Harry the Valet was a famous Victorian jewel thief who was celebrated for his daring exploits in which he swiped the jewels of the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland and the evil Maharajah of Alwar. Hornung may have based the Raffles books on him. Despite his humble Cockney beginnings (though his family was middle class and bourgeois) he posed as a debonair man about time, living the high life of champagne and Gaiety Girls and shooting in the season, funding it all from the proceeds of his crimes.
His modus operandi was to hang around railway stations watching the upper class travelling with the footmen and maids, wait until the maid put the jewel case down and turned her back, instantly pinch it and escape. This called for acute observation, dexterity (he learned his trade as a pickpocket), daring, and the ability to blend into the crowd both before and after the event. But it was a fundamentally simple M.O. and the wonder is that he got away with it for so long. Because he specialised in jewels he was very dependent on a network of fences and was lucky that none of them turned him in. In the end it was his recklessness in the aftermath of his most spectacular heist that earned him his first long prison spell; after that he was too old to truly be successful and too well-known to escape for long.
Although Hamilton repeatedly pads his book with tantalising glimpses of what will be revealed in the final chapter, which irritates me immensely, he is a great writer who has built a sometimes seedy life into a rattling good yarn.
Excellent. December 2013; 285 pages
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