The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont, page 1
THE TRIUMPHS OF EUGENE VALMONT
The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (1906) is a collection of lively, enjoyable stories about a French detective resident in London. Whether dealing with a gang of anarchists in ‘The Siamese Twin of a Bomb-Thrower’ or flirting with the supernatural in ‘The Ghost with the Club-Foot’, the resourceful M. Valmont rarely loses his sang-froid and self-confidence. He may not always catch the criminal but his sense of style and Poirot-like conceit remain intact. Valmont is one of the most successful of the Edwardian era’s many rivals to Sherlock Holmes. His cases do not demand feats of Sherlockian deduction but the wit and energy with which Robert Barr tells them mean that the assorted triumphs of Eugene Valmont will continue to delight readers in the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Robert Barr (September 16, 1849–October 21, 1912) was a British-Canadian novelist, born at Glasgow, Scotland. He immigrated to Upper Canada at age four and was educated in Toronto at Toronto Normal School. Barr was headmaster of the Central School, Windsor, Ontario, and in 1876 became a member of the staff of the Detroit Free Press, in which his contributions appeared under the signature ‘Luke Sharp’. In 1881 he removed to London, to establish there the weekly English edition of the Free Press and in 1892 founded The Idler magazine, choosing Jerome K Jerome as his collaborator (wanting, as Jerome said, ‘a popular name’). He retired from the co-editorship in 1895.
GASLIGHT CRIME – A GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Nick Rennison
When fans of crime novels talk of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, they are usually referring to the 1920s and the 1930s – the era of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham. Yet there was an earlier and arguably greater Golden Age – the period between 1887, the year in which Sherlock Holmes first appeared, and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This was the Age of Gaslight Crime. It was during these years that crime fiction emerged as a full-fledged genre of literature. This was the time when dozens of weekly and monthly magazines regularly featured crime stories. It was when some of the major publishers of the day began to publish detective novels in large numbers for the first time. It was when Sherlock Holmes grew and grew in popularity until he was established as the iconic figure in British culture he has remained to the present day.
The era had other genre bestsellers in addition to Conan Doyle’s novels and collections of short stories about his great detective. Some even sold more copies than the works of the maestro. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume, for instance, was first published in 1886 in Melbourne, Australia, the city in which the story takes place. The following year – the same year in which Sherlock Holmes took his first bow in A Study in Scarlet – the novel appeared in an edition published in London. It went on to sell half a million copies worldwide, far outstripping early sales of Conan Doyle’s book. Hume published more than a hundred other novels, not all of them crime fiction, in a career that lasted until 1932 but none had the startling success of his first one.
However, the story is not all about Holmes and big bestsellers. What is striking about crime fiction in the 1890s and 1900s is its sheer diversity. Inspired by Conan Doyle, plenty of pipe-smoking imitations of his great detective prowled the foggy streets of London. Some were mere clones created by hack penny-a-liners to fill the pages of the proliferating magazines. Others were more substantial and original creations in themselves. Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt, a lawyer turned private detective, featured in stories that were originally published, like the Sherlock Holmes adventures, in the Strand magazine. Hewitt was a much less flamboyant character than Holmes but his adventures remain well worth reading. (Morrison was also the creator of Horace Dorrington, an intriguingly amoral private detective in 1890s London who’s not even averse to trying to bump off his clients if they become troublesome.) Dr Thorndyke, the invention of R Austin Freeman, was a medical man who became a lawyer and used the knowledge he had gained in both professions to solve crimes. He made his debut in 1907 in The Red Thumb Mark, a tale that highlights the then fledgling science of fingerprints, and continued to appear in novels and short stories until 1942.
Eager to make their characters stand out from the crowd, writers sought for novel and distinguishing features with which to endow them. At the very end of the gaslight era, Ernest Bramah introduced his blind investigator Max Carrados, a man whose other senses had become preternaturally acute since he lost his sight. Thorpe Hazell, a railway obsessive and passionate vegetarian, was the unlikely hero of a series of stories by Victor Whitechurch, first collected in a volume published in 1912 entitled Thrilling Stories of the Railway and read recently on BBC Radio by Benedict Cumberbatch. Some detectives of the time had a particular attraction to the occult. William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder and Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance faced up to mostly supernatural antagonists in their investigations. Gentlemen burglars were popular on both sides of the Channel. Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law EW Hornung created Raffles, a cricketer and amateur cracksman who appeared in twenty-six short stories and one novel between 1898 and 1909; the French writer Maurice Leblanc came up with the similarly larcenous Arsène Lupin in 1905 and his adventures were rapidly translated into English.
Sleuths of all nationalities from French (Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont) and Indian (a wise old Hindu named Kala Persad featured in stories by Headon Hill) to Canadian (the woodsman November Joe, created by Hesketh Prichard) flourished in the magazines. Women detectives were also popular. Catherine Louisa Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, who appeared in short stories in The Ludgate Monthly in 1893 and then in book form, was a resourceful employee of the Fleet Street Detective Agency; Dorcas Dene, an actress turned detective, featured in two books by George R Sims; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was the creation of Baroness Orczy, best known for her novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the dashing hero of the French Revolution.
Many of the categories of crime fiction familiar today originated in this era. Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery, published as a serial in 1891, was the first full-length ‘locked room’ mystery; the ‘inverted detective story’, in which the murderer’s identity is known from the beginning and the interest lies in the investigative process, has its beginnings in the work of R Austin Freeman; many of Freeman’s books can also be seen as forerunners of forensic science mysteries; and the psychological thriller, which might seem an exclusively contemporary form, has its prototypes in books like Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger. Even the beginnings of the police procedural, usually dated to the years after the Second World War, can be glimpsed in Edwardian stories about police officers like B Fletcher Robinson’s Inspector Addington Peace and George R Sims’s Detective Inspector Chance.
The Gaslight Crime and Mystery Club reflects the huge variety of crime fiction from the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It really was a Golden Age. In the pages of the Club’s books, readers will find all the evidence they need that there is much more to gaslight crime than just Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. There are many more riches just waiting to be discovered.
THE TRIUMPHS OF EUGENE VALMONT
A Preface by Nick Rennison
It’s difficult to exaggerate the influence Sherlock Holmes had on crime fiction in the 1890s and 1900s. The success of Conan Doyle’s detective spawned hundreds of imitators. The period was a golden age for English magazines and they were all filled with potential rivals to the Baker Street sleuth. There were female detectives, blind detectives, American detectives, gypsy detectives, medical detectives, railway detectives, clerical detectives, and detectives who investigated the supernatural. There were even French detectives. Of the latter, the most successful was created not by a French writer but by a Scotsman who had grown up in Canada and returned to the UK to forge a literary career that encompassed everything from travel sketches to historical fiction. Robert Barr’s Eugène Valmont first appeared in stories published in Windsor Magazine and Pearson’s Magazine in 1904-5. The stories were collected in a volume entitled The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont in 1906. Barr had been the author of some of the very earliest parodies of Sherlock Holmes (‘Detective Stories Gone Wrong: The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs’ was published in The Idler, the magazine he founded with Jerome K Jerome, in 1892) and it is little wonder that his own detective has Sherlockian qualities. Like Holmes, Valmont – a former head of the Parisian police in exile in London – has the habit of carefully explaining his deductive processes to those with a less quick mind. He is a master of disguise. He is not interested in money but works only on cases that interest him. And, again like Holmes, he has little but contempt for the clodhopping policemen of Scotland Yard. In one of the Valmont stories (‘The Absent-Minded Coterie’) there are clear echoes of Conan Doyle’s ‘The Red-Headed League’, as Barr cheerfully hints to his readers. Eugène Valmont, however, is a much more tongue-in-cheek creation than Sherlock Holmes. The title of the book, The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont, seems ironic. We see very few of his triumphs. The very first story explains why he has had to leave France to avoid becoming a laughing-stock and, in the rest of the tales, he fails far more often than he succeeds. Yet none of these setbacks ever daunts him or dents his supreme self-confidence. ‘I have had my failures, of course,’ he acknowledges but he remains a happy egotist. Whether dealing with a gang of anarchists in ‘The Siamese Twin of a Bomb-Thrower’ or flirting with the supernatural in ‘The Ghost with the Club-Foot’, his sense of style and his almost Poirot-like conceit never desert him. Most of the detectives who thronged the pages of those late Victorian and Edwardian magazines have been forgotten. Many of them deserve their fate but Eugène Valmont is not one of them. He was, and remains, an original and enjoyable creation. In 1948, the American crime writer Ellery Queen described The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont as a tour de force and praised its ‘humour, warmth and ingenuity’. More than seventy years later, their verdict still seems a just one.
Part 1
THE TRIUMPHS OF EUGENE VALMONT
The Mystery of the Five Hundred Diamonds
When I say I am called Valmont, the name will convey no impression to the reader, one way or another. My occupation is that of private detective in London, but if you ask any policeman in Paris who Valmont was he will likely be able to tell you, unless he is a recent recruit. If you ask him where Valmont is now, he may not know, yet I have a good deal to do with the Parisian police.
For a period of seven years I was chief detective to the Government of France, and if I am unable to prove myself a great crime hunter, it is because the record of my career is in the secret archives of Paris.
I may admit at the outset that I have no grievances to air. The French Government considered itself justified in dismissing me, and it did so. In this action it was quite within its right, and I should be the last to dispute that right; but, on the other hand, I consider myself justified in publishing the following account of what actually occurred, especially as so many false rumours have been put abroad concerning the case. However, as I said at the beginning, I hold no grievance, because my worldly affairs are now much more prosperous than they were in Paris, my intimate knowledge of that city and the country of which it is the capital bringing to me many cases with which I have dealt more or less successfully since I established myself in London.
Without further preliminary I shall at once plunge into an account of the case which riveted the attention of the whole world a little more than a decade ago.
The year 1893 was a prosperous twelve months for France. The weather was good, the harvest excellent, and the wine of that vintage is celebrated to this day. Everyone was well off and reasonably happy, a marked contrast to the state of things a few years later, when dissension over the Dreyfus case rent the country in twain.
Newspaper readers may remember that in 1893 the Government of France fell heir to an unexpected treasure which set the civilised world agog, especially those inhabitants of it who are interested in historical relics. This was the finding of the diamond necklace in the Château de Chaumont, where it had rested undiscovered for a century in a rubbish heap of an attic. I believe it has not been questioned that this was the veritable necklace which the court jeweller, Boehmer, hoped to sell to Marie Antoinette, although how it came to be in the Château de Chaumont no one has been able to form even a conjecture. For a hundred years it was supposed that the necklace had been broken up in London, and its half a thousand stones, great and small, sold separately. It has always seemed strange to me that the Countess de Lamotte-Valois, who was thought to have profited by the sale of these jewels, should not have abandoned France if she possessed money to leave that country, for exposure was inevitable if she remained. Indeed, the unfortunate woman was branded and imprisoned, and afterwards was dashed to death from the third storey of a London house, when, in the direst poverty, she sought escape from the consequences of the debts she had incurred.
I am not superstitious in the least, yet this celebrated piece of treasure trove seems actually to have exerted a malign influence over everyone who had the misfortune to be connected with it. Indeed, in a small way, I who write these words suffered dismissal and disgrace, though I caught but one glimpse of this dazzling scintillation of jewels. The jeweller who made the necklace met financial ruin; the Queen for whom it was constructed was beheaded; that high-born Prince Louis René Edouard, Cardinal de Rohan, who purchased it, was flung into prison; the unfortunate Countess, who said she acted as go-between until the transfer was concluded, clung for five awful minutes to a London windowsill before dropping to her death to the flags below; and now, a hundred and eight years later, up comes this devil’s display of fireworks to the light again!
Droulliard, the working man who found the ancient box, seems to have prised it open, and ignorant though he was – he had probably never seen a diamond in his life before – realised that a fortune was in his grasp. The baleful glitter from the combination must have sent madness into his brain, working havoc therein as though the shafts of brightness were those mysterious rays which scientists have recently discovered. He might quite easily have walked through the main gate of the Château unsuspected and unquestioned with the diamonds concealed about his person, but instead of this he crept from the attic window on to the steep roof, slipped to the eaves, fell to the ground, and lay dead with a broken neck, while the necklace, intact, shimmered in the sunlight beside his body. No matter where these jewels had been found the Government would have insisted that they belonged to the Treasury of the Republic; but as the Château de Chaumont was a historical monument, and the property of France, there could be no question regarding the ownership of the necklace. The Government at once claimed it, and ordered it to be sent by a trustworthy military man to Paris. It was carried safely and delivered promptly to the authorities by Alfred Dreyfus, a young captain of artillery, to whom its custody had been entrusted.
In spite of its fall from the tall tower neither case nor jewels were perceptibly damaged. The lock of the box had apparently been forced by Droulliard’s hatchet, or perhaps by the clasp knife found on his body. On reaching the ground the lid had flown open, and the necklace was thrown out.
I believe there was some discussion in the Cabinet regarding the fate of this ill-omened trophy, one section wishing it to be placed in a museum on account of its historical interest, another advocating the breaking up of the necklace and the selling of the diamonds for what they would fetch. But a third party maintained that the method to get the most money into the coffers of the country was to sell the necklace as it stood, for as the world now contains so many rich amateurs who collect undoubted rarities, regardless of expense, the historic associations of the jewelled collar would enhance the intrinsic value of the stones; and, this view prevailing, it was announced that the necklace would be sold by auction a month later in the rooms of Meyer, Renault and Co, in the Boulevard des Italiens, near the Bank of the Crédit-Lyonnais.
This announcement elicited much comment from the newspapers of all countries, and it seemed that, from a financial point of view at least, the decision of the Government had been wise, for it speedily became evident that a notable coterie of wealthy buyers would be congregated in Paris on the thirteenth (unlucky day for me!) when the sale was to take place. But we of the inner circle were made aware of another result somewhat more disquieting, which was that the most expert criminals in the world were also gathering like vultures upon the fair city. The honour of France was at stake. Whoever bought that necklace must be assured of a safe conduct out of the country. We might view with equanimity whatever happened afterwards, but while he was a resident of France his life and property must not be endangered. Thus it came about that I was given full authority to ensure that neither murder nor theft nor both combined should be committed while the purchaser of the necklace remained within our boundaries, and for this purpose the police resources of France were placed unreservedly at my disposal. If I failed there should be no one to blame but myself; consequently, as I have remarked before, I do not complain of my dismissal by the Government.
The broken lock of the jewel case had been very deftly repaired by an expert locksmith, who in executing his task was so unfortunate as to scratch a finger on the broken metal, whereupon blood poisoning set in, and although his life was saved, he was dismissed from the hospital with his right arm gone and his usefulness destroyed.
