Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
Two for the Money
By Simon Raven
The Shortest Route to Paradise: The Story of Charles Peace
by David Ward
Horizon, 176 pp., $4.95
The Prince of Thieves
by J.J. Lynx
Atheneum, 237 pp., $4.95
Of these two rather moderate books, David Ward's is probably the more reliable. J. J. Lynx's, by virtue of its charming hero, definitely the more attractive. Mr. Ward's The Shortest Route to Paradise tells the story of Charles Peace, a notorious English house-breaker of the mid-nineteenth century who was finally hanged for murder and while this book suffers from a lot of fatuous social and moral hindsight, it has an air of careful documentation, of sober attention to detail, which invites belief. Mr. Lynx, on the other hand, is anything but sober his The Prince of Thieves, which deals with the life and gay times of George Manolesco (alias the Duke of Otranto, alias H. H. Prince Lahovary, historical prototype of Raffles and Arsène Lupin), abounds in imagined conversations and encounters so arch and yet so prurient that one feels as though one were reading a Victorian kitchen romance illustrated by early examples of the dirty photograph—you know the kind of thing, grotesqueries of black hose and enormous yellow bottoms. Nevertheless, it must be allowed that the criminal files of Europe do give Mr. Lynx broad warrant for these reconstructions; that Mr. Lynx, unlike Mr. Ward, does not come all over priggish about forensic problems; and that George Manolesco is in any case a big enough character to survive his biographer's shortcomings.
Review, 744 words
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