Résumé
Résumé de Les Pillards
À qui s’adresse-t-il ?
This book is for readers who enjoy clever swindles, comic dialogue, and a city full of brokers, reporters, and millionaires. It suits anyone who likes puzzles solved by wit and the pleasure of watching proud people discover how much they missed.
De quoi parle ce livre ?
The Plunderers is a book of four linked tales by Edwin Lefevre, an American writer who spent his working life around Wall Street. It is set in New York in the early 1910s, when jewelers, newspapers, trust companies, and railroad kings ran the city's money. Each tale follows the same unseen band of gentleman swindlers, who sign themselves the Plunder Recovery Syndicate and say they take only from rich men who took too much themselves.
Each target is different. First come the owners of the finest jewelry shops on Fifth Avenue. Then comes a stock market panic that begins with a banker who fails to reach his office. Next are a trust company president and a miner from the Klondike with a hotel engine room full of gold dust. Last is a railroad magnate whose only son starts talking to himself on the street. The plots depend on plain human habits, such as vanity, curiosity, and the wish to be near a title.
You will meet clerks, brokers, reporters, and millionaires who all feel sure they cannot be fooled. The dialogue is quick and often funny, and each scheme is laid out with the care of a chess problem. This summary follows the four tales in order and stops before each solution, so the surprises stay yours. Let us begin on Christmas Eve, at an advertising window, with a man who can barely speak.
Dans ce résumé
- 1Odd advertisements start the trapFree
- 2A colonel buys pearls for a princess
- 3A stranger brings ten letters and a bet
- 4A banker misses his own office
- 5A miner arrives with fifteen tons of gold
- 6Friendship, a nurse, and a jealous husband
- 7A taxi, a talisman, and a strange question
- 8Sweet peas, a father, and a reporter
- 9Why the swindles work and how they read
Point clé 1 sur 9
Odd advertisements start the trap
The first tale, The Pearls of Princess Patricia, opens on Christmas Eve at the advertising window of the New York Herald. A clean-shaven man in black clothes and black gloves can speak only in a hoarse whisper. Clerk Ralph Carroll leans close and prices his strange notice, which asks for a twitching man who likes to think about himself.
When the stranger takes off a glove to find a five-dollar bill, Carroll sees a long ivory-colored scar running from his knuckles up under his cuff. He remembers it afterward, along with the voice. On Saturday morning ten men with twitching necks and limbs wait outside Room 888 of the St. Iago Building. The door bears the name of the Acme Vibrator Company and its manager, W. W. Lovell.
Lovell whispers his questions and chooses a tall blond cabinetmaker named Lewis J. Wright. The pay is sixty dollars a week plus expenses, and the job takes Wright to London to do nothing at all. He is to sit in the waiting room of a Dr. Atterbury, twice a day, and think about his own ailment. Wright agrees, though he cannot guess why anyone would pay for that.
The other applicants fill out a form asking whether they mind sitting in comfortable chairs, or minding their own business. Lovell answers every question by pointing at his throat. In the hall the men decide they are meant to be living advertisements for a vibrating machine. A fortnight later the same man returns to the Herald, and this time his notice asks for a brave man at one hundred dollars a day, with no questions answered.
A crowd of brutes, dreamers, and boys with romance in their eyes packs the hall. Lovell picks a shabby man of about forty who looks more determined than reckless. This man will be called W. W. Lowry, and his orders are exact. He must buy travelers checks, sail for Paris, and at eleven minutes past eleven on the eleventh day, ask for eleven letters. He must bring them back unopened and ask nothing.
That’s 1 of 9 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 90,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 6 h
- Listening time10 h
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 9 other languages
Questions about Les Pillards
What is The Plunderers about?
It is a set of four linked tales in which a band of gentleman swindlers targets rich New Yorkers, including jewelers, a financier, a trust company president, and a railroad magnate, using disguises, false clues, and careful study of each victim.
Who are the Plunder Recovery Syndicate?
They are the unseen gang behind all four tales. They claim to take only wealth they consider tainted, and they send polite, witty letters to their victims. Different members appear in each tale under different names.
Is The Plunderers a novel or a collection of short stories?
It is four connected stories rather than one continuous plot. Each has its own victim and setting, while recurring characters such as the reporter Amos Kidder and the Syndicate itself link them into one book.
Is The Plunderers based on a true story?
It is fiction set in New York in the early 1910s. Real figures such as Gates, Harriman, and Rockefeller are mentioned for color, but the swindles, firms, and characters are invented by Lefevre.
Is The Plunderers easy to read?
The tales are built on quick, lively dialogue and clear scenes, with a wry narrator. Each story opens on a vivid odd detail, so the plots are simple to follow.