The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [5]
Nick Rance, “The Immorally Rich and the Richly Immoral: Raffles and the Plutocracy,” in Twentieth Century Suspense (London: Macmillan, 1990).
Peter Rowland, Raffles and His Creator (London: Nekta, 1999). About E. W. Hornung, the creator of A. J. Raffles.
Norman St. Barbe Sladen, The Real Le Queux (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1938). About William Le Queux, the creator of Count Bindo de Ferraris.
Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler, Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and Their Audience, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1979).
ONLINE INTRODUCTIONS AND READING GUIDES
http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/history-articles.htm
http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/0start.htm#TOC
http://www.mysterylist.com/
GRANT ALLEN
Before his Colonel Clay series was collected in An African Millionaire in 1897, Grant Allen had been publishing books for two decades. More than fifty volumes had already appeared and dozens more would follow; any almost random selection of their titles demonstrates the variety of his interests. Allen’s self-published first book, Physiological Aesthetics, was followed by such equally weighty tomes as The Colour-Sense and The Evolution of the Idea of God. He also wrote popular novels, including A Bride from the Desert, The Type-writer Girl (under a female pseudonym), and For Maimie’s Sake, which boasted the eye-catching subtitle A Tale of Love and Dynamite. Allen was a free-thinker about both religion and marriage. His most notorious novel was the 1895 succès de scandale The Woman Who Did, about a well-educated young woman (pointedly not a guttersnipe) who chose to have a child outside of wedlock.
Perhaps Allen’s diverse interests and impatience with narrow social conventions emerged from his varied upbringing. He was born Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen in Ontario, to an Irish father who had immigrated some years before and a Scottish-French mother from a distinguished Canadian family. At first home-schooled by his father and later assigned a Yale tutor, he attended both English and French universities before becoming a classics major at Oxford. After teaching Greek and Latin in several British schools, he spent three years as a professor of moral and mental philosophy in Jamaica. When the school failed, he settled in England and launched a writing career.
Allen worked so hard that his severe writer’s cramp became a cautionary fable among fellow writers. Colleagues on both sides of his career held him in high esteem. When he was briefly in financial straits, his friend Charles Darwin lent him money, and shortly after Darwin’s death in 1882 Allen wrote a charming biography of his friend for Andrew Lang’s series of “English Worthies.” When Allen himself died with his picaresque detective novel Hilda Wade unfinished, his friend Arthur Conan Doyle completed it for him.
Allen came relatively late to crime fiction, partly because he couldn’t survive by writing only science-related nonfiction, but he was soon adept at the conjuror’s sleight of hand and distracting patter that distinguishes the masters in the field. He also simply wrote a fine sentence—sly, literate, precise. He invented two noteworthy detectives, both women, both (like Colonel Clay) non-stop travelers: Miss Lois Cayley, who is out for adventure, and Hilda Wade, who is out to avenge her father’s murder.
But Allen is remembered now mostly for his ingenious Colonel Clay, the first series character who was a criminal yet appeared in the role of hero rather than villain. Clay dares to rob the same victim again and again during the course of a dozen clever and amusing episodes. In one of them, he impersonates a detective hired to find the notorious Colonel Clay, a plot device that Maurice Leblanc would steal a few years later in a novel about the equally protean