The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [3]
Some once-popular characters turned out to work better on-screen than on the page. The year 1919 brought Jack Boyle’s sole novel about Boston Blackie, a half-reformed criminal and secret crusader for justice; his decades of fame grew out of ongoing film adaptations. In the mid-1920s, Englishman Bruce Graeme launched a series about Richard Verrell, a masked cracksman nicknamed Blackshirt. A bestselling author, he steals for fun—until a woman discovers his identity and calls him up to make him steal (and solve crimes) on demand. Blackshirt too gained in translation to the screen.
Surprisingly, in this anthology you will find only one story about a female thief. During the gaslight era there were plenty of female detectives. C. L. (Catherine Louisa) Pirkis launched the career of Loveday Brooke in 1894. Three years later George R. Sims introduced Dorcas Dene. Around the turn of the century, the prolific L. T. Meade, in collaboration with Robert Eustace, published several stories about Miss Florence Cusack. Baroness Orczy, creator of the Scarlet Pimpernel, published the collection Lady Molly of Scotland Yard in 1910. Orczy also created the villainess Madame Sara, while Meade gave us the equally dastardly Madame Koluchy. Apparently, in the unwritten rules of the time, women could write about or commit or solve murders, but lesser crimes were left mostly to men. The only female thief in our collection—not counting a collaborator whose identity must remain secret until you stumble upon it as you read—is the brilliant Four Square Jane, who was created by a man, Edgar Wallace. Soon afterward, but a bit beyond the purview of this collection, came Sophie Lang, Fidelity Dove, and their colleagues.
The majority of these stories come from a series about the character. In most cases I have read and reread every entry in the series to determine which one best represents the character and author. A note placing both in context precedes each story, so that you won’t have to flip back and forth between the story and this introduction to fish around for background information. Stories appear in order of publication.
Although this era’s stories make us think of the term gentleman thief, not every malefactor in The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime is an aristocrat (and, of course, the last thief in the book isn’t male). J. Rufus Wallingford raised himself from poverty; Captain Gault commands a ship. Author O. Henry, in particular, portrays the more working-class side of the criminal life.
Part of the fun of these capers lies in the way that they reflect the growing skepticism about official Victorian virtues. Some of our lawbreaking protagonists are explicitly critical of the business and social worlds on which they prey. O. Henry, who was adept at skewering Gilded Age business-speak, once described a meeting of a burglar, a con man, and a financier as a conference of “labor and trade and capital.” In his malapropriate way, O. Henry’s con man Jeff Peters remarks about his partner Andy Tucker that nowhere in the world could you find three people “with brighter ideas about down-treading the proletariat than the firm of Peters, Satan and Tucker, incorporated.” In one story, Peters deliberately sets out to hunt Midas