O. HENRY

William Sidney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1862 and, less than half a century later, died in New York City, internationally famous under the pen name O. Henry. In between, he lived in Austin and Pittsburgh, traveled the Caribbean and South America with outlaws, spent time in prison for embezzlement, and wrote hundreds of stories. Apparently he proved memorable in every place he visited. Greensboro has an O. Henry Boulevard, Austin an O. Henry Middle School, and New York City will always be nicknamed Bagdad-on-the-Hudson after O. Henry’s phrase.

Since 1919 there has been an annual short-story award named after O. Henry, but probably he couldn’t win it himself. Nowadays we consider surprise endings unnecessarily contrived; they have all but disappeared from serious fiction. But contrivance—outwitting the reader, reeling your own variations on the conjuror’s patter—is of course a staple of crime fiction. Caper stories, in fact, almost demand surprise endings.

O. Henry’s best known story is probably “The Gift of the Magi,” but most of us also remember “The Ransom of Red Chief” and a few others. Undoubtedly his most famous crime story is “A Retrieved Reformation,” the sentimental safecracker tale that begat the 1928 movie Alias Jimmy Valentine. The story that follows is not sentimental. “The Chair of Philanthromathematics” first appeared in McClure’s in 1908 and later the same year in O. Henry’s collection The Gentle Grafter. This volume is required reading for any fan of the genre. The primary con man is Jeff Peters, who tortures language but never hurts human beings, and his colleagues include Buckingham Skinner and Andy Tucker.

A century after O. Henry’s death, none of his work holds up better than these chronicles of itinerant con men. For one thing, the stories don’t taste artificially sweetened, unlike many of his tales of ill-starred lovers and good-hearted bums. And the dialect, which would be harder to find in the real world than a speaker of Sinclair Lewisese, is irresistible. Incidentally, fans of the genre need to know that O. Henry also wrote a couple of the most amusing parodies of Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes” and “The Sleuths,” as well as inventing the great detective Tictocq to parody both real and fictional French tales.