Dead Men Tell No Tales by E. W. Hornung
Jun. 12th, 2019 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeReturning to the Hornung read-through!
Much as I love the Raffles stories, the most frustrating thing about them is the way Hornung does such interesting things with subverting and undermining stereotypes in the portrayal of his more morally ambiguous characters, only to fall back on lazy and often offensive stereotypes when characterising more straightforward villains. Unfortunately, Dead Men Tell No Tales (1899, the same year as The Amateur Cracksman) is an even more blatant example of this tendency.
It's an exciting adventure story, involving much danger and derring-do along with large stashes of gold. Mr Cole, the narrator (I don't think he ever gets a first name), survives a shipwreck on a voyage from Australia to England. It later turns out that the shipwreck was engineered by a gang of smugglers as a means of getting their ill-gotten gold safely ashore, and Cole finds himself pursued by the gang as they try to stop him from giving away their secret. Also mixed up in the affair is Eva Denison, the stepdaughter of the gang's ringleader, a beautiful and spirited young lady—having fallen hopelessly in love with her before the shipwreck, Mr Cole is determined to save her from the villains.
The gang of smugglers are, as I said, mostly uninteresting stereotypes—the evil foreigner, the brutish black man, the morally destitute member of the lower orders and a side role for the hideous unfeminine woman. It's all the more disappointing because there is some very interesting complexity and ambiguity in the final member of the gang, Francis Rattray, much of which bears a distinct resemblance to certain aspects of the Raffles stories. Rattray is a fairly undeniable villain who knows he's doing wrong and yet is in some ways honourable and admirable in his actions; the more sympathetic narrator is at once fascinated and repelled by him and his many-sided charisma, in a way that reads as fairly blatantly queer; and he's an upper-class white Englishman—here, the only one in the varied cast of villains.
It's as if Hornung is perfectly capable of subverting prejudiced expectations and examining the deeply flawed foundations of the Victorian imperialist worldview, revealing the complicated truth beneath its straightforward falsehoods, but only in one direction. It's immensely frustrating, precisely because it's so clear he can do better than this. Hopefully he does so in some of the later books!
Much as I love the Raffles stories, the most frustrating thing about them is the way Hornung does such interesting things with subverting and undermining stereotypes in the portrayal of his more morally ambiguous characters, only to fall back on lazy and often offensive stereotypes when characterising more straightforward villains. Unfortunately, Dead Men Tell No Tales (1899, the same year as The Amateur Cracksman) is an even more blatant example of this tendency.
It's an exciting adventure story, involving much danger and derring-do along with large stashes of gold. Mr Cole, the narrator (I don't think he ever gets a first name), survives a shipwreck on a voyage from Australia to England. It later turns out that the shipwreck was engineered by a gang of smugglers as a means of getting their ill-gotten gold safely ashore, and Cole finds himself pursued by the gang as they try to stop him from giving away their secret. Also mixed up in the affair is Eva Denison, the stepdaughter of the gang's ringleader, a beautiful and spirited young lady—having fallen hopelessly in love with her before the shipwreck, Mr Cole is determined to save her from the villains.
The gang of smugglers are, as I said, mostly uninteresting stereotypes—the evil foreigner, the brutish black man, the morally destitute member of the lower orders and a side role for the hideous unfeminine woman. It's all the more disappointing because there is some very interesting complexity and ambiguity in the final member of the gang, Francis Rattray, much of which bears a distinct resemblance to certain aspects of the Raffles stories. Rattray is a fairly undeniable villain who knows he's doing wrong and yet is in some ways honourable and admirable in his actions; the more sympathetic narrator is at once fascinated and repelled by him and his many-sided charisma, in a way that reads as fairly blatantly queer; and he's an upper-class white Englishman—here, the only one in the varied cast of villains.
It's as if Hornung is perfectly capable of subverting prejudiced expectations and examining the deeply flawed foundations of the Victorian imperialist worldview, revealing the complicated truth beneath its straightforward falsehoods, but only in one direction. It's immensely frustrating, precisely because it's so clear he can do better than this. Hopefully he does so in some of the later books!
