GRANT ALLEN

Before his Colonel Clay series was collected in An African Millionaire in 1897, Grant Allen had been publishing books for two decades. More than fifty volumes had already appeared and dozens more would follow; any almost random selection of their titles demonstrates the variety of his interests. Allen's self-published first book, Physiological Aesthetics, was followed by such equally weighty tomes as The Colour-Sense and The Evolution of the Idea of God. He also wrote popular novels, including A Bride from the Desert, The Type-writer Girl (under a female pseudonym), and For Maimie's Sake, which boasted the eye-catching subtitle A Tale of Love and Dynamite. Allen was a freethinker about both religion and marriage. His most notorious novel was the 1895 succes de scandale The Woman Who Did, about a well-educated young woman (pointedly not a guttersnipe) who chose to have a child outside of wedlock.

Perhaps Allen's diverse interests and impatience with narrow social conventions emerged from his varied upbringing. He was born Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen in Ontario, to an Irish father who had immigrated some years before and a Scottish-French mother from a distinguished Canadian family. At first home-schooled by his father and later assigned a Yale tutor, he attended both English and French universities before becoming a classics major at Oxford. After teaching Greek and Latin in several British schools, he spent three years as a professor of moral and mental philosophy in Jamaica. When the school failed, he settled in England and launched a writing career.

Allen worked so hard that his severe writer's cramp became a cautionary fable among fellow writers. Colleagues on both sides of his career held him in high esteem. When he was briefly in financial straits, his friend Charles Darwin lent him money, and shortly after Darwin's death in 1882 Allen wrote a charming biography of his friend for Andrew Lang's series of "English Worthies." When Allen himself died with his picaresque detective novel Hilda Wade unfinished, his friend Arthur Conan Doyle completed it for him.

Allen came relatively late to crime fiction, partly because he couldn't survive by writing only science-related nonfiction, but he was soon adept at the conjuror's sleight of hand and distracting patter that distinguishes the masters in the field. He also simply wrote a fine sentence—sly, literate, precise. He invented two noteworthy detectives, both women, both (like Colonel Clay) nonstop travelers: Miss Lois Cayley, who is out for adventure, and Hilda Wade, who is out to avenge her father's murder.

But Allen is remembered now mostly for his ingenious Colonel Clay, the first series character who was a criminal yet appeared in the role of hero rather than villain. Clay dares to rob the same victim again and again during the course of a dozen clever and amusing episodes. In one of them, he impersonates a detective hired to find the notorious Colonel Clay, a plot device that Maurice Leblanc would steal a few years later in a novel about the equally protean Arsene Lupin. Allen seems to have based Clay's victim, Charles Vandrift, on notorious South African diamond millionaire Barney Barnato, who also inspired Raffles's unscrupulous opponent in a story by E. W. Hornung.

First published in The Strand Magazine in July 1896, "The Episode of the Diamond Links" is only the second caper in the series, and occurs not long after the encounter with the Mexican Seer who is mentioned in the story. It is narrated by Vandrift's brother-in-law and secretary.

THE EPISODE OF THE
DIAMOND LINKS

"Let us take a trip to Switzerland," said Lady Vandrift. And any one who knows Amelia will not be surprised to learn that we did take a trip to Switzerland accordingly. Nobody can drive Sir Charles, except his wife. And nobody at all can drive Amelia.

There were difficulties at the outset, because we had not ordered rooms at the hotels beforehand, and it was well on in the season; but they were overcome at last by the usual application of a golden key; and we found ourselves in due time pleasantly quartered in Lucerne, at the most comfortable of European hostelries, the Schweitzerhof.

We were a square party of four—Sir Charles and Amelia, myself and Isabel. We had nice big rooms, on the first floor, overlooking the lake; and as none of us was possessed with the faintest symptom of that incipient mania which shows itself in the form of an insane desire to climb mountain heights of disagreeable steepness and unnecessary snowiness, I will venture to assert we all enjoyed ourselves. We spent most of our time sensibly in lounging about the lake on the jolly little steamers; and when we did a mountain climb, it was on the Rigi or Pilatus—where an engine undertook all the muscular work for us.

As usual, at the hotel, a great many miscellaneous people showed a burning desire to be specially nice to us. If you wish to see how friendly and charming humanity is, just try being a well-known millionaire for a week, and you'll learn a thing or two. Wherever Sir Charles goes he is surrounded by charming and disinterested people, all eager to make his distinguished acquaintance, and all familiar with several excellent investments, or several deserving objects of Christian charity. It is my business in life, as his brother-in-law and secretary, to decline with thanks the excellent investments, and to throw judicious cold water on the objects of charity. Even I myself, as the great man's almoner, am very much sought after. People casually allude before me to artless stories of "poor curates in Cumberland, you know, Mr. Wentworth," or widows in Cornwall, penniless poets with epics in their desks, and young painters who need but the breath of a patron to open to them the doors of an admiring Academy. I smile and look wise, while I administer cold water in minute doses; but I never report one of these cases to Sir Charles, except in the rare or almost unheard-of event where I think there is really something in them.