A Prince of Swindlers Read Free Page A

knowing wink and tip of the hat that establishes a sympathetic relationship with the working-class readers of his adventures who perhaps also would like to perceive their social superiors as silly fools and buffoons.
    The gentleman thief is ultimately an undermining representation of the perceived moral and social virtues of the English public (that is, private) school system, which was (and is) upper-class biased, maintaining a set of ethical standards above and apart from the working classes. Stories featuring the gentleman thief thus are the inverted mirror and moral opposite of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Both Holmes and Simon Carne appeared in similar periodicals in England and America. Both were successful “amateurs” in their respective professions. But what makes this comparison between Holmes and Simon Carne even more interesting is the fact that they each represent entirely different moral stances at the turn of the twentieth century: the light and the dark, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the condoned and the outlawed that were emblematic of a Victorian worldview that was depicted in the similar literary examination of the duality of human nature found in Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
( 1886 ).
    But lest the reader begin to take Boothby’s commentary on London’s comical social elites too seriously, with his framing-device Preface the author also layers another structuring element on Carne’s sneering confessions: that of the traditional fairy tale. Note, for example, the use of the exotic, fantasy-like setting of the Indian island mansion where Amberley first encounters Simon Carne. Boothby amuses his reader at the start of the narrative by lightening the grand deus ex machina entrance of Carne in the book with what is conceivably a playful nudge at the British Empire and its governing relationship with its perceived “exotic” Indian subjects; Boothby, the well-traveled writer, brings an outsider’s perspective to the British sense of imperialist superiority. This nudge and wink at the reader cautions us not to take the following events in Carne’s narrative with too much gravity. The negative consequences of Carne’s felonious behavior are not intended to be taken at face value. Rather, his criminal enterprises are designed to serve as an elaborate metaphor that parallels the “happy Prince” and “enchanted castle” (language employed by Boothby to describe the setting of Carne’s Indian residence in the Preface) of the children’s fairy tale, where important life lessons are taught, but only as a footnote to simple escapist pleasure. A fairy-tale beginning to Simon Carne’s upcoming escapades softens the otherwise cruel mockery of London’s privileged late-Victorian society. The book’s Introduction, set in Calcutta and relating Simon Carne’s conspiracy with the mysteriously sinister Trincomalee Liz, outlines for the reader his intended scheme to pilfer the “untold wealth” in London, and also reinforces this fairy-tale subtext, reminding the reader that cruel social criticism in the popular escapist fiction of the time could only rock the boat of convention so far without capsizing it.
    In the most frequently anthologized Simon Carne story, “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds” (first published in the February 1897 issue of
Pearson’s Magazine
), Boothby ably demonstrates a talent for literary parody. The author not only caricatures the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that were so popular with readers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Britain and America; he satirizes the very form of the amateur detective story itself. In London, Carne adopts the elaborate disguise of the “famous private detective” Klimo, who “has won for himself the right to be considered as great as Lecocq, or even the late lamented