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Informationen zum Autor Guy Boothby (1867–1905) was born to a prominent Australian political family. He wrote more than fifty books before his death at age thirty-seven. Gary Hoppenstand is a professor of English at Michigan State University and wrote the introduction to Penguin Classics edition of An African Millionaire . He lives in East Lansing! Michigan. Klappentext "First published in Great Britain by Ward! Lock & Co. 1900"--Title page verso. Introduction When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle attempted to kill Sherlock Holmes in the 1893 story “The Final Problem,” the proposed demise of Holmes was perhaps also a symbolic death knell for the amateur detective in popular crime fiction. At that moment, the amateur detective hero was undergoing some substantial formulaic revision and was being split into two different narrative directions. The first of these narrative directions landed in the gothic supernatural genre, where the amateur detective became the amateur occult detective. The early source of this transformational development began in the work of the Irish-born gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, in his collection of tales In a Glass Darkly (1872), published as the posthumous files of the fictitious occult investigator Dr. Martin Hesselius. Irish author Bram Stoker sculpted Le Fanu’s reflective Dr. Hesselius into a fearless vampire killer in his novel Dracula (1897), which features an occult professor named Abraham Van Helsing, who functions as Stoker’s rational voice in the story by explaining and justifying the supernatural powers of Dracula both to other characters and to the reader. English writer Algernon Blackwood continued this trend in John Silence, Physician Extraordinary (1908), a short story collection containing an assortment of tales that highlight a consulting occult physician as an interconnected framing device for the stories. British-born William Hope Hodgson contributed his own version of the ghost hunter in his collection Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (1913), thus completing the conversion of Conan Doyle’s pragmatic, hyper-rational amateur detective into the “supernatural sleuth.” This character type continued through the twentieth century in the American pulp fiction magazines to the contemporary writers of urban fantasy, arguably reaching its cultural zenith in the comic mode with the 1980s film franchise Ghostbusters , and remaining popular today in films like The Conjuring . The second narrative direction resulted in the creation of the gentleman thief protagonist, a culmination of the hero-turned-villain. Indeed, as reader interest heightened through the second half of the nineteenth century for the villain-as-protagonist, the brilliant sleuth who made fools of the professional police was no longer the detective hero, but instead the gentleman thief. While the late-Victorian occult detective was essentially a product of Irish and British writers, the gentleman thief possessed a French readership in addition to a British and American audience. The most important of the French gentleman thief protagonists was Arsène Lupin, penned by the prolific French novelist Maurice Leblanc, while the most famous, or infamous, of these British and American gentleman thief protagonists included Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, Frederick Irving Anderson’s Infallible Godahl, and, of course, Guy Boothby’s Simon Carne. The origins of the gentleman thief protagonist in popular crime fiction began in a series of interconnected short stories featuring the master crook Colonel Clay, written by author Grant Allen and appearing in The Strand Magazine from June 1896 through May 1897. These stories were later collected in a book entitled An African Millionaire , published in 1897, interestingly the same year that Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared. Canadian-...
