Selecting Material for "The Crime Wave Crests"
Almost certainly, the fourth volume of the Curating Crime Collection will be called The Complete Crimes of Romney Pringle, and it will combine all of Clifford Ashdown's stories featuring career criminal, Romney Pringle. Ashdown's Pringle tales are consistently good fun in that stretching-reality, sometimes-downright-goofy way that draws me and I hope many other readers to this subgenre of mystery fiction.
Almost certainly, the fifth volume will include Miriam Michelson's short novel In the Bishop's Carriage. It's a fast-paced drama of a woman trying very hard to abandon a criminal past for an acting career, and Michelson -- who served as a drama critic along with being a popular fiction writer -- manages to create the feel of a French farce. I like it a lot! But it's not long enough to be the whole book. And finding something else to combine with Michelson is proving to be a bit of a challenge.
Bored People Are Boring People
One contender was Arnold Bennett's The Loot of Cities. This short series of stories features Cecil Thorold, a gentleman thief who's wealthy, sophisticated -- and terribly bored. Thorold combats his ennui by committing crime. Boredom is a potentially interesting motivation, I guess, but it's difficult to sustain readers' interest in such a character. Bored people are boring people, after all. Bennett might have recognized this because, by the fourth and fifth tales in the series, Thorold has become the victim of an elaborate crime rather the perpetrator of one. The sixth and final adventure involves a (very, very) complex scheme to attend a gala theatrical performance, which strikes me as a petty crime at best.
Is there a negative form of "curated"? I de-curated The Loot of the Cities.
John Cameron's illustration of Cecil Thorold being asked about his stolen watch appeared in Windsor Magazine.
A Promising to Saddening Choice
Now, if the name William Le Queux rings a bell, it's probably because of his role in establishing spy fiction. His 1906 novel The Invasion of 1910 depicts a war between England and Germany, and it was published eight years before WWI. The Count's Chauffeur (1907) can be seen as Le Queux's contribution to that wave of crime fiction from which I'm curating my "9-volume anthology" called the Curated Crime Collection.
And The Count's Chauffeur starts out with a lot of promise! While Michelson's In the Bishop's Carriage illustrates a character struggling to escape the crime world, Le Queux spotlights one being seduced into that lifestyle. This trajectory, though, might've been an afterthought. It's not until well toward the end of the book that narrator George Ewart, who has been hired to drive Count Bindo and his partners in crime, muses:
Before my engagement as the Count's chauffeur I think I was just as honest as the average man ever is; but there is an old adage which says that you can't touch pitch without being besmirched, and in my case it was, I suppose, only too true. I had come to regard their ingenious plots and adventures with interest and attention, and marvelled at the extraordinary resource and cunning with which they misled and deceived their victims. ...
Had this composite novel consistently charted Ewart's gradual corruption, it might've been better. Not Macbeth or Lord of the Flies, needless to say. But better.
But no. Instead, Le Queux's chauffeur loses direction and swerves to settings and adventures of a very different type. About halfway through the book, Ewart leaves aiding and abetting behind, becoming -- like Cecil Thorold -- a victim of crime and circumstance. A tale titled "The Red Rooster," I'll admit, is very intriguing in and of itself. Ewart finds himself entangled in a pogrom in Poland, and here, a Jewish character's noble self-sacrifice reveals an awareness of that group's persecution that I haven't seen before in British literature of this period. Sadly, though, it has nothing to do with Ewart's succumbing to a life of crime or with the kind of stuff that makes up the Curated Crime Collection.
Cyrus Cuneo's illustration for The Count's Chauffeur appeared in Cassell's Magazine.
As my disappointment rose in terms of Le Queux giving me a solid piece of crime fiction -- perhaps not entirely his intention -- he seemed to grow inconsistent even within the tales themselves. In "The Lady in a Hurry," we first read Ewart's assessment of a brand new character named Julie Rosier: "There was nothing of the police spy or adventuress about her. On the contrary, she seemed a very charmingly modest young woman." Our narrator contradicts himself a mere two pages later: "At first I had been conscious that there was something unusual about her, and suspected her to be an adventuress." Dude! Le Queux! Why ya gotta do this to me? Were you rushing to meet a deadline?
Again: de-curated!
The Count's Chauffeur certainly has its interests. It is consistent if there were a genre called Buzzing About in a Newfangled Motorcar fiction. Unfortunately, in terms of late-1800s/early-1900s fiction featuring criminals -- i.e., Professor Moriarty's competition -- it's not up to snuff.
So the curation continues...
--Tim
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