A Prince of Swindlers

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

A PRINCE OF SWINDLERS

GUY
BOOTHBY
(
1867
–
1905
) was one of the most successful authors of crime fiction during the turn of the twentieth century. Born in Adelaide, South Australia, to a prominent Australian political family, Boothby wrote more than fifty books in a decade, before passing away at thirty-seven. Along with his stories about gentleman thief Simon Carne, Boothby published one of the earliest mummy horror stories,
Pharos, the Egyptian
(
1899
), as well as a series of novels featuring one of the more nefarious criminal masterminds, Dr. Nikola, in
A Bid for Fortune: or, Dr. Nikola's Vendetta
(
1895
),
Dr. Nikola
(
1896
),
The Lust of Hate
(
1898
),
Dr. Nikola's Experiment
(
1899
), and
“Farewell, Nikola”
(
1901
).

GARY
HOPPENSTAND
is a professor of English at Michigan State University. A recipient of numerous awards from the National Popular Culture Association, he is the former editor of the
Journal of Popular Culture
and recently introduced Grant Allen's
An African Millionaire
for Penguin Classics.

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First published in Great Britain by Ward, Lock & Co.
1900

Published in the United States of America by A. Westbrook Co.
1907

This edition with an introduction by Gary Hoppenstand published in Penguin Books
2015

Introduction copyright ©
2015
by Gary Hoppenstand

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ISBN
978
-
1
-
101
-
61438
-
9

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
1980
s 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.