The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [2]
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.
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