A Prince of Swindlers (2 page)

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
).