The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [4]
Aside from profit, incidentally, motives in these stories include financing true love and balancing the scales of justice. A few of the criminals are actually vexed by a Robin Hood urge to redistribute wealth beyond their own coffers. Four Square Jane robs “people with bloated bank balances.”
“Thieves respect property,” wrote G. K. Chesterton a century ago. “They merely wish the property to become their property that they may the more perfectly respect it.” Chesterton, creator of the popular detective Father Brown, was himself a man of stern morals in his fiction. While trying to convert the criminal Flambeau from his life of thievery, Father Brown assures him that “There is still youth and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. . . . Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped with slime.”
Although one or two of the characters in this book wind up slimed, most would disagree with the priest. They remain quite merry despite—or perhaps because of—years of robbing the rich. Theirs was the first great era in which fictional crime was allowed to pay. Impatient with Victorian ideals of proper behavior, Edwardian-era crime fiction permitted a whole range of outrageous behavior, and along the way it lampooned the crass values of an increasingly materialistic society. “I think a lot of people were happy about those who could get something for nothing,” remarks the noted anthologist and scholar Otto Penzler. “Anarchy was in the air.”
In crime-fiction circles, this kind of anarchy led to the period of gleeful irreverence chronicled in this book. “His conscience was sufficiently elastic to give him no trouble,” writes Guy Boothby of aristocrat Simon Carne. “To him it was scarcely a robbery he was planning, but an artistic trial of skill, in which he pitted his wits and cunning against the forces of society in general.” Not that every con attempted meets with success. One story (and of course I’m not going to tell you which) fails spectacularly; the nature of its failure becomes the point of the story.
But mostly these authors and their characters are having fun: burgling London and Paris, conning New York and Ostend, laughing all the way to the bank—not that they would ever trust a bank. I had always intended The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime to read like a holiday jaunt into the past. As I assembled the final manuscript, I was pleased to find that the first words in the first story are “Let us take a trip.”
—michael sims
Suggestions for Further Reading
Several histories of detective stories include small amounts of useful information about gaslight thief tales, but the sources below focus on the authors and topics particularly relevant to The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. The list features books available through libraries, omitting articles of narrow focus that appear in specialist journals. More in-depth sources can be found cited within the books listed below or in source guides online.
William Vivian Butler, The Durable Desperadoes: A Critical Study of Some Enduring Heroes (London: Macmillan, 1973).
Frank Wadleigh Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907).
Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir (London: Grant Richards, 1900). About the creator of Colonel Clay.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, various volumes, and the numerous sources listed therein.
Richard Lancelyn Green, introduction and notes to Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (London: Penguin, 2003), by E. W. Hornung.
Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, rev. ed. (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984).
Margaret Lane, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (London: Heinemann, 1938). About the creator of Four Square Jane.
Gerald Langford, Alias O. Henry: A Biography of William Sidney Porter (London: Macmillan, 1957). About the creator of Jeff Peters.
Richard Lingeman, Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (New York: Random House, 2002).
George Orwell, “Raffles