Barry H. Wiley's Blog: Plotting the Impossible
January 2, 2017
Time and the Thought Reader
The seventh story in my Stuart C. Cumberland series of mysteries, “Time and the Thought Reader”, will appear in the February 4 issue of Kings River Life Magazine (www.kingsriverlife.com). It is a different take on the time travel story in which the entire story changes completely on one word, spoken by H. G. Wells, who else. Using an historical personage as protagonist can create some plot limitations, but fortunately thought readers, as the Amazing Kreskin once told me, tend to become involved in bizarre situations. I have, perhaps, pushed that comment to its limits. I am planning a second collection of Cumberland stories, tentatively called Travels of a Thought Reader, loosely planned for this Summer. A Cumberland novel is also in-progress.
I have two other novels in-progress that are now taking all the time available. One, The Man Who Loved Joan of Arc, set in 1988, has drawn me back into the depths of my earlier research into the French Resistance and the French Gestapo. I have stood on the steps at 93 rue Lauriston in Paris, the headquarters of the French Gestapo, which numbered at the time of D-Day, 32,000 French men and women actively supporting the Nazi occupiers. Vichy was another story. The memory of 93 is still very much alive in France even in the 21st century, as occupants of 93 recently requested their address be changed to 91a, to help erase the brutal memories of what happened in the building during the Occupation, particularly in the cellars. The request was denied saying it would betray the memories of those who had suffered there. The building is currently empty. Completion of the first draft of Joan should be February, then a rewrite, then off to the agents and see what happens.
I have two other novels in-progress that are now taking all the time available. One, The Man Who Loved Joan of Arc, set in 1988, has drawn me back into the depths of my earlier research into the French Resistance and the French Gestapo. I have stood on the steps at 93 rue Lauriston in Paris, the headquarters of the French Gestapo, which numbered at the time of D-Day, 32,000 French men and women actively supporting the Nazi occupiers. Vichy was another story. The memory of 93 is still very much alive in France even in the 21st century, as occupants of 93 recently requested their address be changed to 91a, to help erase the brutal memories of what happened in the building during the Occupation, particularly in the cellars. The request was denied saying it would betray the memories of those who had suffered there. The building is currently empty. Completion of the first draft of Joan should be February, then a rewrite, then off to the agents and see what happens.
November 7, 2016
Cheiro, Master of the Tell Tale Hand
Cheiro
His Tumultuous Career
as the Greatest Occultist of the Century
Now on Amazon [ASIN B01MSFNWZ2] in pre-release, Master of the Tell Tale Hand is the first biography (fully illustrated) of Cheiro, the palmist, who came to so dominate the occult world of Europe and America in the 1890’s and early 20th century that his name became synonymous with psychic divination techniques of all types. This is not a work on palmistry, as even now, 81 years after the publication of his last book, all of Cheiro’s books from 1894 to 1935, including his one novel and a volume of poetry, are still in print. It is rather the story Cheiro’s tumultuous career from out of work Irish actor to the absolute pinnacle of Parisian society a celebrated member of the wealthy elite, to be found lying drunk and dying on a street corner in Hollywood.
But it wasn’t Cheiro who first raised palmistry from decades of indifference, even contempt, to become a must for any prominent society soirees of British, European and American ladies of fashion. That was Edward Heron-Allen, a British polymath, whose two books in 1883 and 1885 stripped away the Hindu astrology and county fair mysticism to present for the first time an apparent scientific system of reading the shape of the hand and the lines of the hand. E H-A was of a wealthy family and so was already accepted into the upper levels of British society, thus his books ignited a craze for knowledge of palmistry where no social gathering of any prominence was complete without the presence of E H-A reading the dainty bejeweled hands of all the ladies present.
E H-A embarked on a planned three-year tour of America which lasted less than a year as interest in palmistry in the U/S. faded, and stories of E H-A consorting with “burlesque ladies” closed the doors of American society. Heron-Allen returned to England where he immersed himself in other areas.
But an out of work Irish actor stranded in New York when his theater troupe returned to England , William John “Jack” Warner had experienced some of the Heron-Allen enthusiasm, perhaps even attending E H-A’s first lecture at Chickering Hall in New York, and so, reading the Heron-Allen books and other works on palmistry, and, first rejecting the name Solomon, Warner took the name Cheiro as his performing nom de guerre and set out to seize some of the gold he saw flowing into the hands of the Englishman.
Master of the Tell Tale Hand tells the story of how Jack Warner became the legendary Cheiro, acquiring a fortune in the process, only to lose it all in a single day.
His Tumultuous Career
as the Greatest Occultist of the Century
Now on Amazon [ASIN B01MSFNWZ2] in pre-release, Master of the Tell Tale Hand is the first biography (fully illustrated) of Cheiro, the palmist, who came to so dominate the occult world of Europe and America in the 1890’s and early 20th century that his name became synonymous with psychic divination techniques of all types. This is not a work on palmistry, as even now, 81 years after the publication of his last book, all of Cheiro’s books from 1894 to 1935, including his one novel and a volume of poetry, are still in print. It is rather the story Cheiro’s tumultuous career from out of work Irish actor to the absolute pinnacle of Parisian society a celebrated member of the wealthy elite, to be found lying drunk and dying on a street corner in Hollywood.
But it wasn’t Cheiro who first raised palmistry from decades of indifference, even contempt, to become a must for any prominent society soirees of British, European and American ladies of fashion. That was Edward Heron-Allen, a British polymath, whose two books in 1883 and 1885 stripped away the Hindu astrology and county fair mysticism to present for the first time an apparent scientific system of reading the shape of the hand and the lines of the hand. E H-A was of a wealthy family and so was already accepted into the upper levels of British society, thus his books ignited a craze for knowledge of palmistry where no social gathering of any prominence was complete without the presence of E H-A reading the dainty bejeweled hands of all the ladies present.
E H-A embarked on a planned three-year tour of America which lasted less than a year as interest in palmistry in the U/S. faded, and stories of E H-A consorting with “burlesque ladies” closed the doors of American society. Heron-Allen returned to England where he immersed himself in other areas.
But an out of work Irish actor stranded in New York when his theater troupe returned to England , William John “Jack” Warner had experienced some of the Heron-Allen enthusiasm, perhaps even attending E H-A’s first lecture at Chickering Hall in New York, and so, reading the Heron-Allen books and other works on palmistry, and, first rejecting the name Solomon, Warner took the name Cheiro as his performing nom de guerre and set out to seize some of the gold he saw flowing into the hands of the Englishman.
Master of the Tell Tale Hand tells the story of how Jack Warner became the legendary Cheiro, acquiring a fortune in the process, only to lose it all in a single day.
August 24, 2016
Monte Carlo Systems: Myrhs and Promises
While researching Monte Carlo for my novel, Shadow of the Tiger, the second of the Kyame Piddington series, which is set in 1896, I encountered a number of fascinating references and stories all of which contributed to the evocation of Monte Carlo and Monaco of that time. Using those references, I wrote the following article which appeared in History Magazine, December/January, 2010. It placed here as the interest in challenging the wheel is always present, and the system, used by Kyame Piddington in 1896, is just as valid today and requires the same solid discipline for success.
Monte Carlo Systems:
Myths and Promises
The roulette wheel has no conscience and no memory.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Gambler
1867
The Plan
Over dinner at the Baldwin Club in a gloomy and depressing London, in November, 1897, the banker, the Hon. Albert Victor Bethell, and his barrister friend, Frank Corzon, resolved to visit the legendary Monte Carlo Casino in the tiny (eight square miles), but captivating, Mediterranean principality of Monaco. Their plan: to utilize a roulette system to pay all their expenses for at least ten days -- to demonstrate that with the right discipline and minimum capital they, or anyone else, could, for a time, live completely off the Bank. And, if successful, write a book about their experience and make money off that, too.
The Systems
Certainly a noble objective -- but which system to use of the many regularly flogged to visiting gamblers, Imperial, royal and commoner? Systems that the well-dressed gentlemen and the occasional lady pitched as being infallible; as being the one system that François Blanc, the Monte Carlo Casino general managing director, did not want you to learn; and all for sale as you stepped off the train from Nice, confidentially, of course, for a mere five to fifty francs.
One notorious example was:
“The Discovery of the Age!”
“How to beat the Bank at flat stakes.”
Price 20 francs
Though a seemingly simple and straightforward system, there was a subtle fatal flaw in the system that assured the trusting player progressively larger losses over time.
But François Blanc was delighted with systems players. He provided score cards to facilitate clocking the wheels; even allowing space for adding machines at the tables; and on one occasion, when the punter needed room for a large ledger on which to calculate his system, Casino management placed a small table near the wheel to accommodate the gambler and to avoid his blocking two or three other gamblers from sitting at the table.
As a result, a certain Monégasque axiom became well known: “Rouge gagne quelquefois, Noir souvent, mais Blanc toujours.” [Red wins sometimes, black often, but Blanc always.]
The Monte Carlo Casino
From 1872, for almost four decades, Monte Carlo was the only legal casino in Europe. Only two games were played: roulette and the card game Trente-et-Quarante. Over the years, remarkable sums had been won by various individuals at both games, but it was roulette systems that had the greatest apparent promise. And nothing brought the plungers, splashers and punters like the publicity from a fabulous win of hundreds of thousands of francs in a week, or even in a single day.
Or, the ultimate win: breaking the Bank itself.
Breaking the Bank at Monte Carlo
Thirty-five year old Charles Deville Wells arrived at the Casino on July 19, 1891. He was an unprepossessing man, medium height, a black beard and bald. He sat down at a roulette table and played as though the Devil himself was his backer. Eleven hours of steady play later, Wells walked away with 250,000 francs profit. He repeated the feat the following day. The third day, Wells encountered early losses of fifty thousand francs at roulette, switched to Trente-et-Quarante, and, staking the maximum at each play, soon recovered his losses, returned to roulette and broke the table a dozen times in the course of the afternoon. Then he quit. His stamina had finally given out after almost twenty-six steady hours of play, but Wells walked away with over half-a-million francs, which he immediately transferred to his London bank.
Later, returning to Monte Carlo in the winter season, incredibly, Wells did it again.
Wells refused to divulge his system of playing, but observers thought it resembled coup des trios, a system in which accumulated stakes from three winning coups are set aside and the gambler starts over with new capital. But there was actually no system. Charles Wells simply had an astonishing run of luck, which was written up in all major European newspapers. His exploits became the basis for the music hall song written in 1892 by Fred Gilbert, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”.
But the Monte Carlo Bank was never broken –- that was impossible for a single individual -- though breaking a table several times in a single day was a singular event. François Blanc, who had died fifteen years before Wells’s first arrival, once observed, “He who breaks the bank to-day will most assuredly return tomorrow and let the bank break him.”
Returning to Monaco in December, 1892, as Blanc would have expected, Charles Wells arrived on a glamorous yacht, the Palais Royal. His luck held briefly, but then he sustained heavy losses and, wiped out, withdrew.
The source of Wells’s vast capital was finally revealed when French police boarded the Palais Royal, in January, 1892, to arrest Charles Wells for swindling investors in England.
Wells’s extensive Monte Carlo newspaper publicity had raised the suspicions of his titled investors, and swallowing their pride, they had alerted police. Wells served eight years in prison. Once released, he engaged in additional cons. In 1906, he was arrested and imprisoned for three more years. Later in France, Wells was caught again, which led to yet another sentence of five years in a French prison.
However, Wells had, prior to his first arrest, invested some of his winnings in annuities and so, once out of the French prison; he lived comfortably until his death in 1929 at eighty-five.
One other source of Wells’s later income was dividends from the Casino itself. In addition to the annuities, after his first visit, Wells had purchased fifty thousand francs worth of shares in the Casino which had steadily increased in value, ironically due partly to the Wells publicity.
Which System to Play?
But which of the fifteen or so most popular systems would be appropriate for the Bethell and Curzon Monte Carlo excursion?
All roulette systems are based on even chance wagers, i.e., red-black, high-low, odd-even. Most are progressive, in that they attempt to recover lost capital by increasing subsequent stakes following a loss. The longer the sequence of losses continue, then progressively higher stakes are required to continue to play the system –- until, under the most negative conditions, the gambler’s capital is exhausted. All systems are focused on defending the player’s capital and moderating his losses.
Most writers on roulette systems, including Victor Bethell, emphasize that gambling at roulette without a system ensures disaster, much sooner than later. With a system and with the discipline and capital to persevere, the gambler is always aware of his financial status and is not tempted to recklessly attempt to quickly recover losses.
However, different systems require different levels of starting capital, and some, to be avoided, ensure more rapid losses than others. And the one somewhat banal element that undermines many systems is that they are tedious, given their repeated detailed calculations, even though they may be safer.
Many systems were also based on a myth. In 1903, in his book, Facts and Fallacies of Monte Carlo, Sir Hiram Maxim pointed out that the concept of “evening up”, (assuming that the frequency of one color appearing must eventually equal the frequency of the other, the basic assumption of many systems), was a fallacy. Regardless of the number of consecutive coups of, say red, the odds of black coming up on the next spin always remains the same. The wheel has no memory of what came before; with the exception of biased wheels, which have a mechanical tendency for the ball to fall more frequently than statistically predictable in a certain sector of the wheel.
Jagger and the Biased Wheel
The first gambler to detect biased wheels at Monte Carlo was Joseph Jagger, a mechanic from Yorkshire, England, who in 1873 at the end of his first day at roulette, won 350,000 francs. Unlike all other systems, Jagger played specific numbers, en plein, apparently at random, and won consistently -- but at only one table. Over the next three days his winnings grew to one-and-a-half million francs.
Based on his own experience of manufacturing spindles for the textile industry, Jagger theorized that regardless of the care in manufacture, some roulette wheels would not spin true, tending to a bias for certain numbers that could be detected with patient clocking of the wheel; a bias that should continue even with Casino personnel checking the wheel balance with a spirit level to one millimeter tolerance, three times a day.
But, if true, then which wheel? Jagger brought six clerks from his firm to record the numbers surreptitiously over several days at each of Monte Carlo’s six roulette wheels. The data collected confirmed Jagger’s theory and identified the key flawed wheel.
Once the Casino management recognized what was happening, they shuffled the wheels, changing them around the tables, but Jagger had seen a small scratch on the biased wheel and, once finding it, his winnings continued. The management again altered the wheels, giving them adjustable frets on each pocket. At that point, experiencing consistent losses, Joseph Jagger quit, returned home and retired on his winnings.
The Noble Lord’s System
Some systems are also temporary as was the legendary Noble Lord’s System. An English lord entered the Casino one Sunday morning with the last hymn sung before the sermon at the English Church still running through his mind. He heard 32 red called from the first table; then heard 32 red called from the next. Something was familiar. Then he recognized that 32 was the number of the hymn that morning. He swiftly bet 32 red at each of the four remaining tables and made a quick £400 profit.
After mentioning his good fortune to two friends, the following Sunday, fifty men squeezed into the church with the startled congregation. Once the hymn number was announced there was a loud, mad sprint for the church doors as the pews rapidly emptied of men as in a fire drill.
The hymn number came up again at the tables.
The minister, learning that his church had become a popular gambling system, announced from the pulpit the following Sunday that henceforth no hymn with a number less than 37 would be sung before the sermon. The Noble Lord’s lesson being: if you have a system that works, keep it to yourself.
The Avant Dernier System
The system which Bethell and Curzon developed was called the Avant Dernier. In this system, the gambler backs the color that came up the play previous to the last. For example, assume R, B, R had come up. The gambler would play B with his first stake, and then no matter what turned up next; he would play R. Always the second color prior, which ensured success if there was a long run of a single color, or shorter runs of two or three. The combinations of R/B that could undermine the system are few, but would occur and needed to be quickly recognized.
With the procedure set, the daily goal the two men set was to win four units a day, with a unit, for them, being one louis or twenty francs; but always quit when four had been won. They decided to use “flat stakes”, which meant they played the same number of units each coup, thus eliminating tedious progressive calculations.
If however, the Bank won ten spins from the players before they had won one coup, they agreed the flat stakes would be increased to two units at each spin until all losses were recovered, then revert to one unit and continue. But they would always quit when four units were won, whether in an hour or in a day.
Using the Avant Dernier system, Bethell and Curzon achieved their goal: ten days in which all their expenses in Monaco were covered by their winnings. Not all the days were strong winners, though on three days they achieved their goal of winning four units in only a couple of hours. Keeping rigidly to their agreed system, after ten days they left Monte Carlo with their starting capital of £600 still in their pockets, all bills paid, and some marvelous friendships and memories of a beautiful country.
The Right System
Fundamentally, whether a century ago or now, the system that achieves the gambler’s goal with the smallest number of stakes (thus diminishing the effect of the zero) is the best the player can execute.
However, regardless of the system used, Lord Harry Rosslyn, a renowned Monte Carlo gambler, observed in 1896 that, “Perseverance, strong nerve and the constitution of a dray-horse are absolutely necessary to success.”
The End
Suggested Readings:
Bethell, Victor, Ten Days at Monte Carlo: At the Bank’s Expense,
William Heinemann, London, 1898.
------ Monte Carlo Anecdotes and Systems of Play, William Heinemann, London, 1910.
Fielding, Xan, The Money Spinner: Monte Carlo and Its Fabled Casino,
Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1977.
Maxim, Sir Hiram S., Monte Carlo Facts and Fallacies,
Alexander Moring Ltd., London, 1903.
Monte Carlo Systems:
Myths and Promises
The roulette wheel has no conscience and no memory.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Gambler
1867
The Plan
Over dinner at the Baldwin Club in a gloomy and depressing London, in November, 1897, the banker, the Hon. Albert Victor Bethell, and his barrister friend, Frank Corzon, resolved to visit the legendary Monte Carlo Casino in the tiny (eight square miles), but captivating, Mediterranean principality of Monaco. Their plan: to utilize a roulette system to pay all their expenses for at least ten days -- to demonstrate that with the right discipline and minimum capital they, or anyone else, could, for a time, live completely off the Bank. And, if successful, write a book about their experience and make money off that, too.
The Systems
Certainly a noble objective -- but which system to use of the many regularly flogged to visiting gamblers, Imperial, royal and commoner? Systems that the well-dressed gentlemen and the occasional lady pitched as being infallible; as being the one system that François Blanc, the Monte Carlo Casino general managing director, did not want you to learn; and all for sale as you stepped off the train from Nice, confidentially, of course, for a mere five to fifty francs.
One notorious example was:
“The Discovery of the Age!”
“How to beat the Bank at flat stakes.”
Price 20 francs
Though a seemingly simple and straightforward system, there was a subtle fatal flaw in the system that assured the trusting player progressively larger losses over time.
But François Blanc was delighted with systems players. He provided score cards to facilitate clocking the wheels; even allowing space for adding machines at the tables; and on one occasion, when the punter needed room for a large ledger on which to calculate his system, Casino management placed a small table near the wheel to accommodate the gambler and to avoid his blocking two or three other gamblers from sitting at the table.
As a result, a certain Monégasque axiom became well known: “Rouge gagne quelquefois, Noir souvent, mais Blanc toujours.” [Red wins sometimes, black often, but Blanc always.]
The Monte Carlo Casino
From 1872, for almost four decades, Monte Carlo was the only legal casino in Europe. Only two games were played: roulette and the card game Trente-et-Quarante. Over the years, remarkable sums had been won by various individuals at both games, but it was roulette systems that had the greatest apparent promise. And nothing brought the plungers, splashers and punters like the publicity from a fabulous win of hundreds of thousands of francs in a week, or even in a single day.
Or, the ultimate win: breaking the Bank itself.
Breaking the Bank at Monte Carlo
Thirty-five year old Charles Deville Wells arrived at the Casino on July 19, 1891. He was an unprepossessing man, medium height, a black beard and bald. He sat down at a roulette table and played as though the Devil himself was his backer. Eleven hours of steady play later, Wells walked away with 250,000 francs profit. He repeated the feat the following day. The third day, Wells encountered early losses of fifty thousand francs at roulette, switched to Trente-et-Quarante, and, staking the maximum at each play, soon recovered his losses, returned to roulette and broke the table a dozen times in the course of the afternoon. Then he quit. His stamina had finally given out after almost twenty-six steady hours of play, but Wells walked away with over half-a-million francs, which he immediately transferred to his London bank.
Later, returning to Monte Carlo in the winter season, incredibly, Wells did it again.
Wells refused to divulge his system of playing, but observers thought it resembled coup des trios, a system in which accumulated stakes from three winning coups are set aside and the gambler starts over with new capital. But there was actually no system. Charles Wells simply had an astonishing run of luck, which was written up in all major European newspapers. His exploits became the basis for the music hall song written in 1892 by Fred Gilbert, “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”.
But the Monte Carlo Bank was never broken –- that was impossible for a single individual -- though breaking a table several times in a single day was a singular event. François Blanc, who had died fifteen years before Wells’s first arrival, once observed, “He who breaks the bank to-day will most assuredly return tomorrow and let the bank break him.”
Returning to Monaco in December, 1892, as Blanc would have expected, Charles Wells arrived on a glamorous yacht, the Palais Royal. His luck held briefly, but then he sustained heavy losses and, wiped out, withdrew.
The source of Wells’s vast capital was finally revealed when French police boarded the Palais Royal, in January, 1892, to arrest Charles Wells for swindling investors in England.
Wells’s extensive Monte Carlo newspaper publicity had raised the suspicions of his titled investors, and swallowing their pride, they had alerted police. Wells served eight years in prison. Once released, he engaged in additional cons. In 1906, he was arrested and imprisoned for three more years. Later in France, Wells was caught again, which led to yet another sentence of five years in a French prison.
However, Wells had, prior to his first arrest, invested some of his winnings in annuities and so, once out of the French prison; he lived comfortably until his death in 1929 at eighty-five.
One other source of Wells’s later income was dividends from the Casino itself. In addition to the annuities, after his first visit, Wells had purchased fifty thousand francs worth of shares in the Casino which had steadily increased in value, ironically due partly to the Wells publicity.
Which System to Play?
But which of the fifteen or so most popular systems would be appropriate for the Bethell and Curzon Monte Carlo excursion?
All roulette systems are based on even chance wagers, i.e., red-black, high-low, odd-even. Most are progressive, in that they attempt to recover lost capital by increasing subsequent stakes following a loss. The longer the sequence of losses continue, then progressively higher stakes are required to continue to play the system –- until, under the most negative conditions, the gambler’s capital is exhausted. All systems are focused on defending the player’s capital and moderating his losses.
Most writers on roulette systems, including Victor Bethell, emphasize that gambling at roulette without a system ensures disaster, much sooner than later. With a system and with the discipline and capital to persevere, the gambler is always aware of his financial status and is not tempted to recklessly attempt to quickly recover losses.
However, different systems require different levels of starting capital, and some, to be avoided, ensure more rapid losses than others. And the one somewhat banal element that undermines many systems is that they are tedious, given their repeated detailed calculations, even though they may be safer.
Many systems were also based on a myth. In 1903, in his book, Facts and Fallacies of Monte Carlo, Sir Hiram Maxim pointed out that the concept of “evening up”, (assuming that the frequency of one color appearing must eventually equal the frequency of the other, the basic assumption of many systems), was a fallacy. Regardless of the number of consecutive coups of, say red, the odds of black coming up on the next spin always remains the same. The wheel has no memory of what came before; with the exception of biased wheels, which have a mechanical tendency for the ball to fall more frequently than statistically predictable in a certain sector of the wheel.
Jagger and the Biased Wheel
The first gambler to detect biased wheels at Monte Carlo was Joseph Jagger, a mechanic from Yorkshire, England, who in 1873 at the end of his first day at roulette, won 350,000 francs. Unlike all other systems, Jagger played specific numbers, en plein, apparently at random, and won consistently -- but at only one table. Over the next three days his winnings grew to one-and-a-half million francs.
Based on his own experience of manufacturing spindles for the textile industry, Jagger theorized that regardless of the care in manufacture, some roulette wheels would not spin true, tending to a bias for certain numbers that could be detected with patient clocking of the wheel; a bias that should continue even with Casino personnel checking the wheel balance with a spirit level to one millimeter tolerance, three times a day.
But, if true, then which wheel? Jagger brought six clerks from his firm to record the numbers surreptitiously over several days at each of Monte Carlo’s six roulette wheels. The data collected confirmed Jagger’s theory and identified the key flawed wheel.
Once the Casino management recognized what was happening, they shuffled the wheels, changing them around the tables, but Jagger had seen a small scratch on the biased wheel and, once finding it, his winnings continued. The management again altered the wheels, giving them adjustable frets on each pocket. At that point, experiencing consistent losses, Joseph Jagger quit, returned home and retired on his winnings.
The Noble Lord’s System
Some systems are also temporary as was the legendary Noble Lord’s System. An English lord entered the Casino one Sunday morning with the last hymn sung before the sermon at the English Church still running through his mind. He heard 32 red called from the first table; then heard 32 red called from the next. Something was familiar. Then he recognized that 32 was the number of the hymn that morning. He swiftly bet 32 red at each of the four remaining tables and made a quick £400 profit.
After mentioning his good fortune to two friends, the following Sunday, fifty men squeezed into the church with the startled congregation. Once the hymn number was announced there was a loud, mad sprint for the church doors as the pews rapidly emptied of men as in a fire drill.
The hymn number came up again at the tables.
The minister, learning that his church had become a popular gambling system, announced from the pulpit the following Sunday that henceforth no hymn with a number less than 37 would be sung before the sermon. The Noble Lord’s lesson being: if you have a system that works, keep it to yourself.
The Avant Dernier System
The system which Bethell and Curzon developed was called the Avant Dernier. In this system, the gambler backs the color that came up the play previous to the last. For example, assume R, B, R had come up. The gambler would play B with his first stake, and then no matter what turned up next; he would play R. Always the second color prior, which ensured success if there was a long run of a single color, or shorter runs of two or three. The combinations of R/B that could undermine the system are few, but would occur and needed to be quickly recognized.
With the procedure set, the daily goal the two men set was to win four units a day, with a unit, for them, being one louis or twenty francs; but always quit when four had been won. They decided to use “flat stakes”, which meant they played the same number of units each coup, thus eliminating tedious progressive calculations.
If however, the Bank won ten spins from the players before they had won one coup, they agreed the flat stakes would be increased to two units at each spin until all losses were recovered, then revert to one unit and continue. But they would always quit when four units were won, whether in an hour or in a day.
Using the Avant Dernier system, Bethell and Curzon achieved their goal: ten days in which all their expenses in Monaco were covered by their winnings. Not all the days were strong winners, though on three days they achieved their goal of winning four units in only a couple of hours. Keeping rigidly to their agreed system, after ten days they left Monte Carlo with their starting capital of £600 still in their pockets, all bills paid, and some marvelous friendships and memories of a beautiful country.
The Right System
Fundamentally, whether a century ago or now, the system that achieves the gambler’s goal with the smallest number of stakes (thus diminishing the effect of the zero) is the best the player can execute.
However, regardless of the system used, Lord Harry Rosslyn, a renowned Monte Carlo gambler, observed in 1896 that, “Perseverance, strong nerve and the constitution of a dray-horse are absolutely necessary to success.”
The End
Suggested Readings:
Bethell, Victor, Ten Days at Monte Carlo: At the Bank’s Expense,
William Heinemann, London, 1898.
------ Monte Carlo Anecdotes and Systems of Play, William Heinemann, London, 1910.
Fielding, Xan, The Money Spinner: Monte Carlo and Its Fabled Casino,
Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1977.
Maxim, Sir Hiram S., Monte Carlo Facts and Fallacies,
Alexander Moring Ltd., London, 1903.
May 12, 2016
The Shadow
One of the joys in writing historical fiction is the research needed to create the world in which your story will take place. Though that recreation does not need to be exactly historically accurate, plot issues come first, the world needs to ring true to the reader. For two projects in different stages of progress (one in 1888 and the other in 2016), I have been researching Tibet with its mysterious lamas, monks and priests against its staggeringly beautiful mountains, some of which are sacred in themselves.
Research also brings the fun of the unexpected, and often the entry of new people into your newly enriched life.
I’ve just finished Theodore Illion’s In Secret Tibet, 1937, and am moving on to Alexandra David-Neel, Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, 1931. David-Neel is herself a legendary figure in any study of Tibet, with her portrayal of her amazing experiences coming under attack as falsified and other negative statements. However, as remarkable as they are, all evidence indicates that all of her stories are true.
Both books speak in awe of the lung-gom-pa, the flying lamas who can travel indefinitely at about 15mph over the countryside, their arms and legs moving in pendulum fashion, their faces reflecting a deep trance state, and never running out of breath.
And the Ngagspa, the lama magician, whom both authors claim could cause death at a distance. Unlike the opening scenes in the pathetic 1994 movie, The Shadow, where a lama can apparently send a dagger anywhere with only his mind; what actually is described is that a dagger is blessed by the magician, given to a messenger who places it near the target. At a distance then, up to perhaps a mile or two, maybe more, the Ngagspa mentally directs the target to pick up the dagger and kill himself, which he does. According to legends and interviews collected by the authors, this has happened.
And, of course, the origin story of The Shadow (and the Green Lama, another crime fighter of the 40’s) of a wealthy gentleman traveling off into the great mountains of Tibet, to a secret lamasery where an aged hooded lama teaches him how “to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him”, etc., and then he returns to the Western world to courageously use his gift against evil. That is where the research gets interesting, because the answer in this case is: maybe.
I had the great joy of knowing Walter B. Gibson who wrote 286 Shadow novels. Walter’s Shadow, however, never went to Tibet and was not invisible. He was everything else however, as Walter knew the worlds and the people of conjuring and the occult in serious depth, and utilized that knowledge throughout his Shadow novels. He wrote under the Street & Smith company name of Maxwell Grant (if you asked him for his Shadow autograph he would write Walter Gibson and Maxwell Grant in a single signature. He would always ask which signature you wanted, Shadow or magic. Maxwell Grant was a combination of the names of two major magic dealers in the 30’s Maxwell Holden and U.F. Grant.)
And, of course, those who know The Shadow canon, the Shadow’s real name was not Lamont Cranston as it was on radio and in the ’94 movie, but Kent Allard, who in turn used Lamont Cranston as an identity whenever Cranston was traveling out of the country. One of Walter’s novels had the inevitable plot issue of what happens when the real Cranston encounters the Shadow’s Cranston.
When the radio show with Orson Welles as The Shadow was launched, the Shadow character could not only be invisible, but could also read minds. With such dual capabilities, the only thing between the bad guys and being arrested were the commercials. To heighten the tension of the stories, the Shadow’s mindreading was eliminated in favor of Margot Lane, a definite improvement. However, Walter’s Shadow did not have Margot Lane. When I asked him about Margot, Walter laughed. With the growth of Margot’s popularity on radio, pressure grew on Walter from his readers to put Margot into the novels. He shrugged. “I finally had to do it,” he said. And so Margot Lane entered the world of the “real” Shadow.
The interesting thing is that while there is marginal evidence about any lamas clouding anyone’s mind, there was evidence of some lamas having the ability to sense the thoughts of others. Before the destruction of Tibet by Communist China, about 20% of Tibet’s population was lamas, monks, and priests, who were then supported by the other 80%. No one knows the actual population of Tibet at any given time, but it was estimated at about three million up through the 40’s. Of all that 20%, less than 1% could actually do any of the legendary feats of flying, killing at a distance, or thought reading. The one percent was looked on as the holy ones, who would appear and then disappear after aiding someone. They never claimed to be holy, as the other 19% were always eager to do in order to gain more offerings from the oftentimes terrified people. The holy lamas/hermits never asked for an offering -- and never utilized the “music hall magic tricks” as Illion calls it in his book, of the others.
And then there is the story of the great white dog without a name, from The Golden Doorway to Tibet, Nicol Smith, 1949, which I utilized in the first volume of my Adventures in Second Sight series, Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons.
And more Tibet awaits. The fun part of the research is that it can change the plot, and sometimes, even the characters.
If you are interested in mystery novels set in modern Tibet, then I would certainly recommend the five novels by Eliot Pattison and his detective, Shan Tao Yun, beginning with The Skull Mantra.
Remember, too, according to Tibetan beliefs, each time you recite the six sacred syllables:
Om Mani Padme Hum
one thousand of your sins will be forgiven.
Research also brings the fun of the unexpected, and often the entry of new people into your newly enriched life.
I’ve just finished Theodore Illion’s In Secret Tibet, 1937, and am moving on to Alexandra David-Neel, Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, 1931. David-Neel is herself a legendary figure in any study of Tibet, with her portrayal of her amazing experiences coming under attack as falsified and other negative statements. However, as remarkable as they are, all evidence indicates that all of her stories are true.
Both books speak in awe of the lung-gom-pa, the flying lamas who can travel indefinitely at about 15mph over the countryside, their arms and legs moving in pendulum fashion, their faces reflecting a deep trance state, and never running out of breath.
And the Ngagspa, the lama magician, whom both authors claim could cause death at a distance. Unlike the opening scenes in the pathetic 1994 movie, The Shadow, where a lama can apparently send a dagger anywhere with only his mind; what actually is described is that a dagger is blessed by the magician, given to a messenger who places it near the target. At a distance then, up to perhaps a mile or two, maybe more, the Ngagspa mentally directs the target to pick up the dagger and kill himself, which he does. According to legends and interviews collected by the authors, this has happened.
And, of course, the origin story of The Shadow (and the Green Lama, another crime fighter of the 40’s) of a wealthy gentleman traveling off into the great mountains of Tibet, to a secret lamasery where an aged hooded lama teaches him how “to cloud men’s minds so they cannot see him”, etc., and then he returns to the Western world to courageously use his gift against evil. That is where the research gets interesting, because the answer in this case is: maybe.
I had the great joy of knowing Walter B. Gibson who wrote 286 Shadow novels. Walter’s Shadow, however, never went to Tibet and was not invisible. He was everything else however, as Walter knew the worlds and the people of conjuring and the occult in serious depth, and utilized that knowledge throughout his Shadow novels. He wrote under the Street & Smith company name of Maxwell Grant (if you asked him for his Shadow autograph he would write Walter Gibson and Maxwell Grant in a single signature. He would always ask which signature you wanted, Shadow or magic. Maxwell Grant was a combination of the names of two major magic dealers in the 30’s Maxwell Holden and U.F. Grant.)
And, of course, those who know The Shadow canon, the Shadow’s real name was not Lamont Cranston as it was on radio and in the ’94 movie, but Kent Allard, who in turn used Lamont Cranston as an identity whenever Cranston was traveling out of the country. One of Walter’s novels had the inevitable plot issue of what happens when the real Cranston encounters the Shadow’s Cranston.
When the radio show with Orson Welles as The Shadow was launched, the Shadow character could not only be invisible, but could also read minds. With such dual capabilities, the only thing between the bad guys and being arrested were the commercials. To heighten the tension of the stories, the Shadow’s mindreading was eliminated in favor of Margot Lane, a definite improvement. However, Walter’s Shadow did not have Margot Lane. When I asked him about Margot, Walter laughed. With the growth of Margot’s popularity on radio, pressure grew on Walter from his readers to put Margot into the novels. He shrugged. “I finally had to do it,” he said. And so Margot Lane entered the world of the “real” Shadow.
The interesting thing is that while there is marginal evidence about any lamas clouding anyone’s mind, there was evidence of some lamas having the ability to sense the thoughts of others. Before the destruction of Tibet by Communist China, about 20% of Tibet’s population was lamas, monks, and priests, who were then supported by the other 80%. No one knows the actual population of Tibet at any given time, but it was estimated at about three million up through the 40’s. Of all that 20%, less than 1% could actually do any of the legendary feats of flying, killing at a distance, or thought reading. The one percent was looked on as the holy ones, who would appear and then disappear after aiding someone. They never claimed to be holy, as the other 19% were always eager to do in order to gain more offerings from the oftentimes terrified people. The holy lamas/hermits never asked for an offering -- and never utilized the “music hall magic tricks” as Illion calls it in his book, of the others.
And then there is the story of the great white dog without a name, from The Golden Doorway to Tibet, Nicol Smith, 1949, which I utilized in the first volume of my Adventures in Second Sight series, Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons.
And more Tibet awaits. The fun part of the research is that it can change the plot, and sometimes, even the characters.
If you are interested in mystery novels set in modern Tibet, then I would certainly recommend the five novels by Eliot Pattison and his detective, Shan Tao Yun, beginning with The Skull Mantra.
Remember, too, according to Tibetan beliefs, each time you recite the six sacred syllables:
Om Mani Padme Hum
one thousand of your sins will be forgiven.
July 7, 2015
Jack
Even in the midst of the almost daily horrors of the butcheries committed by ISIS, the public interest in Jack the Ripper seems insatiable. Jack, if there was such a single person, destroyed, apparently, only five women in London’s teeming fetid Whitechapel district in the Autumn of 1888, and then, apparently, disappeared, leaving Scotland Yard empty-handed and the case unsolved.
‘Who did it’ has become an industry of its own. as a quick look at Google confirms. In half a second, you get 11.9 million contacts! Even with that level of saturation, the steady flow of ‘case closed’ books continues with insistent declarations regarding the fiend who did it now! clearly identified, even without witnesses, no fingerprints, nor, even faintly modern forensics, etc. In fact, in Victorian times, it virtually required reliable eye-witnesses to convict anyone of murder.
Even Sherlock Holmes has been busy regularly capturing Jack since the first Holmes-Ripper story appeared in German in 1907. And Murder by Decree (1979) is certainly one of the most entertaining and best casted of the Holmes movie genre, in which Holmes once again captures Jack.
And, of course, the paranormal, as the spirit medium, Robert James Lees, self-titled The Recorder, became a prominent presence in the newspapers of the day. Lees, 39 at the time, is ginned up in various shapes in movies and stories, again always with the necessary strong implication that he was genuine, and with his visions of who ‘did it’ being used as a secondary plot line. Also he is always described as an adviser to the Queen, though, in fact, his only contact with Queen Victoria was a thank-you note from her for the copy of his book that he had sent.
Even with all this, there are Ripper questions that are obvious, that, to my mind anyway, have never been satisfactorily answered, or in many presentations, not even addressed.
So, why Jack and The Thought Reader, a novel in-progress? The protagonist and narrator of Jack and The Thought Reader (and also of Tales of a Thought Reader to be published by Createspace in 2-3 weeks) is Stuart C, Cumberland, the most successful thought reader of his day, who did get involved, peripherally, in the Ripper story. Both novels are historical fiction, but strive to adhere to factual history as closely as possible.
Cumberland also created a strong reputation as an exposer of fake spirit mediums, so bringing him up against Robert Lees was natural, as well as his own professional need to exploit the Ripper frenzy to his own benefit. He wasn’t the only performer/magician to do that.
Researching the Jack novel has taken me back to favorite movies and stories, while digging back into the factual (such as it is) accounts of those weeks of the “Autumn Horror”. I have visited London many times over the past number of years, including Lime House and the East End, Naturally, nothing resembles Whitechapel in 1888.
There is a feeling however, of other voices.
The police of the day could not win without a major break: an eye-witness preferably, solid physical clues, a connection that could suggest a motive other than just madness. But there were no factual connections, the five women, the ‘canonical five’, according to the police, did not know each other, though the density of Whitechapel could be used to explain almost any theory, so why those five, as opposed to any number of other women?
But was there no connection?
‘Who did it’ has become an industry of its own. as a quick look at Google confirms. In half a second, you get 11.9 million contacts! Even with that level of saturation, the steady flow of ‘case closed’ books continues with insistent declarations regarding the fiend who did it now! clearly identified, even without witnesses, no fingerprints, nor, even faintly modern forensics, etc. In fact, in Victorian times, it virtually required reliable eye-witnesses to convict anyone of murder.
Even Sherlock Holmes has been busy regularly capturing Jack since the first Holmes-Ripper story appeared in German in 1907. And Murder by Decree (1979) is certainly one of the most entertaining and best casted of the Holmes movie genre, in which Holmes once again captures Jack.
And, of course, the paranormal, as the spirit medium, Robert James Lees, self-titled The Recorder, became a prominent presence in the newspapers of the day. Lees, 39 at the time, is ginned up in various shapes in movies and stories, again always with the necessary strong implication that he was genuine, and with his visions of who ‘did it’ being used as a secondary plot line. Also he is always described as an adviser to the Queen, though, in fact, his only contact with Queen Victoria was a thank-you note from her for the copy of his book that he had sent.
Even with all this, there are Ripper questions that are obvious, that, to my mind anyway, have never been satisfactorily answered, or in many presentations, not even addressed.
So, why Jack and The Thought Reader, a novel in-progress? The protagonist and narrator of Jack and The Thought Reader (and also of Tales of a Thought Reader to be published by Createspace in 2-3 weeks) is Stuart C, Cumberland, the most successful thought reader of his day, who did get involved, peripherally, in the Ripper story. Both novels are historical fiction, but strive to adhere to factual history as closely as possible.
Cumberland also created a strong reputation as an exposer of fake spirit mediums, so bringing him up against Robert Lees was natural, as well as his own professional need to exploit the Ripper frenzy to his own benefit. He wasn’t the only performer/magician to do that.
Researching the Jack novel has taken me back to favorite movies and stories, while digging back into the factual (such as it is) accounts of those weeks of the “Autumn Horror”. I have visited London many times over the past number of years, including Lime House and the East End, Naturally, nothing resembles Whitechapel in 1888.
There is a feeling however, of other voices.
The police of the day could not win without a major break: an eye-witness preferably, solid physical clues, a connection that could suggest a motive other than just madness. But there were no factual connections, the five women, the ‘canonical five’, according to the police, did not know each other, though the density of Whitechapel could be used to explain almost any theory, so why those five, as opposed to any number of other women?
But was there no connection?
May 7, 2015
Foreign Legion Musings
Fighting the French in Morocco" by Albert Bartels is one of the more obscure books on WWI in North Africa and the Middle East. T.E. Lawrence is, thanks to Lowell Thomas, the almost legendary, mystical leader of the Arab Revolt. Bartels attempted the same thing in Morocco. Below is a review of the book, which I found in London in a bookshop near the British Museum that specialized in books on the Middle East, a shop I returned to several times over the years.
Illustrated with photographs by the author. Translated from the German orignal.
T.E, Lawrence was not the only European to lead an Arab uprising against his WWI enemies. Unlike TEL, Albert Bartels was not a soldier or a member of any military unit.He arrived in Morocco in 1903 as a young employee of a German trading company. He quickly learned Arabic and with it the cultures and differences of the 66 tribes/clans of Morocco.
With more enlightened support from Berlin, Bartels may well have succeeded in making Morocco into a German colony, and certainly would have drawn a substantial number of French troops from the bloody trenches to the Atlas and Rif mountains.
With the coming of WWI, the French seized all German interests in Morocco and imprisoned all German nationals in Oran. Bartels, with three other prisoners, escaped into the Spanish zone, making his way to the German Consulate in Melilla, where he was promised arms and financial support for his planned fight against the French by the German Government.
The promises were never kept. Further, the German government forced Bartels to work with Abd-el-Malek, who proved to be a treacherous ally who attempted to kill Bartels on one occasion with poisoned butter. Bartels was threatened with court martial by the German government if he abandoned Malek. With no financial support from Berlin, Batels bought cartridges for his Riff fighters with his own money, then by signing notes. Like fighting a war using your MasterCharge.
In the end, Bartels was never captured by the French, but was ordered to cease operations by the German government as part of the Armistice Agreement.
Pictured in native dress, Bartels is ruggedly handsome, bearded, the exotic hero of some exotic movie. With every right to be intensely bitter, his book refuses to take on that tone. He writes in a simple unadorned and direct style, and is remarkably modest.
His courage and resourcefulness in combat is recorded in only one obscure book. His pubic impact, however, can be measured by the fact that P.C. Wren in his 1926 sequel to Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur, Albert Bartels is the enemy of the Legion approaching on the horizon to threaten French glory in Morocco. Wren had no need to explain to his readers of the time who Albert Bartels was.
In case you are stopped on the street and offered money for the answer to the question: How many American and British French Foreign Legion movies have been made, including re-makes -- the answer is 73.
I have the Legion in a novel in-progress, "A Song of the Desert", set in 1989 in San Francisco. Consequently, I have picked up my previous study of the Legion to freshen my memory, so will be reviewing some books on the Legion as well as on the French Resistance during WWII, which was not what the movies have portrayed. As DeGaulle said, "The Resistance, it was just a bluff that came off."
Illustrated with photographs by the author. Translated from the German orignal.
T.E, Lawrence was not the only European to lead an Arab uprising against his WWI enemies. Unlike TEL, Albert Bartels was not a soldier or a member of any military unit.He arrived in Morocco in 1903 as a young employee of a German trading company. He quickly learned Arabic and with it the cultures and differences of the 66 tribes/clans of Morocco.
With more enlightened support from Berlin, Bartels may well have succeeded in making Morocco into a German colony, and certainly would have drawn a substantial number of French troops from the bloody trenches to the Atlas and Rif mountains.
With the coming of WWI, the French seized all German interests in Morocco and imprisoned all German nationals in Oran. Bartels, with three other prisoners, escaped into the Spanish zone, making his way to the German Consulate in Melilla, where he was promised arms and financial support for his planned fight against the French by the German Government.
The promises were never kept. Further, the German government forced Bartels to work with Abd-el-Malek, who proved to be a treacherous ally who attempted to kill Bartels on one occasion with poisoned butter. Bartels was threatened with court martial by the German government if he abandoned Malek. With no financial support from Berlin, Batels bought cartridges for his Riff fighters with his own money, then by signing notes. Like fighting a war using your MasterCharge.
In the end, Bartels was never captured by the French, but was ordered to cease operations by the German government as part of the Armistice Agreement.
Pictured in native dress, Bartels is ruggedly handsome, bearded, the exotic hero of some exotic movie. With every right to be intensely bitter, his book refuses to take on that tone. He writes in a simple unadorned and direct style, and is remarkably modest.
His courage and resourcefulness in combat is recorded in only one obscure book. His pubic impact, however, can be measured by the fact that P.C. Wren in his 1926 sequel to Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur, Albert Bartels is the enemy of the Legion approaching on the horizon to threaten French glory in Morocco. Wren had no need to explain to his readers of the time who Albert Bartels was.
In case you are stopped on the street and offered money for the answer to the question: How many American and British French Foreign Legion movies have been made, including re-makes -- the answer is 73.
I have the Legion in a novel in-progress, "A Song of the Desert", set in 1989 in San Francisco. Consequently, I have picked up my previous study of the Legion to freshen my memory, so will be reviewing some books on the Legion as well as on the French Resistance during WWII, which was not what the movies have portrayed. As DeGaulle said, "The Resistance, it was just a bluff that came off."
April 20, 2015
The Rich Thief
The Rich Thief
“You must not make the criminal a hero.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1924.
One of the most enjoyable plot gimmicks for mystery writers and readers is the story where the protagonist, a criminal, a thief who never kills, is actually a wealthy (or in the case of Raffles, apparently wealthy) socially-connected man who engages in crime to tweak the nose of the system , to champion some worthy cause, or just for the adrenaline rush of risking everything he has, even his freedom for twenty years or so.
A fun write, after all, look at the number of authors involved – but one that can, too easily, become a multi-layered cliché.
A few rich thieves who come immediately to mind would be:
The classic movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, particularly the original 1968 version with Steve McQueen, though the later 1999 version with Pierce Brosnan is also enjoyable (with a sequel rumored at various times). [As an aside, the original movie was being filmed in Boston while I was at the Harvard Business School. So it is a real nostalgia trip when my wife and I watch it again.] At the time of its 1968 filming the Boston Strangler story was much in the news which is why no street signs were revealed in the filming, with even the location of the Crown mansion on Beacon Hill (85 Mt. Vernon St.) was concealed, in order to ensue no viewer started thinking Strangler when they should be thinking Crown. One of the killings attributed to the Strangler took place about half-a-block from one of the scenes. And yes, I did take glider lessons, which was a blast. There is no age limit on glider licenses.
A friend, Walter B. Gibson, writing as Maxwell Grant, wrote one of the truly legendary rich thieves, The Shadow, starting in1930. Walter’s Shadow was not invisible, but had about every other talent imaginable. Walter ended up writing 286 Shadow novels at a rate of two novels per month. In one of our conversations, he told me, laughing, that his ardent readers would closely critique the stories and then chastise him for any mistakes he made, as, in one novel, when he put the Shadow’s telephone in his Sanctum on the wrong side of the desk. But at two novels a month and other writings in his “spare time” Walter was really the incarnation of the word prolific. The popularity of the Shadow radio program finally forced him to add Margo Lane to his novels, something he had resisted for a number of months. And, while Lamont Cranston was a wealthy man-about-town, in Walter’s stories, Cranston was a real person whose identity the Shadow used when Cranston himself was out of town. All Shadow fans know the Shadow’s real name.
Then there was Erle Stanley Gardner’s 1932 creation, The Patent Leather Kid, who was wealthy idle man-about-town Dan Seller, the source of whose wealth was a mystery. Unlike some other rich thieves, Seller assumes an intermediate persona, businessman Rodney Stone, who then, wearing black patent-leather mask, gloves and shoes, becomes the Kid whose exploits constantly antagonize Inspector Phil Brame. There were twelve stories and the Kid ceased his career in 1934.
Among the 49 other series characters that Gardner created, there were a few other short-lived rich thieves before He focused primarily on lawyer, Perry Mason.
No even brief consideration of rich thieves could omit Zorro, Johnston McCulley’s 1919 creation which has appeared in every mode of presentation possible. Don Diego de Valera, the indolent idle son of a wealthy Spanish land owner, dons black mask and costume, and on his great black stallion, Tornado, rides out to defend the poor or embarrass the Spanish authorities. McCulley’s portrayal of Zorro varied over the stories, particularly when he kills Zorro in his first story, then brings him back.
As popular as the stories were, it was the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., appearance in the 1920 silent film, The Mark of Zorro that put Zorro on the popular map for decades to come. It also created a new career for Fairbanks.
One of the earliest and most popular rich thieves was A. J. Raffles, by E. W. Hornung, the son-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle. The amateur cracksman and premier cricketer first appeared in 1898. Hornung’s creation was the inverse of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Raffles stole primarily to maintain his social standing, but also at times to settle accounts and for the sport of defeating an arrogant aristocracy. The final story in which Raffles, together with his loyal accomplice, Harry “Bunny” Manders, try to even things up ethically by joining the British Army during the Boer War during which Raffles is heroically killed.
Raffles became immediately popular with actors as Anthony Valentine, David Niven, Ronald Coleman, and John Barrymore portraying him in film, stage and television. After Hornung’s death, other authors continued the stories, all of which lead to an enjoyable read. Valentine’s Raffles in the British series of that name seems right on, a believable, resourceful rich thief.
There are more incarnations, naturally, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Arsene Lupin come to mind, but the rich thief remains one of the most enjoyable mystery clichés out there -- and what other mystery plot could get you up in a glider?
“You must not make the criminal a hero.”
Arthur Conan Doyle, 1924.
One of the most enjoyable plot gimmicks for mystery writers and readers is the story where the protagonist, a criminal, a thief who never kills, is actually a wealthy (or in the case of Raffles, apparently wealthy) socially-connected man who engages in crime to tweak the nose of the system , to champion some worthy cause, or just for the adrenaline rush of risking everything he has, even his freedom for twenty years or so.
A fun write, after all, look at the number of authors involved – but one that can, too easily, become a multi-layered cliché.
A few rich thieves who come immediately to mind would be:
The classic movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, particularly the original 1968 version with Steve McQueen, though the later 1999 version with Pierce Brosnan is also enjoyable (with a sequel rumored at various times). [As an aside, the original movie was being filmed in Boston while I was at the Harvard Business School. So it is a real nostalgia trip when my wife and I watch it again.] At the time of its 1968 filming the Boston Strangler story was much in the news which is why no street signs were revealed in the filming, with even the location of the Crown mansion on Beacon Hill (85 Mt. Vernon St.) was concealed, in order to ensue no viewer started thinking Strangler when they should be thinking Crown. One of the killings attributed to the Strangler took place about half-a-block from one of the scenes. And yes, I did take glider lessons, which was a blast. There is no age limit on glider licenses.
A friend, Walter B. Gibson, writing as Maxwell Grant, wrote one of the truly legendary rich thieves, The Shadow, starting in1930. Walter’s Shadow was not invisible, but had about every other talent imaginable. Walter ended up writing 286 Shadow novels at a rate of two novels per month. In one of our conversations, he told me, laughing, that his ardent readers would closely critique the stories and then chastise him for any mistakes he made, as, in one novel, when he put the Shadow’s telephone in his Sanctum on the wrong side of the desk. But at two novels a month and other writings in his “spare time” Walter was really the incarnation of the word prolific. The popularity of the Shadow radio program finally forced him to add Margo Lane to his novels, something he had resisted for a number of months. And, while Lamont Cranston was a wealthy man-about-town, in Walter’s stories, Cranston was a real person whose identity the Shadow used when Cranston himself was out of town. All Shadow fans know the Shadow’s real name.
Then there was Erle Stanley Gardner’s 1932 creation, The Patent Leather Kid, who was wealthy idle man-about-town Dan Seller, the source of whose wealth was a mystery. Unlike some other rich thieves, Seller assumes an intermediate persona, businessman Rodney Stone, who then, wearing black patent-leather mask, gloves and shoes, becomes the Kid whose exploits constantly antagonize Inspector Phil Brame. There were twelve stories and the Kid ceased his career in 1934.
Among the 49 other series characters that Gardner created, there were a few other short-lived rich thieves before He focused primarily on lawyer, Perry Mason.
No even brief consideration of rich thieves could omit Zorro, Johnston McCulley’s 1919 creation which has appeared in every mode of presentation possible. Don Diego de Valera, the indolent idle son of a wealthy Spanish land owner, dons black mask and costume, and on his great black stallion, Tornado, rides out to defend the poor or embarrass the Spanish authorities. McCulley’s portrayal of Zorro varied over the stories, particularly when he kills Zorro in his first story, then brings him back.
As popular as the stories were, it was the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., appearance in the 1920 silent film, The Mark of Zorro that put Zorro on the popular map for decades to come. It also created a new career for Fairbanks.
One of the earliest and most popular rich thieves was A. J. Raffles, by E. W. Hornung, the son-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle. The amateur cracksman and premier cricketer first appeared in 1898. Hornung’s creation was the inverse of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Raffles stole primarily to maintain his social standing, but also at times to settle accounts and for the sport of defeating an arrogant aristocracy. The final story in which Raffles, together with his loyal accomplice, Harry “Bunny” Manders, try to even things up ethically by joining the British Army during the Boer War during which Raffles is heroically killed.
Raffles became immediately popular with actors as Anthony Valentine, David Niven, Ronald Coleman, and John Barrymore portraying him in film, stage and television. After Hornung’s death, other authors continued the stories, all of which lead to an enjoyable read. Valentine’s Raffles in the British series of that name seems right on, a believable, resourceful rich thief.
There are more incarnations, naturally, The Scarlet Pimpernel and Arsene Lupin come to mind, but the rich thief remains one of the most enjoyable mystery clichés out there -- and what other mystery plot could get you up in a glider?
March 19, 2015
Chandler et al
Every mystery writer (and reader) goes back to the classics, to enjoy another time, to take a breath or to recalibrate. Just doing it for fun also counts.
I am currently reading The Maltese Falcon for the first time in about 15 years, with The Big Sleep in paperback waiting for a trip next week. But why reread books where the first sentence reads like a cliche? Because of all the other people who tried to write a sentence as good, and never could. The Mona Lisa is a visual cliche, but worth all the time you can give it for your second or tenth look.
I've always thought Chandler used the mansion on Franklin Avenue that is now the Magic Castle for the Sternwood mansion in The Big Sleep. It just fits too well. I would recommend your exploring the Castle (to determine your own opinion on the Sternwood question -- of course).
I have stood on the plot of ground where Miles Archer's body was found. I have eaten Sam's Chops at John's Grill while having a beer at the bar where Hammett customarily drank his lunch. Sam's Chops is the meal that Sam ate in the Falcon before running off on a wild goose chase on the Peninsula. While you are at John's grill, go upstairs to see the photos and displays regarding the movie and Hammett. The third floor used to be for a jazz night, but I'm not sure if that happens any more. John's is one of the last 2-3 old style grills still operating in the City. Brass, mahogany, and only waiters, not waitresses, and a great but limited menu.
Have you read Chandler's 1956 review of Fleming's James Bond creation? He thought Bond was an excellent creation, and that the first three novels were solid, but the fourth, Diamonds Are Forever, had a great title but read like a standard American gangster novel. (Chandler was writing in the Sunday London Times, Narch 25, 1956.) He calls Bond in this novel a character "as atmospheric as a dinosaur". The punch-line to Chandler is that the amazing thing about this American novel was that it was written by an Englishman. He then advises Ian Fleming not to be a stunt writer, or "he will end up no better than the rest of us".
While finishing my current novel, I am beginning working on a thriller novel set in 1988 in London, Paris and the French Countryside called 34 rue St. Dominique, which has a major sub-plot I haven't seen used in any thriller, i.e., the French Gestapo. I'll talk some about the French Gestapo next time.
BTW, the best brief work on Hammett and Chandler is Robert B. Parker's The Private Eye in Hammett and Chandler, Lord John Press, 1984. A signed private printing, I have #282 of 300 copies. It is a remnant of his Ph.D. thesis of the same title with a misspelling on the first page, but what the hell, it's only ink.
I am currently reading The Maltese Falcon for the first time in about 15 years, with The Big Sleep in paperback waiting for a trip next week. But why reread books where the first sentence reads like a cliche? Because of all the other people who tried to write a sentence as good, and never could. The Mona Lisa is a visual cliche, but worth all the time you can give it for your second or tenth look.
I've always thought Chandler used the mansion on Franklin Avenue that is now the Magic Castle for the Sternwood mansion in The Big Sleep. It just fits too well. I would recommend your exploring the Castle (to determine your own opinion on the Sternwood question -- of course).
I have stood on the plot of ground where Miles Archer's body was found. I have eaten Sam's Chops at John's Grill while having a beer at the bar where Hammett customarily drank his lunch. Sam's Chops is the meal that Sam ate in the Falcon before running off on a wild goose chase on the Peninsula. While you are at John's grill, go upstairs to see the photos and displays regarding the movie and Hammett. The third floor used to be for a jazz night, but I'm not sure if that happens any more. John's is one of the last 2-3 old style grills still operating in the City. Brass, mahogany, and only waiters, not waitresses, and a great but limited menu.
Have you read Chandler's 1956 review of Fleming's James Bond creation? He thought Bond was an excellent creation, and that the first three novels were solid, but the fourth, Diamonds Are Forever, had a great title but read like a standard American gangster novel. (Chandler was writing in the Sunday London Times, Narch 25, 1956.) He calls Bond in this novel a character "as atmospheric as a dinosaur". The punch-line to Chandler is that the amazing thing about this American novel was that it was written by an Englishman. He then advises Ian Fleming not to be a stunt writer, or "he will end up no better than the rest of us".
While finishing my current novel, I am beginning working on a thriller novel set in 1988 in London, Paris and the French Countryside called 34 rue St. Dominique, which has a major sub-plot I haven't seen used in any thriller, i.e., the French Gestapo. I'll talk some about the French Gestapo next time.
BTW, the best brief work on Hammett and Chandler is Robert B. Parker's The Private Eye in Hammett and Chandler, Lord John Press, 1984. A signed private printing, I have #282 of 300 copies. It is a remnant of his Ph.D. thesis of the same title with a misspelling on the first page, but what the hell, it's only ink.
December 27, 2014
The Impossible
I performed a mind reading act while in college. Relax. I was a fake. I made interesting money and learned a valuable lesson. People, intelligent well-educated people, men and women, will believe whatever they need to believe – almost regardless of any contrary evidence. I was a seventeen year old fake mindreader that people, years and years older, were asking to tell their fortunes. I just couldn’t do that, though I knew the jargon and the routine, and though I could have tripled my mentalist income if I had. The downside was not worth it.
Years later, I learned another aspect of that lesson while doing volunteer work in a local maximum-security prison when I came to know three con men, and, once gaining their trust, we discussed setting up cons, short cons, long cons and what the real difference was between the thinking and the risks involved. They were experienced cons who could fake sincerity with the best of the politicians. One night as I was leaving, and we had come to know each other, I asked the obvious question: “I’m going home and you are going back to your 5x7 cell. What went wrong?”
Though naturally their details were different, the bottom line was the same. What had brought each of them down was coming to believe their own con, to prefer the fake personae, the fake story to their own reality. As one explained, when you become the wrong person, you stop watching the edges of the con, stop watching your back, and the holes in your story become “pathetically obvious”.
Thus, in my writing, both non-fiction and fiction, the paranormal is all fake, all a con. I wrote the biography of the woman whom Harry Houdini called “… the greatest female mystifier”. That was blonde, blue-eyed, only five feet tall, Anna Eva Fay. (Her biography is The Indescribable Phenomenon from Hermetic Press.) She was the quintessential con woman who went from a condition of near slavery in northeastern Ohio to becoming the most acclaimed spirit medium in the U.S., convincing prominent scientists in the US and UK that she was the real thing, that she could project “a non-human force at a distance”. When the profits from the ghosts started declining in 1894, Annie went on the vaudeville stage to become acclaimed as a greater showman than Houdini. In her act, she repeated some of what she had done in the séance room, then Annie stole the mind reading act of magician, S.S. Baldwin, to add it to her séance material, then performed it better than he did, as Baldwin publicly admitted. Annie died in 1927 at 76 in her own bed, the wealthiest citizen of Melrose, MA. Her home, Heathman Manor, had seen Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and others who came to consult her on the spirits, real and fake. At the time of her death, Anna Eva Fay was eulogized in the New York Times. Annie, throughout her 48 year career, never believed her own con.
So, when you are plotting the impossible in your story or novel, do you make the paranormal powers displayed fake or real? The problem with doing it “real” is to be able to make your protagonist productively vulnerable, i.e., does the vulnerability advance the plot, is he or she someone who makes believable mistakes and legitimately suffers from them. Be careful as scattering too many chunks of Kryptonite about your plot eventually becomes obvious, silly … and dull.
I knew Walter B. Gibson who created the character of The Shadow, one of the greatest mystery protagonists in the genre. Walter created the Shadow as highly intelligent, relentless, ruthless, with an astonishing range of bizarre knowledge – but never invisible. When the Shadow went on radio with Orson Welles as his initial incarnation, he was not only invisible but could also read minds. As was pointed out at the time with some humor, the only thing between the crooks and justice was the commercials as with those powers, the Shadow could never lose. When it was realized that a super-Shadow was dull, the Shadow lost his mentalist powers and gained Margo Lane. A great trade-off.
When I began my Adventures in Second Sight trilogy I modeled my teen-age heroine, Kyame Piddington, after Anna Eva Fay. At the age of eleven and desperately trying to replace her dead mother in the family second sight act (two-person mind reading), Kyame learns hard lessons as she deals with hostile audiences, bank robbers, jadoo-wallahs, murderous crystal gazers, and others, along with the prediction of a New York Chinese astrologer, that she had the soul of an implacable assassin. All in the course of which, learning from her father and the people she encounters, Kyame comes to understand how to sell her con, to become real to the people as she and her father travel across the American West in 1890-95. At sixteen in San Francisco, she faces the master of the Bing On tong who had literally butchered her father, her own death only a few seconds away, yet it is Kyame who disappears from the master’s windowless office, leaving him dead with a silver knife in his heart, and leaving the door behind her still barred from the inside.
To members of the tong, the young white woman should have been dead, but now they believed she was a tulku, a Tibetan term for an occult wraith who can move through solid walls and locked doors to kill and then vanish.
Kyame had sold her con to her toughest audience.
I love vampires (my favorites are by Scarlet Dean), and I have sat on the Bram Stoker Memorial Bench on the bluff overlooking Whitby Harbor with Dracula in the back of my mind. But for me as a writer, a fake paranormal is more challenging, more intriguing -- and you, the reader, can actually go out and duplicate the wonder you have just read.
Just don’t believe it.
Years later, I learned another aspect of that lesson while doing volunteer work in a local maximum-security prison when I came to know three con men, and, once gaining their trust, we discussed setting up cons, short cons, long cons and what the real difference was between the thinking and the risks involved. They were experienced cons who could fake sincerity with the best of the politicians. One night as I was leaving, and we had come to know each other, I asked the obvious question: “I’m going home and you are going back to your 5x7 cell. What went wrong?”
Though naturally their details were different, the bottom line was the same. What had brought each of them down was coming to believe their own con, to prefer the fake personae, the fake story to their own reality. As one explained, when you become the wrong person, you stop watching the edges of the con, stop watching your back, and the holes in your story become “pathetically obvious”.
Thus, in my writing, both non-fiction and fiction, the paranormal is all fake, all a con. I wrote the biography of the woman whom Harry Houdini called “… the greatest female mystifier”. That was blonde, blue-eyed, only five feet tall, Anna Eva Fay. (Her biography is The Indescribable Phenomenon from Hermetic Press.) She was the quintessential con woman who went from a condition of near slavery in northeastern Ohio to becoming the most acclaimed spirit medium in the U.S., convincing prominent scientists in the US and UK that she was the real thing, that she could project “a non-human force at a distance”. When the profits from the ghosts started declining in 1894, Annie went on the vaudeville stage to become acclaimed as a greater showman than Houdini. In her act, she repeated some of what she had done in the séance room, then Annie stole the mind reading act of magician, S.S. Baldwin, to add it to her séance material, then performed it better than he did, as Baldwin publicly admitted. Annie died in 1927 at 76 in her own bed, the wealthiest citizen of Melrose, MA. Her home, Heathman Manor, had seen Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and others who came to consult her on the spirits, real and fake. At the time of her death, Anna Eva Fay was eulogized in the New York Times. Annie, throughout her 48 year career, never believed her own con.
So, when you are plotting the impossible in your story or novel, do you make the paranormal powers displayed fake or real? The problem with doing it “real” is to be able to make your protagonist productively vulnerable, i.e., does the vulnerability advance the plot, is he or she someone who makes believable mistakes and legitimately suffers from them. Be careful as scattering too many chunks of Kryptonite about your plot eventually becomes obvious, silly … and dull.
I knew Walter B. Gibson who created the character of The Shadow, one of the greatest mystery protagonists in the genre. Walter created the Shadow as highly intelligent, relentless, ruthless, with an astonishing range of bizarre knowledge – but never invisible. When the Shadow went on radio with Orson Welles as his initial incarnation, he was not only invisible but could also read minds. As was pointed out at the time with some humor, the only thing between the crooks and justice was the commercials as with those powers, the Shadow could never lose. When it was realized that a super-Shadow was dull, the Shadow lost his mentalist powers and gained Margo Lane. A great trade-off.
When I began my Adventures in Second Sight trilogy I modeled my teen-age heroine, Kyame Piddington, after Anna Eva Fay. At the age of eleven and desperately trying to replace her dead mother in the family second sight act (two-person mind reading), Kyame learns hard lessons as she deals with hostile audiences, bank robbers, jadoo-wallahs, murderous crystal gazers, and others, along with the prediction of a New York Chinese astrologer, that she had the soul of an implacable assassin. All in the course of which, learning from her father and the people she encounters, Kyame comes to understand how to sell her con, to become real to the people as she and her father travel across the American West in 1890-95. At sixteen in San Francisco, she faces the master of the Bing On tong who had literally butchered her father, her own death only a few seconds away, yet it is Kyame who disappears from the master’s windowless office, leaving him dead with a silver knife in his heart, and leaving the door behind her still barred from the inside.
To members of the tong, the young white woman should have been dead, but now they believed she was a tulku, a Tibetan term for an occult wraith who can move through solid walls and locked doors to kill and then vanish.
Kyame had sold her con to her toughest audience.
I love vampires (my favorites are by Scarlet Dean), and I have sat on the Bram Stoker Memorial Bench on the bluff overlooking Whitby Harbor with Dracula in the back of my mind. But for me as a writer, a fake paranormal is more challenging, more intriguing -- and you, the reader, can actually go out and duplicate the wonder you have just read.
Just don’t believe it.
October 13, 2014
Gump's
Gump's -- a San Francisco store that from 1861 to 1975 meant exclusive exotic luxury. Richard Gump was president from 1947 to 1975 when he sold the store in order to settle the Gump estate. The store was then sold five more times until in 2005 it was bought by a private investment firm.
The only object in the present Gump's from the original store is a large gilded Buddha from the Qing Dynasty. As in the original store,the Buddha is the only item in the store not for sale.
The full and fascinating history of Gump's is in Gump's Treasure Trade (1949, recently reprinted) and in Gump's since 1861: a San Francisco Legend(1991).
Richard Gump was a handsome, wealthy, talented bachelor. He was the quintessential man-about-town, appearing frequently in the local papers with beautiful women on his arm. He was also a widely acknowledged expert on jade and on what constituted 'good taste'. His two books, Jade, Stone of Heaven (1962) and Good Taste Costs No More (1951) still make informative reading, particularly the one on jade.
In 1946, Petrie Wine was looking for a summer replacement for its successful radio show "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (this was the last time that Rathbone took the role of Holmes). The writers, Anthony Boucher (who wrote the plot synopsis) and Denis Green (who wrote the final script) came up with "The Casebook of Gregory Hood", which starred a handsome, wealthy and talented man-about-town who ran an import/export firm dealing in exclusive exotic objects while solving mysteries and pursuing beautiful women for 30 minutes once a week. Based on private correspondence, Richard Gump was their direct model. Gump was also referenced on the show a few times as a client of Hood Importers.
There are 15 surviving radio shows available from any old-time radio dealer. And the scripts are available from Crippen & Landau (2009) in The Casebook of Gregory Hood, edited by Joe Christopher (who kindly references me in a footnote or two).
All of which then says, therefore what?
The Gump story is of great interest by itself. For me it goes further, as I have my mentalist-detective, John Randall Brown, living at 13 August Alley with Gump overtones; and in the second of the Steele Mackaye Investigations novellas put out by Stark Raving Group (the first will be released at Bouchercon)a client of the firm is Gregory Hood who reminiscences about Gump and his father. Gump stuff will be back in the third Steele Mackaye story, "The Eleventh Curse", as there is a Gump Ocean Research Station on the island of Mo'orea, a former 34 acre estate which Richard Gump gave to UC Berkeley. The Gump research has just been great fun. Please join in.
The only object in the present Gump's from the original store is a large gilded Buddha from the Qing Dynasty. As in the original store,the Buddha is the only item in the store not for sale.
The full and fascinating history of Gump's is in Gump's Treasure Trade (1949, recently reprinted) and in Gump's since 1861: a San Francisco Legend(1991).
Richard Gump was a handsome, wealthy, talented bachelor. He was the quintessential man-about-town, appearing frequently in the local papers with beautiful women on his arm. He was also a widely acknowledged expert on jade and on what constituted 'good taste'. His two books, Jade, Stone of Heaven (1962) and Good Taste Costs No More (1951) still make informative reading, particularly the one on jade.
In 1946, Petrie Wine was looking for a summer replacement for its successful radio show "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce (this was the last time that Rathbone took the role of Holmes). The writers, Anthony Boucher (who wrote the plot synopsis) and Denis Green (who wrote the final script) came up with "The Casebook of Gregory Hood", which starred a handsome, wealthy and talented man-about-town who ran an import/export firm dealing in exclusive exotic objects while solving mysteries and pursuing beautiful women for 30 minutes once a week. Based on private correspondence, Richard Gump was their direct model. Gump was also referenced on the show a few times as a client of Hood Importers.
There are 15 surviving radio shows available from any old-time radio dealer. And the scripts are available from Crippen & Landau (2009) in The Casebook of Gregory Hood, edited by Joe Christopher (who kindly references me in a footnote or two).
All of which then says, therefore what?
The Gump story is of great interest by itself. For me it goes further, as I have my mentalist-detective, John Randall Brown, living at 13 August Alley with Gump overtones; and in the second of the Steele Mackaye Investigations novellas put out by Stark Raving Group (the first will be released at Bouchercon)a client of the firm is Gregory Hood who reminiscences about Gump and his father. Gump stuff will be back in the third Steele Mackaye story, "The Eleventh Curse", as there is a Gump Ocean Research Station on the island of Mo'orea, a former 34 acre estate which Richard Gump gave to UC Berkeley. The Gump research has just been great fun. Please join in.
Plotting the Impossible
Reflections and thoughts on the books I'm reading both as pleasure and as research for my writings, both fiction and non-fiction. The topics will be all over the place, so don't expect any consistency
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