GUY BOOTHBY

Guy Boothby’s character Simon Carne was the first memorable “gentleman thief,” a title for which Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay was not born in the right circumstances to qualify. Carne is well bred, independently wealthy, and on equal footing with aristocrats and international diplomats. His peers fall prey to his charm, for he is both con artist and burglar—as well as, of course, a master of disguise. Carne might have dined with other such characters in this volume, including Arnold Bennett’s millionaire Cecil Thorold, but he would never have crossed paths with, say, O. Henry’s rustic con men.

Like Grant Allen, Guy Newell Boothby immigrated from the colonies to make his mark in England. The grandson of a judge and the son of an assemblyman, he was born in Adelaide, on Australia’s southern coast. One of his earliest jobs was serving as secretary to the mayor of the city. In 1890, while in his early twenties, he joined with musician Cecil James Sharp, who was later renowned as a music folklorist, and wrote the libretto for a comic opera. He also performed opera himself. Over the next few years he traveled across the island continent with his brother, including a journey from Cooktown, on the northeast coast, back down to Adelaide, and in 1894 published an account of the trips in his first book, On the Wallaby. Travel remained a favorite preoccupation.

Following the success of his first novel at about the same time, he moved to London and devoted himself to writing. Between 1895 and 1901 he published five shamelessly melodramatic novels about Dr. Nikola, a sinister criminal mastermind in the Professor Moriarty mode, spiced with a dash of Fu Manchu. Boothby died of pneumonia at the young age of thirty-seven, leaving behind a wife and three children. During his brief life, he wrote more than fifty books.

The first Simon Carne story, “The Duchess of Wiltshire’s Diamonds,” appeared in the February 1897 issue of Pearson’s Magazine, under the series title “A Prince of Swindlers,” which the next year also became the title of the collected adventures.