Guy Boothby, A Prince of Swindlers (1900/2015)

Penguin has just republished Guy Boothby’s 1900 novel A Prince of Swindlers and it’s a must-read for fans of Victorian crime fiction and E.W. Hornung’s Raffles stories in particular. Boothby’s protagonist is Simon Carne, who we first meet living in India but who then moves to London, where he commits a series of daring and outrageous thefts from members of London’s high society. There’s an element of social critique in this conceit, in the sense that Boothby presents the nobility as profoundly gullible and, to all intents and purposes, defenseless against Carne’s charm, his ability to disguise himself, and his meticulous and detailed planning. At the same time, Boothby makes it difficult for his reader to romanticize Carne as a Robin Hood figure, because he is so clearly out for himself. While the plots lack the elegance and ingenuity of Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes stories, Boothby is clearly indebted to Doyle’s archetypal amateur detective for inspiration, and there is a nice element of self-reflexivity in the fact that one of Carne’s disguises is ‘Klimo,’ an eccentric private detective who investigates one of the crimes that Carne himself has committed! This reprint edition also comes with a very useful introduction from Gary Hoppenstand, who points out, among other things, the continuing appeal of the ‘gentleman thief’ figure in today’s popular culture.