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Pemberton, Max

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 4 months ago
Max Pemberton (1863-1950) was a British author of mystery and adventure stories. He was born in Birmingham and educated at Caius College Cambridge. He edited magazines and was a director of Northcliffe Newspapers from 1920, and was later knighted.


Mike Grost on Max Pemberton

 

Max Pemberton seems to be a pioneering but somewhat artistically minor member of the Rogue school. His Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (1895) is a miscellaneous grab bag of every type of short story about jewels and crime. A lot of the stories are really mediocre, as well. Three are better than the rest. "The Ripening Rubies", anthologized by Hugh Greene in The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, is the only story in the collection that is at once good, and of some similarity to the conventional crime story. This is a vividly realistic story of a jewel robbery at an English society party. "The Comedy of the Jeweled Links" is a Biter Bit tale of some sharp dealing involving a pair of emerald cuff links. It is more in the tradition of sardonic tales of con jobs than of the mystery story proper. Somerset Maugham ("A String of Pearls") and Roald Dahl ("Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat") went on to write stories somewhat like this, in which affluent people who engage in dubious business practices eventually find themselves stung. I believe that the tradition has at least some roots in de Maupassant's "The Necklace", although that story is far grimmer than any of the others discussed here. Finally, "The Watch and the Scimitar" is an adventure tale, partly set in the Casbah in Algiers, no less. It shows lots of exotic foreign color.

 

Pemberton's A Gentleman's Gentleman has been cited as the pioneer Rogue book, but I have never even seen a copy, let alone read it. The tales in Jewel Mysteries I Have Known, while dealing with crime, are not really all that close to the Rogue school. For one thing, there are no memorable rogues on the order of Raffles or Simon Carne in the book. Nor does the book have the anti-social glee one associates with Rogues. "The Ripening Rubies" does anticipate the Rogue school in its look at lower class crooks adopting the clothes of the upper classes, and mingling with them socially, to steal their jewels. Despite the fact that this story dates from the Doyle era, its technique recalls the casebook literature of Waters and Forrester from 30 years previously. There is the same heroic narrator, infiltrating bad guys, detecting their crimes while preserving a certain incognito, and leading a police raid on the bad guys' headquarters, just as Forrester's hero did in "Arrested on Suspicion". There is also considerable, realistic attention paid to servants in this story, just as there was in Forrester. There is also a vivid portrait of London Society in this tale. The title of the story refers to the yellow color of the stolen rubies in the tale; Pemberton has a penchant for color titles.

 

Bibliography

 

The Diary of A Scoundrel (1891)

Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (1894) aka Jewel Mysteries From A Dealer’s Note Book

The Iron Pirate (1896)

A Gentleman’s Gentleman (1896)

The Phantom Army (1898)

The Giant’s Gate (1901)

The Diamond Ship (1907)

Wheels of Anarchy (1908)

The Man Who Drove the Car (1919)

The Mystery of the Green Heart (1910)

Captain Black (1911)

White Motley (1911)

Two Women (1914)

Behind the Curtain (1916)

A Bagman in Jewels (1919)

John Dighton, Mystery Millionaire (1923)

Dolores and Some Others (1931)

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