hornung’s Raffles plundered England’s elite, Frederick Irving Anderson’s Infallible Godahl was the only significant American gentleman thief to appear in crime fiction in the years prior to World War I. Perhaps an American audience was less inclined to accept a morally ambivalent American protagonist in crime fiction, while simultaneously having no difficulty in reading the adventures of British and French gentleman thieves. No doubt the American readership perceived the older European culture as being more decadent, and subsequently was inclined to accept their rogues and thieves as heroes. Anderson’s Infallible Godahl was featured in just six stories published in the so-called slick periodical The Saturday Evening Post from 1913 to 1914, which were subsequently collected in a single volume entitled The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl in 1914. Though relatively unknown to today’s reader, during his lifetime, American-born Frederick Irving Anderson (1877–1947) was one of the more popular authors of thriller and detective fiction to appear in The Saturday Evening Post. He wrote extensively and successfully for the slick magazine markets, publishing more than fifty stories in The Saturday Evening Post alone. He published only three volumes of crime fiction: The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (1914), The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925), and The Book of Murder (1930), which the mystery writing team of “Ellery Queen” ranked as number 82 in their “Queen’s Quorum” of the 125 most important detective/crime fiction books published.

Anderson’s importance as a contributor to crime fiction that featured the gentleman thief can be found in the complexity and sophistication of his plotting of the Godahl stories. The author’s touch is often subtle and complex in the series, and Godahl’s exploits may require several readings to appreciate fully the author’s self-critique of literary creation, and the broader critique of American social class, wealth, and vanity that frequently parallels the depiction of Godahl’s amazing thefts. Anderson’s work is distinguished by its descriptive evocation of Manhattan and its surrounding environs and by its leisurely narrative pacing, but perhaps what makes his body of crime fiction most intriguing is his attraction to, and celebration of, the gentleman (and gentlewoman) thief. Two of his three published books of fiction featured criminal protagonists, and he was one of the first crime fiction writers to create a female master thief with his charismatic rogue, Sophie Lang. Occasionally, Anderson would have his series detective heroes, Oliver Armiston and Deputy Parr, pursue his two series villains, Godahl and Sophie Lang. But, unlike Conan Doyle having his Sherlock Holmes ultimately triumph over Professor Moriarty, Anderson’s heroes never seem to defeat their more clever villains.

Nestled securely among these notorious gentleman and gentlewoman thief protagonists is the equally infamous Simon Carne, the charming villain protagonist of Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers (1900), originally serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897. Boothby was quite adept at employing villains in his fiction, and featured several in his body of work. His most famous villain protagonist was Dr. Nikola, a nefarious genius and master of the occult who appeared in a series of novels, including A Bid for Fortune: or, Dr. Nikola’s Vendetta (1895), Dr. Nikola (also titled Dr. Nikola Returns, 1896), The Lust of Hate (1898), Dr. Nikola’s Experiment (1899), and “Farewell, Nikola” (1901). Nikola is a visually striking and aesthetically sophisticated character, and is an important model for the cultured literary gentleman thief that soon followed. Perhaps an even more fascinating Boothby villain is Pharos, the Egyptian, featured in the 1899 novel of the same title. Pharos is, in actuality, the mummy Ptahmes, possessing magical attributes that he puts to appropriately evil use in his wicked schemes. As a prototype, Pharos, the Egyptian anticipates the classic Universal Studios 1932 horror film The Mummy, directed by Karl Freund and starring the iconic Boris Karloff (resurrected in 1999 starring Brendan Fraser). Despite this impressive cabinet of entertaining creations, Simon Carne remains Boothby’s most ingenious villain, and A Prince of Swindlers remains one of Boothby’s finest books.

As biographer Paul Depasquale notes, Guy Boothby “remains perhaps South Australia’s most neglected successful author, except by antiquarians and book collectors.” On October 13, 1867, in Adelaide, South Australia, Guy Newell Boothby was born to a father who served in the South Australian Legislative Assembly. After moving to England with his mother, he was educated at the Priory School in Salisbury and at Lord Weymouth’s Grammar School in Warminster, Wiltshire (some sources also cite Christ’s Hospital in London as another school Boothby attended). At sixteen, he returned to Australia, and with his father’s and grandfather’s political connections, he was hired as the private secretary to the mayor of Adelaide, Lewis Cohen, in 1890. Boothby once wrote plays, including comic operas, but although a few of these plays were produced, he failed to discover the type of success in the theater that he would eventually find as a highly prolific and popular writer of melodramatic fiction. Around 1891, Boothby traveled extensively with his friend Longley Taylor around the Pacific Islands and in the Far East.

In 1892, Boothby voyaged across the Pacific Islands region, and journeyed from Northern Queensland to Adelaide. He used these experiences in his first book, entitled On the Wallaby; or, Through the East and Across Australia, published in 1894. The following year, he married Rose Alice Bristowe. Also in 1895, Boothby published A Lost Endeavour and The Marriage of Esther: A Torres Straits Sketch. Besides the five Nikola adventures, Guy Boothby eventually penned more than fifty books during his brief lifetime, many of them—including The Beautiful White Devil (1897), Love Made Manifest (1899), and The Curse of the Snake (1902)—sensational potboilers intending to do nothing more than satisfy a voracious readership. Of his writing habits, an obituary published in the Advertiser noted:

In answer to a request made by an interviewer of the London Weekly Sun, some time ago, Mr. Guy Boothby explained his methods of work. They were somewhat paralyzing. He got up at a fearful hour in the early dawn, when Londoners were just going to bed. His two secretaries had to be there at 5:30 a.m. He talked his novels into a phonograph, and when he had talked enough his secretaries transcribed it direct on the typewriter. (“Obituaries Australia”)

Boothby’s last book, In the Power of the Sultan, was published in 1908, three years after his death. His literary efforts brought him financial success (his earnings perhaps as high as twenty thousand pounds a year), which allowed him a well-to-do gentleman’s life that involved horse breeding and book collecting. On February 26, 1905, Boothby died from influenza at the tragically young age of thirty-seven, survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son. He was buried at Bournemouth, England.

A New York Times obituary covering Guy Boothby’s death printed this backhanded compliment about the author:

Books from his pen appeared with bewildering frequency, and among English authors it has been a standing joke that he invented a machine by which he turned them out. But, what is more to the purpose, they all sold well. The critics sneered and superior persons jeered, but the public read Boothby’s novels eagerly and were always ready for more.

Though the majority of Boothby’s literary efforts are forgotten by modern readers, his stories rank among the best popular crime fiction published during the turn of the twentieth century. A Prince of Swindlers should certainly be included in this list.

In the Preface to A Prince of Swindlers, Boothby establishes a clever framing device for the interconnected short stories that follow. The narrator, the Earl of Amberley, offers an embarrassed explanation to the reader, who learns that Simon Carne’s spectacular series of thefts has already occurred, and that the manuscript of these adventures is intended to provide a cathartic redemption for the Earl of Amberley and his guilt at being an unwitting part of Carne’s plans. The principal manuscript of A Prince of Swindlers is written by Carne himself, and is presented to Amberley as a mocking gift intended both to celebrate Carne’s criminal accomplishments and humiliate Amberley for his gullibility. Though structured by the framing device of Amberley’s reception, handling, and commentary about Simon Carne’s manuscript, A Prince of Swindlers functions as a type of elaborate moral confession of both the triumphant con artist and the conned fool.

A Prince of Swindlers also serves as a subversive critique of the class-based economic system in late-Victorian Britain. The “brilliant season” in London that is described as the backdrop to Simon Carne’s criminal exploits, the reader is told, acts as an attraction to the wealthy (and those who prey on the wealthy). The implication behind Carne’s various successful schemes against London’s social elite is that the privileged are a group of blithering idiots undeserving of their great wealth and privilege, because although a supposedly superior social class they are, in fact, easily duped by false appearances and insincere grace. Great wealth functions in these stories as a burden rather than as a privilege, something that can make you both a fool and a victim. By implication, in Carne’s ridiculing narrative, wealth and social standing are something to be wary of; however, no practical alternative to the pursuit of wealth and social standing is ever given. Boothby’s criticism is not of wealth itself, but of the incompetent upper-crust fools who mismanage the financial responsibilities of their elevated position in society.

Though Carne follows his own personal code of honor (he does not steal from Amberley, his sponsor in London society), he is nevertheless guilty of the sin of pride, as exemplified by the boastful tone in which he celebrates his deeds. The physical existence of his confessional manuscript detailing his criminal exploits is emblematic of his tremendous ego and prideful nature. One would imagine that a “professional” thief would want to attract as little attention as possible to his crimes, but for Simon Carne the success of his various schemes is apparently only part of his ambitions. He also wants to embarrass the British high society that could so easily be taken in by his acting, a performance that underscores the duality of his nature as a person and as a gentleman thief.

This duality is best represented by his physical appearance. Simon Carne masks his inward moral deformity with his hunchback disguise. By implication, then, Carne’s false outward appearance of fortune and social position masks his actual, inner wicked nature. Beauty and deformity—both physical and spiritual—are transposed with each other, and ultimately become confusing to the hapless victims of Carne’s schemes. Boothby, however, also employs a wonderful sense of humor with this character, as illustrated in the ironic description of Carne’s portrait in the book’s Preface, which offers an amusingly blunt clue about Carne’s pretend physical deformity that the obtuse Earl of Amberley fails to recognize. Carne is thus having a wonderful joke on the social elite that he swindles, a knowing wink and tip of the hat that establishes a sympathetic relationship with the working-class readers of his adventures who perhaps also would like to perceive their social superiors as silly fools and buffoons.

The gentleman thief is ultimately an undermining representation of the perceived moral and social virtues of the English public (that is, private) school system, which was (and is) upper-class biased, maintaining a set of ethical standards above and apart from the working classes. Stories featuring the gentleman thief thus are the inverted mirror and moral opposite of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Both Holmes and Simon Carne appeared in similar periodicals in England and America. Both were successful “amateurs” in their respective professions. But what makes this comparison between Holmes and Simon Carne even more interesting is the fact that they each represent entirely different moral stances at the turn of the twentieth century: the light and the dark, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the condoned and the outlawed that were emblematic of a Victorian worldview that was depicted in the similar literary examination of the duality of human nature found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

But lest the reader begin to take Boothby’s commentary on London’s comical social elites too seriously, with his framing-device Preface the author also layers another structuring element on Carne’s sneering confessions: that of the traditional fairy tale. Note, for example, the use of the exotic, fantasy-like setting of the Indian island mansion where Amberley first encounters Simon Carne. Boothby amuses his reader at the start of the narrative by lightening the grand deus ex machina entrance of Carne in the book with what is conceivably a playful nudge at the British Empire and its governing relationship with its perceived “exotic” Indian subjects; Boothby, the well-traveled writer, brings an outsider’s perspective to the British sense of imperialist superiority. This nudge and wink at the reader cautions us not to take the following events in Carne’s narrative with too much gravity. The negative consequences of Carne’s felonious behavior are not intended to be taken at face value. Rather, his criminal enterprises are designed to serve as an elaborate metaphor that parallels the “happy Prince” and “enchanted castle” (language employed by Boothby to describe the setting of Carne’s Indian residence in the Preface) of the children’s fairy tale, where important life lessons are taught, but only as a footnote to simple escapist pleasure. A fairy-tale beginning to Simon Carne’s upcoming escapades softens the otherwise cruel mockery of London’s privileged late-Victorian society. The book’s Introduction, set in Calcutta and relating Simon Carne’s conspiracy with the mysteriously sinister Trincomalee Liz, outlines for the reader his intended scheme to pilfer the “untold wealth” in London, and also reinforces this fairy-tale subtext, reminding the reader that cruel social criticism in the popular escapist fiction of the time could only rock the boat of convention so far without capsizing it.

In the most frequently anthologized Simon Carne story, “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds” (first published in the February 1897 issue of Pearson’s Magazine), Boothby ably demonstrates a talent for literary parody. The author not only caricatures the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that were so popular with readers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Britain and America; he satirizes the very form of the amateur detective story itself. In London, Carne adopts the elaborate disguise of the “famous private detective” Klimo, who “has won for himself the right to be considered as great as Lecocq, or even the late lamented Sherlock Holmes.” With Klimo, Boothby is obviously responding to the absurdity of the amateur consulting detective, a character who appears uninterested in money, and who works outside of the police, to whom he is vastly superior. Boothby punctuates his parody by stating that Klimo “made his profession pay him well. . . .” Boothby was well aware that no such individual could actually exist in the real world, and that it required a substantial willing suspension of disbelief for the reader to accept a Sherlock Holmes at face value. By having Simon Carne employ his Klimo disguise, Boothby is playfully delineating the unequal contest of intellect and skill between his perceptions of both the amateur consulting detective and the gentleman thief.

The remaining adventures in A Prince of Swindlers are equally entertaining. Like all good authors of popular fiction, Boothby’s writing style is compelling. The plotting moves along at a brisk pace. The reader is enticed to discover what Simon Carne’s latest spectacular caper will be, every one representing a level of danger that not only threatens to bring Carne to justice, but also (and even more humiliating for a late-Victorian British audience) to expose Carne for a fraud and a cad. Yet Carne has ever the steady hand during his daring exploits, being a master of disguise and trickery, as well as an expert on human nature. High society serves as both his access to wealth and his masquerade. He plans his schemes with bravado, and he never fails. While sailing away from England following Carne’s daring theft of the Emperor of Westphalia’s expensive gold plate in “An Imperial Finale,” his valet, Belton, states, “. . . I must confess I should like to know what they will say when the truth comes out.” Carne’s reply is both proud and defiant: “I think they’ll say that, all things considered, I have won the right to call myself ‘A Prince of Swindlers.’”

The spirit of Simon Carne and the gentleman thief has resided within our popular culture in fiction, film, and television for generations. Edward D. Hoch’s assortment of Nick Velvet tales—collected in The Thefts of Nick Velvet (1978) and The Velvet Touch (2000)—offers a perfect example of the gentleman thief’s continuing prosperity in popular crime fiction. Noted American crime fiction writer Lawrence Block contributed his own version of the gentleman thief with his Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, which include Burglars Can’t Be Choosers (1977), The Burglar in the Closet (1978), and The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (1979), among others. The Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief (1955) starring Cary Grant as the former cat burglar John Robie (based on the 1952 novel by David Dodge); The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), directed by Norman Jewison and starring Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown (remade in 1999 starring Pierce Brosnan); and the popular television series It Takes a Thief, starring Robert Wagner and broadcast from 1968 to 1970 on ABC: these are but several of many examples that illustrate the continuing influence and charm of the gentleman thief protagonist. The safecracker Frank (played by James Caan) in director Michael Mann’s caper thriller Thief (1981) offers a bleak perspective on the gentleman thief protagonist, while director Blake Edwards’s first Inspector Jacques Clouseau film, The Pink Panther (1963), presents actor David Niven’s Sir Charles Lytton (otherwise known as the notorious thief the Phantom) as a comic figure. A more recent incarnation of the gentleman thief in film is Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney) in director Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001), which was originally released in 1960 starring Frank Sinatra and other members of the famous Hollywood “Rat Pack.” Soderbergh’s remake was commercially successful enough to inspire two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007).

Why do readers and moviegoers continue to thrill at the exploits of the gentleman thief? Perhaps the answer lies in the fundamentally entertaining and impermissible quality of the story that features a villain as the central character, which also may paradoxically reinforce our appreciation for law, order, and the detection and normalization of the aberrant. Maybe we also enjoy reading about the exploits of fictional devils who delight in breaking morally proscribed social taboos. Conceivably it is because we just admire their panache and charisma. We find ourselves charmed by Simon Carne’s suave manner and gentlemanly mannerisms, just as his victims are enchanted. At one point, Lord Amberley says of Carne: “His society was like chloral; the more I took of it the more I wanted.” As Mark Twain jokes: “[Go to] heaven for climate, hell for company!” Similarly, as readers of crime fiction, we may appreciate the world inhabited by Sherlock Holmes, but sometimes we simply can’t resist the company and con of Simon Carne.

Works Cited

“Boothby, Guy Newell (1867–1905).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 7, 1979. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/boothby-guy-n