The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [70]
“‘Great!’ says I, feeling fine. ‘I’ll admit you are the doctor this time.’
“‘We’ll be leaving on the morning train,’ says Andy. ‘You’d better get your collars and cuffs and press clippings together.’
“‘Great!’ says I. ‘I’ll be ready. But, Andy,’ says I, ‘I wish I could have met that Professor James Darnley McCorkle before we went. I had a curiosity to know that man.’
“‘That’ll be easy,’ says Andy, turning around to the faro dealer.
“ ‘Jim,’ says Andy, ‘shake hands with Mr. Peters.’ ”
GEORGE RANDOLPH CHESTER
The American writer George Randolph Chester worked as a journalist, dramatist, and scriptwriter, but he was most successful as the author of several books about J. Rufus Wallingford, a con man whose chief talent lies in beating American businessmen at their own game. He can walk into a boardroom in an expensive suit, with nary a dime in his pocket, and walk out as president of an imaginary company. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford became a household name, thanks partly to a popular stage adaptation.
The first series of stories began appearing in the Saturday Evening Post on October 5, 1907, with “Getting Rich Quick,” and appeared in book form in early 1908 as Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. When the series in the Post proved popular, George M. Cohan quickly snapped up the stage rights. In his usual “Cohanizing,” as he called the process himself, he transformed Chester’s tall, stout businessman Wallingford into a diminutive faux patriot. Silent films and then talkies followed. Chester wrote three volumes of sequels between 1910 and 1913. By 1915 a New York Times profile of him was headlined americans like To be FOOLED.
Chester had fun with his book titles, which include Five Thousand an Hour: How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress and The Early Bird: A Business Man’s Love Story. He subtitled the first Wallingford collection A Cheerful Account of the Rise and Fall of an American Business Buccaneer and even added a sly dedication that seems a masterpiece of target marketing: “To the live businessmen of America—those who have been ‘stung’ and those who have yet to undergo that painful experience—this little tale is sympathetically dedicated.”
Chester himself said of Wallingford, “I gave him the power of seeming hospitable, generous and unselfish because the assumption of these virtues is one of the chief weapons of the confidence man.” After all, con is short for “confidence,” and the profession depends upon earning the mark’s trust. In one sequel, the entertaining Young Wallingford, Chester takes us back in time to the master’s beginnings as an ambitious rube, but it doesn’t equal this first volume, in which Wallingford is at his cheerful, despicable best—or worst. The following selection from Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, comprising the book’s first two chapters, demonstrates perfectly how a con artist orchestrates the illusions, lays the trap, and builds toward the goal—a transfer of funds.
GET-RICH-QUICK WALLINGFORD
The mud was black and oily where it spread thinly at the edges of the asphalt, and wherever it touched it left a stain; it was upon the leather of every pedestrian, even the most fastidious, and it bordered with almost laughable conspicuousness the higher marking of yellow clay upon the heavy shoes of David Jasper, where he stood at the curb in front of the big hotel with his young friend, Edward Lamb. Absorbed in “lodge” talk, neither of the oddly assorted cronies cared much for drizzle overhead or mire underfoot; but a splash of black mud in the face must necessarily command some attention. This surprise came suddenly to both from the circumstance of a cab having dashed up just beside them. Their resentment, bubbling hot for a moment, was quickly chilled, however, as the cab door opened and out of it stepped one of those impressive beings