го количества башкирских земель, до неблагонадежности припущенников [Припущенниками называются те, которые за известную ежегодную или единовременную плату, по заключенному догов..
Your mind? --Your mind is water through an April night, A cherry-branch, plume feathery with its white, A lavender as ..
Но меня толкнуло на это не только прежнее сожаление о том, что я не знаю ее тела. Сидя на циновках в одной комнате с Кэса в доме у Коромогава, я заметил, что это сожаление как-то незаметно для меня ослабело...
Grant Allen apparently wrote one of the first books of Rogue tales with his An African Millionaire (1896-1897), which appeared in magazines the same year 1896 as the book publication of Max Pemberton's A Gentleman's Gentleman and the magazine publication of Herbert Keen's The Chronicles Of Elvira House (1896). It is possible that Pemberton's stories appeared in magazines earlier, say in 1895, and might be the earliest of the three. These were not the first tales of clever criminals - one thinks of Israel Zangwill's "Cheating the Gallows" (1893), which has much in common with the later Rogue tales - but they seem to be the first story sequences, and the first works to fully crystallize the form. For that matter, some of the villains in the first six stories in Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1891) have some Rogue like characteristics. Doyle was a friend of Allen's, and the brother-in-law of Raffles creator E.W. Hornung, so he had personal ties to the Rogue writers.
The Rogue Colonel Clay in An African Millionaire is a con man or swindler, unlike such later thieves as Raffles and Jimmie Dale. Another difference: Raffles and Jimmie Dale are the point of view characters in their stories, people whose thoughts and feelings we follow, while Colonel Clay is mainly seen from other people's point of view. He is a far more enigmatic person than these later rogues. The people in the foreground in Allen's tale are Clay's victim, wealthy diamond king Sir Charles Vandrift, and his society wife and opportunistic brother-in-law. All of these characters are mainly seen satirically. They are examples of rich, greedy people at their absolute ugliest. It is hard to think of a more repulsive bunch of human beings, mean, materialistic, social climbing, heartless to the poor, charityless, grasping and duplicitous. It is a portrait of 19th Century Robber Barons at their worst. One of Allen's main motivations in these stories is to offer social commentary, mainly about the worthlessness of such plutocrats. Reading about such unlikable people can be unpleasant.
The tales in An African Millionaire are about swindles, but they are mainly not mystery stories, in the traditional sense. Some of the tales do have Clay pulling off clever stunts whose mechanism is difficult for the reader to guess; these are carefully explained at the ends of the tales. In this sense, the stories do have mystery elements. The mystery is more "how did he do it" rather than "whodunit"; in this, the mystery is a little bit like those in impossible crime stories. The reader does wonder how Clay could have pulled off some of his coups; at first glance they do look impossible. These stories include "The Mexican Seer", "The Tyrolean Castle" and "The Arrest of the Colonel".
The tales mainly have a similar structure, in which a disguised Clay sneaks up on the Vandrift establishment and swindles them. Allen builds up an ostinato quality here, which gets funnier and funnier as the tales progress. He uses a theme and variations approach, in which each new story is a variation on the composite pattern that has gone before. The Vandrifts become quite conscious of these patterns, and often analyze them right in the stories. They often try to compare their current experiences to those of the past stories, critically analyzing them for similarities and differences. Such self-aware, critical analysis of a current plot is an approach also very strongly allied with the mystery genre. One of the notable things about mystery fiction is that both the reader and the characters in the story are not mere passive consumers of the unfolding plot. Instead, the reader and the detective are constantly analyzing the plot, trying to look for its hidden underlying patterns, its links of causality, the plausibility of its sections, its repeated motifs and principles. This is exactly what occurs in the African Millionaire tales, as the Vandrifts try to solve the mystery of each new appearance by Clay. This sort of self-reflexive analysis is especially found in "The Arrest of the Colonel", "The Seldon Gold-Mine" and "The Japanned Dispatch-Box".
While it is not a mystery in the traditional sense, "The Arrest of the Colonel" contains an early depiction in fiction of a private detective. He works for a large detective agency, whose customers tend to be rich men who need help coping with business fraud or theft. This is one of the more ingenious stories in the collection. There is also some good detective work in "The Bertillon Method". This portion of the story is quite science based, and reminds us that Grant Allen began his career as a writer of popular science. "The German Professor" is an early tale about the alleged manufacture of artificial diamonds; later such writers as Jacques Futrelle, Arthur B. Reeve and Ellery Queen would write on this subject.
An African Millionaire shares many plot approaches with Allen's earlier detective story, "The Great Ruby Robbery" (1892). Both tales have a dual perspective, involving both servants and the upper class characters in the same household. A Lady's maid is a key character in both. The scenes in "Ruby" describing the first discovery of the crime, and whether one servant will notify others, recur in a transformed way in "The Bertillon Method". And the discussion immediately following, in which masters try to protect their servants, recur in a much expanded form in the final chapter of An African Millionaire. All of this material is highly comic in tone. There is also social criticism here, in seeing that the servants are often more talented than the members of the upper classes.
Their are other similarities in approach. Suspicion is a key element of both tales. Suspecting whether a character is guilty, and building a case against them, is a key formative element of both stories' plot. "The Great Ruby Robbery" offers at an early date the principle of the Least Likely Suspect. This is explicitly formulated by the police detective in the story.
Both works also involve intervention by the criminal into a process at an unexpected stage as a way of building a mystery puzzle plot. The mystery effects in "The Tyrolean Castle" and "The Arrest of the Colonel" both depend on this. It is hard to discuss this in depth without giving away the details of these mysteries.
Gordon Browne's illustrations for An African Millionaire and Miss Cayley's Adventures are delightful. When these two story sequences were reprinted from The Strand Magazine in book form, Browne's illustrations were reprinted along with them. This means that Allen's books are among the few adult mystery stories to be profusely illustrated in their book form. Not all of Browne's illustrations survived the transition from magazine to book: in the Strand, each chapter title has an illustration going along with it, and these were unfortunately not reprinted.
Detective Stories by Allen
Allen also wrote some detective fiction. Two of his stories are especially notable for their exuberant, upbeat heroes. They are among the more appealing characters in Victorian detective fiction. Both of the characters speak their minds. Both are complete non-conformists, who are full of New Ideas and the spirit of progress. Both are also kind hearted, friendly people, with a knack of getting along with just about anybody and everybody. "The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" (1898) stars Lois Cayley, a penniless young college educated woman who plans to see the world and have adventures, while "The Great Ruby Robbery" (1892) stars the impoverished young Irish parliamentarian Sir Justin O'Byrne. Sidney Paget's illustrations to this tale also have considerable charm. Lois Cayley reminds one of Agatha Christie's young women who are off seeking adventure, like Tuppence and the heroine of They Came to Baghdad (1951). Allen's mystery plots tend to be fairly simple. They tend to derive from the Rogue tradition, and show crooks trying to carry out some scheme that will be foiled by the detective hero.
Allen clearly likes the "Old Lady" of the title, too, despite her cantankerousness. The Old Lady's comments on train travel form a detailed, even relentless, portrait of international travel of the time. Every detail of a trip from England to Germany is covered, with extreme artistic economy. They remind one of the similar progress of "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" (1897), Allen's alarming science fiction account of the wiping out of London. The catastrophe in this tale spreads with ferocious regularity from one location to the next. Allen's story has an apocalyptic quality than makes most contemporary disaster films look like mush.
"The Adventure of the Cantankerous Old Lady" is the first of twelve adventures of Lois Cayley. The tales form a story sequence, with each story building on characters and plot developments that have been introduced in previous ones. Most of the stories are not detective tales, in any sense of the word. Some are romances, some social comedies, other adventure tales. I especially liked Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book: "The Adventure of the Inquisitive American", "The Adventure of the Amateur Commission Agent", "The Adventure of the Impromptu Mountaineer". These stories are basically light hearted comic, adventure tales, with Lois as their heroine. She gets to perform all the heroic feats usually associated with men. Both their New Woman, feminist theme, and their comic tone anticipate the Tish stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
Eventually, this story sequence turns into something of a novel. The last stories in the book all deal with one common mystery case, whose unraveling carries over from story to story. The individual tales become episodes in the working out of this mystery. I cannot think of any other Victorian or Edwardian sequences that work this way - most of them have a self contained mystery in each short. Each story does have its own subject matter - one deals with a courtroom drama, another with a suspenseful chase - and its own tone. The whole thing produces a mosaic effect. This mosaic style of construction anticipates Clifford Hicks' children's mystery novel, Alvin's Secret Code (1963), which is also put together as one novel made up of a series of very disparate short stories, each with its own tone and style.
Because of its unity of plot, readers should probably read all of Miss Cayley's Adventures, and in order, to get the book's full effect. This does not mean all chapters are equally good, far from it, and I name my favorite stories from it on the recommended list above. The India set "The Adventure of the Magnificent Maharajah" contains a memorable attack on racism, one that anticipates E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1912 - 1924).
Тем временем:
... The country was then experiencing what he would later call "a
sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards
our modern life of machines." There were still people in Clyde who
remembered the frontier, and like America itself, the town lived by a
mixture of diluted Calvinism and a strong belief in "progress," Young
Sherwood, known as "Jobby"—the boy always ready to work—showed the kind of
entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a
"go-getter," And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago in his early twenties,
he worked in an advertising agency where he proved adept at turning out
copy. "I create nothing, I boost, I boost," he said about himself, even as,
on the side, he was trying to write short stories.
In 1904 Anderson married and three years later moved to Elyria, a town
forty miles west of Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold paint.
"I was going to be a rich man.... Next year a bigger house; and after that,
presumably, a country estate." Later he would say about his years in Elyria,
"I was a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one." Something drove
him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—a need for
self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?— that
would become a recurrent motif in his fiction.
And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in Anderson's life.
Plainly put, he suffered a nervous breakdown, though in his memoirs he would
elevate this into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the sterility
of commerce and turned to the rewards of literature. Nor was this, I
believe, merely a deception on Anderson's part, since the breakdown painful
as it surely was, did help precipitate a basic change in his life. At the
age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of
the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since
come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance...
