Résumé
Résumé de Grands criminels
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
Readers who enjoy true crime, con artists, daring heists and courtroom drama, and who like vivid portraits of cunning people from Victorian London to wartime Berlin and the American West.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
Remarkable Rogues is a collection of twenty true crime stories by Charles Kingston, a British writer on crime who died in 1944. He wrote it after the First World War, drawing on court records and newspaper reports. He speaks as someone who has watched trials at the Old Bailey. Each chapter follows one swindler, poisoner, forger or murderer from the first scheme to the dock.
The cast is wide. You meet a Russian countess who ruins the men around her, a Texas outlaw queen, a Berlin food swindler and a London beauty doctor. You meet a fake archduke, a tailor who plays his murdered friend, and a thief who steals a Gainsborough painting. Women stand at the center of most of the tales. Kingston keeps asking how clever people fool victims who think themselves shrewd.
Along the way you learn the tricks, from forged cheques and borrowed titles to arsenic in a cup of tea. You also see how ordinary vanity, greed and fear make those tricks work. The stories reach from Germany in 1828 to Edwardian Monte Carlo, Civil War America and wartime Berlin. Here are the main stories in the order Kingston tells them, beginning with a countess whose beauty leads many people to ruin.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Two women turn charm into poisonFree
- 2Outlaw queen and the woman with fatal eyes
- 3Vanity and greed feed two swindlers
- 4Wartime greed and marriage dreams fund two frauds
- 5A buried widow and a false archduke
- 6False baronets and borrowed fortunes
- 7A ranch girl's fortune and a Christmas murder
- 8Poison and a tailor's careful lies
- 9Four rogues, from a duel to a diamond fortune
Point clé 1 sur 9
Two women turn charm into poison
The book opens in Russia with Marie Tarnowska, who at sixteen is courted by a prince, a baron and a count. Against her father's wishes she elopes with the count, Vassili Tarnowska. Within six months she learns he is a libertine, and Kingston says that sense of injustice starts her on the road to ruin. Men gather around her, and her gentle brother-in-law Peter falls hopelessly in love with her and takes his own life. She shrugs it off.
Her next lover is Alexis Bozevsky, an Imperial Guard officer with a magnificent moustache. Her jealous husband shoots him outside the Grand Hotel in Kieff, then calmly tells the police inspector what he has done. Marie abandons her children to nurse the dying man. Dr. Stahl, who loves her too, has already led her into drug use. When Bozevsky dies, Kingston writes that her heart dies with him.
Penniless, she meets Donat Prilukoff, a rich Moscow lawyer who pays her debts. He then confesses he has stolen more than forty thousand pounds from his clients for her sake. Now he holds her in his power. Together they choose a victim, the wealthy widower Count Paul Kamarowsky, and persuade him to make a will and an insurance policy in her favor. The tool for the plot is young Nicholas Naumoff, who is told that the count persecutes the woman he loves. A court in Venice judges the three in 1910.
The second tale moves to Germany and Gesina Gottfried, a plump, pert girl who swears she will marry only a man with money. At seventeen she marries Miltenberg, a drunkard who beats her and leaves her to raise two children in want. Visiting her mother, she watches mice die from white powder bought at the chemist's. She steals some, and arsenic becomes her answer to every obstacle.
One death leads to another. Her husband goes first, then her parents, who oppose her plan to marry the weak young Gottfried, then her own two children. She poisons Gottfried slowly while nursing him, and marries him on his deathbed. Doctors certify each death as natural. Her last victims live in the Bremen household of the wheelwright Rumf. In 1828 Rumf himself spots the powder on a piece of pork he loves, and takes it to the police.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
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Questions about Grands criminels
What is Remarkable Rogues about?
It is a collection of twenty true crime stories about swindlers, poisoners, forgers and murderers in Europe and America. Each chapter follows one person from first scheme to arrest, from a Russian countess to an outlaw queen and a master thief.
Who is Belle Star in Remarkable Rogues?
Belle Star is a female outlaw leader in Texas after the American Civil War. Raised in her father's gang, she takes command at eighteen and uses disguises, sharp shooting and daring raids to rule the district.
Are the stories in Remarkable Rogues true?
Kingston presents the chapters as real cases drawn from court records, police files and newspapers, set between 1750 and the First World War. He names real places, dates and trials, and he adds his own comments as a crime writer.
Is Remarkable Rogues easy to read?
Each chapter is a self-contained story with a clear beginning, middle and end, so you can read one at a time. Kingston writes in a lively, direct voice and keeps the focus on scenes, schemes and trials.
What is the main message of the book?
Kingston shows that vanity and greed make people easy to fool, and that clever criminals are usually caught in the end. Adam Worth's story closes with the lesson that crime does not pay.