A Prince of Swindlers Read Free Page B

Sherlock Holmes.” With Klimo, Boothby is obviously responding to the absurdity of the amateur consulting detective, a character who appears uninterested in money, and who works outside of the police, to whom he is vastly superior. Boothby punctuates his parody by stating that Klimo “made his profession pay him well. . . .” Boothby was well aware that no such individual could actually exist in the real world, and that it required a substantial willing suspension of disbelief for the reader to accept a Sherlock Holmes at face value. By having Simon Carne employ his Klimo disguise, Boothby is playfully delineating the unequal contest of intellect and skill between his perceptions of both the amateur consulting detective and the gentleman thief.
    The remaining adventures in
A Prince of Swindlers
are equally entertaining. Like all good authors of popular fiction, Boothby’s writing style is compelling. The plotting moves along at a brisk pace. The reader is enticed to discover what Simon Carne’s latest spectacular caper will be, every one representing a level of danger that not only threatens to bring Carne to justice, but also (and even more humiliating for a late-Victorian British audience) to expose Carne for a fraud and a cad. Yet Carne has ever the steady hand during his daring exploits, being a master of disguise and trickery, as well as an expert on human nature. High society serves as both his access to wealth and his masquerade. He plans his schemes with bravado, and he never fails. While sailing away from England following Carne’s daring theft of the Emperor of Westphalia’s expensive gold plate in “An Imperial Finale,” his valet, Belton, states, “. . . I must confess I should like to know what they will say when the truth comes out.” Carne’s reply is both proud and defiant: “I think they’ll say that, all things considered, I have won the right to call myself ‘A Prince of Swindlers.’”
    The spirit of Simon Carne and the gentleman thief has resided within our popular culture in fiction, film, and television for generations. Edward D. Hoch’s assortment of Nick Velvet tales—collected in
The Thefts of Nick Velvet
( 1978 ) and
The Velvet Touch
( 2000 )—offers a perfect example of the gentleman thief’s continuing prosperity in popular crime fiction.
Noted American crime fiction writer Lawrence Block contributed his own version of the gentleman thief with his Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, which include
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers
( 1977 ),
The Burglar in the Closet
( 1978 ), and
The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling
( 1979 ), among others. The Alfred Hitchcock film
To Catch a Thief
( 1955 ) starring Cary Grant as the former cat burglar John Robie (based on the 1952 novel by David Dodge);
The Thomas Crown Affair
( 1968 ), directed by Norman Jewison and starring Steve McQueen as Thomas Crown (remade in 1999 starring Pierce Brosnan); and the popular television series
It Takes a Thief
, starring Robert Wagner and broadcast from 1968 to 1970 on ABC: these are but several of many examples that illustrate the continuing influence and charm of the gentleman thief protagonist. The safecracker Frank (played by James Caan) in director Michael Mann’s caper thriller
Thief
( 1981 ) offers a bleak perspective on the gentleman thief protagonist, while director Blake Edwards’s first Inspector Jacques Clouseau film,
The Pink Panther
( 1963 ), presents actor David Niven’s Sir Charles Lytton (otherwise known as the notorious thief the Phantom) as a comic figure. A more recent incarnation of the gentleman thief in film is Danny Ocean (played by George Clooney) in director Steven Soderbergh’s
Ocean’s Eleven
( 2001 ), which was originally released in 1960 starring Frank Sinatra and other members of the famous Hollywood “Rat Pack.” Soderbergh’s remake was commercially successful enough to inspire