Grant Allen

• Born: February 24, 1848
• Birthplace: Alwington, near Kingston, Ontario, Canada
• Died: October 25, 1899
• Place of death: Hindhead, Surrey, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted

Contribution

Grant Allen wrote what he himself acknowledged to be potboilers. Most of his works appeared in serial form in popular magazines such as the Cornhill and the Strand; they were later republished in collections that revolved around a central character. Of these collections, the most famous is An African Millionaire (1897). Its central character, Colonel Clay, has been called “the first great thief of short mystery fiction.” Besides being the first English writer of “crook fiction,” a type of inverted crime story, Allen may have been the first writer to make use of female sleuths: Miss Cayley, in Miss Cayley’s Adventures (1899), and Hilda Wade, in the novel named for her (1900).

Biography

Grant Allen was born Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen on February 24, 1848, in Kingston, Canada. He was the second and only surviving son of Joseph Antisell Allen, a minister of the Irish church, and Charlotte Ann Grant, daughter of the fifth baron de Longuiel, a French title recognized in Canada. He was first educated by his father, then by a Yale tutor when the family moved to Connecticut. Later, he was sent to private school in Dieppe, France, at the Collège Impériale. From there, he went on to the King Edwards School, Birmingham, and then to Oxford University, where he received a first-class degree in classical moderations in 1871. While at Oxford, Allen married, but his wife became ill soon after their marriage and died within two years.

In 1873, Allen was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy at the first university for blacks established in Jamaica. Just before leaving for this post, he married Ellen Jerrad, who accompanied him there. As a teaching position, this appointment was a failure. Most of the students were not literate; they were hardly prepared for a study of “mental and moral philosophy.” Allen used his extra time there, however, to formulate his evolutionary system of philosophy.

In 1876, the school collapsed, following the death of its founder, and Allen returned to England. On his return, he supported himself and his family by writing. At first he wrote only scientific essays, but later he began adapting his scientific ideas to a fiction format. His first novel, Philistia, was published in 1884. He would go on to write more than thirty works of fiction, including detective novels: An African Millionaire, published in 1897; Miss Cayley’s Adventures, published in 1899; and Hilda Wade, published in 1900.

In 1892, Allen had acquired a famous neighbor, Arthur Conan Doyle. Although he and Doyle held diametrically opposed political, social, and religious views, they became good friends. In 1899, Allen, realizing that he was dying, asked Doyle to complete the last two chapters of Hilda Wade. Doyle followed through on his promise to do so, though he admitted that he was never happy with the result. Allen died on October 28, 1899, of liver disease. He was survived by his wife and a son.

Analysis

Grant Allen would be surprised, at the very least, to find that he is best remembered as a writer of popular fiction. Allen considered himself a naturalist and a philosopher, a disciple of Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin. He began writing short stories as a way to illustrate scientific points. His first published work of fiction, “Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,” for example, was not a ghost story but a tale that showed how people could be led to believe in ghosts. Allen described the further circumstances that led to his becoming a writer of fiction in the preface to Twelve Tales, with a Headpiece, a Tailpiece, and an Intermezzo, Being Select Stories (1899). James Payn, on assuming the editorship of the Cornhill magazine, returned one of Allen’s scientific articles and at the same time wrote to “J. Arbuthnot Wilson” (one of Allen’s pseudonyms) to request more short stories. After this, Allen said he was well “on the downward path which leads to fiction.”

One can still see in Allen’s fiction the influence of his scientific interests, his evolutionary philosophy, and his antiauthoritarian politics. In fact, he turned some of his later fiction into a forum for his views on society. He was most infamous in his lifetime for the novel The Woman Who Did (1895), which presents the radical view that marriage is an unnecessary institution.

Allen’s political leanings are evident in his assignment of guilt and innocence. He criticizes the police for seeing only the crime and not the context that may have caused it; in one episode of Hilda Wade, for example, a murderer is presented as morally innocent because his wife’s personality drove him to murder. On the whole, Allen does not hold the police force or professional detectives in high regard. In fact, in one short story, “The Great Ruby Robbery,” as well as one episode of An African Millionaire, it is the detective who is the criminal. The worst offenders, for Allen, are members of the upper class, regardless of whether they have broken the law. This view is very clearly expressed in An African Millionaire, in which crimes committed by a confidence man against a businessman are presented as morally justifiable.

Allen thought of himself as a supporter of women’s rights, though his view that a husband should be excused of the murder of a nagging wife hardly strikes one as liberated. He did believe, however, that women should hold positions in the workforce equal to those of men, and that the English system of chaperoning women was merely another form of imprisonment. These views on women come across most forcefully in his portrayal of strong female characters, especially Miss Cayley of Miss Cayley’s Adventures and the title character of Hilda Wade. Both these heroines could be said to be competing with Sherlock Holmes, as they are probably among the first female detectives to appear in print.

Miss Cayley’s Adventures

Of the two works, Miss Cayley’s Adventures is much more enjoyable and much more consistent in tone. Miss Cayley sets off at the beginning of the novel with twopence to her name, determined to travel around the world and have adventures. She is not disappointed. Among her many exploits are rescuing an Englishwoman from an Arabian harem, shooting tigers in India, and saving her lover from a mountain cliff in Switzerland. The stories never pretend to be grounded in reality, but rather have the spirit of rip-roaring yarns. Miss Cayley is a bold, spontaneous, never-say-die heroine. About to leave England in search of her first adventure, she describes her modus operandi to her more conservative friend Elsie:

I shall stroll out this morning . . . and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets. Let one but float my way, and hi! presto! I seize it. I go where glory or a modest competence waits me. I snatch at the first offer, the first hint of an opening.

Very soon into her adventures, Miss Cayley meets an extremely wealthy young man, Harold Tillington. Miss Cayley refuses to marry Harold, though, because he is so much richer than she; she vows to marry him only when he is penniless and forlorn. The detective plot serves mostly to bring those circumstances about. Toward the end of the novel, Harold is wrongfully accused of fraud by his cousin, a reprehensible member of the aristocracy. Just before he is led away to prison, Miss Cayley marries him and then proceeds to prove his innocence.

Hilda Wade

Hilda Wadeis more centrally concerned with crime and detection. Hilda Wade is on a quest to clear her father of the accusation of murder by proving that the real criminal is a renowned doctor, Sebastian. Hilda Wade is presented as a female version of Sherlock Holmes. She has astonishing powers of intuition that match his powers of deduction. She also has a chronicler and admirer, Dr. Cumberledge, to match Holmes’s Watson. When they first meet, she astonishes Cumberledge by seeming to know everything about him.

The occasion for my astonishment was the fact that when I handed her my card, “Dr. Hubert Ford Cumberledge, St. Nathaniel’s Hospital,” she had glanced at it for a second and exclaimed, without sensible pause or break, “Oh, then, of course, you’re half Welsh, as I am. . . .” “Well, m’yes; I am half Welsh,” I replied. . . . “But why then and of course? I fail to perceive your train of reasoning. . . .” “Fancy asking a woman to give you ’the train of reasoning’ for her intuitions! . . . Shall I explain my trick, like the conjurers?”

The reference to “conjurers” is reminiscent of Watson exclaiming over Holmes’s deductive powers. Doyle had an even more direct influence on the collection, as he wrote the last two episodes following Allen’s death.

Hilda Wade is marred, however, by Allen’s heavy reliance on the belief that personality was evidenced by physical traits and genetically determined. The novel is also inconsistent in tone. The opening chapters take a somewhat grim and realistic approach, which seems fitting for an account of Hilda’s dogged pursuit of her father’s betrayer. Toward the middle of the novel, though, the reader is thrust into a fantastic series of episodes that take Hilda Wade and Dr. Sebastian from South Africa through Tibet. In the final chapters, Sebastian confesses, after having been twice saved by Hilda: first from a dangerous fever in Tibet and then by being pulled from the wreckage of the ship that had been taking them back to England. The novel has none of the light humor that makes both Miss Cayley’s Adventures and An African Millionaire so enjoyable.

An African Millionaire

An African Millionaire is the book for which Allen is probably best remembered, at least among followers of detective fiction. It has been called the first of the field of “crook fiction,” in which the hero is not the detective but his nemesis. Readers are probably more familiar with E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, but Allen’s Colonel Clay preceded Raffles by three years.

An African Millionaire first appeared in twelve successive issues of the Strand magazine, starting in June, 1896. The most notable feature of this series is that each story chronicles robberies committed by the same thief, Colonel Clay, against the same victim, the African millionaire of the title, Sir Charles Vandrift. In each case, Colonel Clay plays on a greedy, self-serving instinct in Sir Charles to line his own pockets. In one episode, for example, the colonel, disguised as a timid parson, agrees to sell Sir Charles some paste-diamond jewelry for two thousand pounds. (The parson will not part with them for less because they belonged to his dear mother.) Sir Charles, however, has realized that they are not paste, but real diamonds and worth much more than two thousand pounds. He complacently believes that he has made a great profit off the parson—until he discovers that he has bought his own stolen diamonds.

Allen portrays Colonel Clay as a sort of modern-day Robin Hood: a confidence man who robs the unethical businessman. Allen’s own view of businessmen and landowners is more explicitly stated in his science fiction novel The British Barbarians: A Hill-Top Novel (1895). In that novel, a traveler from a utopian future asserts that private ownership is a barbaric institution. In An African Millionaire, Colonel Clay echoes this view when he explains his motivation for preying on Sir Charles:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, /And these again have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum!

Well that’s just how I view myself. You are a capitalist and a millionaire. In your large way you prey upon society. . . . In my smaller way, again, I relieve you in turn of a portion of the plunder.

In general, Allen’s critique of the businessman and the Victorian aristocracy is expressed less clumsily in this series of adventures than in the more didactic The British Barbarians. In fact, the African Millionaire stories are much more interesting and enjoyable as satires on the British upper class than as whodunits (or perhaps in this case, “how-to-do-its”). In one story, for example, Sir Charles is gulled into buying a castle because he and his wife want to acquire aristocratic roots:

Nice antique hall; suits of ancestral armour, trophies of Tyrolese hunters, coats of arms of ancient counts—the very thing to take Amelia’s aristocratic and romantic fancy. The whole to be sold exactly as it stood; ancestors to be included at a valuation.

The note of sarcasm here belongs to the narrator, Sir Charles’s brother-in-law, Seymour Wentworth. Seymour is also on Sir Charles’s payroll as his secretary, and is therefore on Sir Charles’s side rather than Colonel Clay’s. Nevertheless, Allen uses him quite successfully as a source of sarcastic asides. By putting the sarcastic voice within the ranks of the wealthy, Allen gives his criticisms more validity.

Aside from the satiric tone, the stories are notable for their various twists on the straightforward confidence-man plot that is established in the first two stories. One such twist occurs in “The Episode of the Arrest of the Colonel,” in which Sir Charles hires a private detective from an agency to protect him from Colonel Clay. The private detective, however, proves to be Colonel Clay himself, who thus once again triumphs over the hapless Sir Charles. The superhuman skills that Colonel Clay seems to possess and the sheer audacity required to continue to hunt the same victim make him a highly entertaining figure. To say that Colonel Clay is a master of disguise is an understatement. As Seymour proclaims, he is “polymorphic, like the element carbon.” (This is also another jab at Sir Charles, who deals in polymorphic carbon—that is, diamonds.) Besides Clay’s appearances as the timid parson and the streetwise private detective, he becomes a Byronic Mexican mind reader, an old German scientist, a Scottish diamond merchant, and a Tyrolese count. The reader, like the much-put-upon Sir Charles, begins to suspect anyone in the stories of being Colonel Clay: “Perhaps we were beginning to suspect him everywhere.”

Although for the most part very playful and even nonsensical in mood, the stories also impart a sense of paranoia, of beginning to suspect everyone, everywhere, of being the enemy. Indeed, Colonel Clay begins to resemble a fairly harmless version of Professor Moriarty. These stories seem to point, in a small way, toward a growing feeling at the end of the nineteenth century that the world was a large and unsafe place—a feeling that would reach its fullest expression in the American hard-boiled detective story. When everyone you meet is a stranger, who can you trust?

On the whole, though, Allen’s stories have not been greatly influential because they are not widely read. Because they are potboilers, they have all but disappeared from library shelves. In the case of Hilda Wade, this disappearance can perhaps be left unmourned, for it has all the worst aspects of the potboiler in being melodramatic, sentimental, and inconsistent in tone. Miss Cayley’s Adventures and An African Millionaire, however, are well worth reviving. In both of these works Allen showed himself to be a good storyteller, a writer of rousing and humorous tales of adventure.

Bibliography

Donaldson, Norman. Introduction to An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay. New York: Dover, 1980. Donaldson describes Clay as the first important rogue character in the short-story crime genre.

Greenslade, William, and Terence Rodgers, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005. Collection of scholarly essays detailing Allen’s relationship to fin-de-siècle British culture.

Morton, Peter. The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. The first critical biography of Allen in a century, this book attempts to solve the mystery of why Allen, a member of a wealthy family, was dependent on his writing to support himself. Discusses not only Allen’s life but also freelance authorship and journalism in Victorian England. Bibliographic references and index.

Morton, Peter, comp. Grant Allen, 1848-1899: A Bibliography. St. Lucia: University of Queensland, 2002. This comprehensive bibliography is indispensable for serious students of Allen.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Briefly mentions Allen and helps place him in context.

Schantz, Tom, and Enid Schantz. “Editors’ Note.” In The Reluctant Hangman, and Other Stories of Crime. Boulder, Colo.: Aspen Press, 1973. Useful commentary on the three stories contained in this special, limited edition that includes the original illustrations from the Strand magazine.