Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)’s Reviews > The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief > Status Update

Just noticed that somehow GR has me as reading this since July. I only started reading it in Dec, though I put it in my bookshelves back then. Odd.

"Mother, as it happened, was extravagantly seasick throughout the voyage..." - I think everyone can imagine what the extravagant part entails. Also men who call their wives Mother have always creeped me out.

"William Pinkerton upheld the law, but in a highly personalized way, and he was not above bending the rules if circumstances or individuals required it. On such shifting sands was the rock of Victorian morality built." - Um, you don't build rocks?!

"Hillary Farrington, an enormous backwoods outlaw whose mother appeared to have mated with a grizzly bear, was restrained in a pair of custom-forged manacles..." Later, he learns that it's a bad thing to get caught under a boat's paddle wheels.

"When the talented, and plainly insane, train robber Oliver Curtis Perry stole $8000 by sawing through the side of a moving train, William [Pinkerton] made no secret of his awe. "There are few if any men who posses the daredevil courage to accomplish what this train robber did." "

"He grew portly, and his mustache evolved in shapes ever more luxurious and rococo..." - immediately had to pause and imagine rococo mustaches. I immediately think Dr. Seussian type designs. Victorians did go a bit crazy with the facial hair.

One of the main problems this author has is trying to work in quotes that aren't related to the subject. Example on this pg: "As Worth stood before the painting in the dark gallery that night, he might have pondered the words of the previous occupant" - Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. Key word there is might. Because we have no idea if Worth knew that Sterne had died there, or if he'd have cared.