The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [50]
“Yours truly,
“JOHN P. HAZARD.”
I at once communicated with Rouen and found Eugène Dubois all right. His first words were—
“I swear I did not steal the jewels.”
He had swum ashore, tramped to Rouen, and kept quiet in great fear as to what would happen.
It took Mr. Hazard longer to make his imitation necklace than he supposed, and several years later he took passage with the two necklaces on the ill-fated steamer Burgoyne, and now rests beside them at the bottom of the Atlantic. As the English poet says—
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark, unfathom’d caves of ocean bear.
ARNOLD BENNETT
Arnold Bennett is the first of two prominent mainstream novelists—the other being Sinclair Lewis—whose little-known crime stories enliven this volume. Bennett’s father was a pawnbroker-turned-solicitor who urged young Arnold to follow in his footsteps. After failing an important law exam, however, the future novelist had to settle for clerking for a solicitor in London. In 1893 he joined the popular new magazine Woman and eventually wound up as its editor. Around the turn of the century, halfway through his life, he committed to writing as a career.
Bennett is remembered as the author of fiction about the industrial Midlands of England, the central belt of the island that includes Staffordshire, where he was born, and such busy cities as Birmingham. His many novels include Anna of the Five Towns, Clayhanger, and Riceyman Steps. Virginia Woolf fans recall him from her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which she complains that writers such as Bennett capture the external details of everyday life but overlook the unique and invisible psyche lurking within. Now and then the workaday Mr. Bennett took a holiday from realism and wrote a crime story as a lark.
Like Simon Carne, Cecil Thorold is a gentleman of leisure—elegant, well dressed, at ease among those who would now be called the glitterati. Bored with his predictable moneyed world, he gets involved in crime for amusement and, on occasion, to benefit others. “What was I to do?” asks Thorold in reply to the question of why he turned to crime. “I was rich. I was bored. I had no great attainments. I was interested in life and in the arts, but not desperately, not vitally. . . . So finally I took to these rather original ‘schemes,’ as you call them. They had the advantage of being exciting and sometimes dangerous, and though they were often profitable, they were not too profitable. In short, they amused me and gave me joy.” Clearly, writing the stories had the same effect on Bennett. He keeps the pace lively and the banter amusing.
Each story takes place in a different exotic port. Set in Belgium, “A Comedy on the Gold Coast” first appeared in The Windsor Magazine in July 1905. It was one of six stories under the serial title “The Loot of Cities: The Adventures of a Millionaire in Search of Joy.” A few months later, this became the title of the collected Cecil Thorold stories, with the addition of two more words that indicate Bennett’s lighthearted vacation from his realistic books: A Fantasia.
Incidentally, the Miss Fincastle who appears late in the story makes Thorold blush because she has witnessed his illegal diversions in the past.
A COMEDY ON THE GOLD COAST
It was five o’clock on an afternoon in mid-September, and a couple of American millionaires (they abounded that year, did millionaires) sat chatting together on the wide terrace which separates the entrance to the Kursaal from the promenade. Some yards away, against the balustrade of the terrace, in the natural, unconsidered attitude of one to whom short frocks are a matter of history, certainly, but very recent history, stood a charming and imperious girl; you could see that she was eating chocolate