bluegargantua (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bluegargantua) wrote2009-04-28 11:05 am
bluegargantua) wrote2009-04-28 11:05 am
Entry tags:
A Stolen Review
Hi,
So I just finished reading The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes edited by Michael Sims. I hate it when books are vague about their contents.
No, as you might expect there's a wide range of tales involving criminals as protagonists all collected from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The stories are all short and punchy and most of them are very clever (the last story about Four Square Jane seemed to suffer a bit from "really? that didn't happen in the course of the investigation?").
In particular, I really enjoyed the high finance con games perpetrated by George Randolph Chester's Get Rich Quick Wallingford and the secret logs of William Hope Hodgson's smuggler Captain Gault. I'd certainly be interested in tracking down a few more of those.
So it's a fun little book and it's perfect if you only get irregular reading time as you can probably finish any given story in 10-15 minutes. Plus, it clearly whets the appetite for a few more stories by various authors you probably haven't heard of.
later
Tom
So I just finished reading The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes edited by Michael Sims. I hate it when books are vague about their contents.
No, as you might expect there's a wide range of tales involving criminals as protagonists all collected from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The stories are all short and punchy and most of them are very clever (the last story about Four Square Jane seemed to suffer a bit from "really? that didn't happen in the course of the investigation?").
In particular, I really enjoyed the high finance con games perpetrated by George Randolph Chester's Get Rich Quick Wallingford and the secret logs of William Hope Hodgson's smuggler Captain Gault. I'd certainly be interested in tracking down a few more of those.
So it's a fun little book and it's perfect if you only get irregular reading time as you can probably finish any given story in 10-15 minutes. Plus, it clearly whets the appetite for a few more stories by various authors you probably haven't heard of.
later
Tom