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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 legendary 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