An African Millionaire

An African Millionaire is a novel by Grant Allen, first serialised in the Strand Magazine across 1896 and 1897 and published in book form in 1897. It is the book Allen is most remembered for now, and it deserves the attention. The novel is essentially a sequence of twelve linked short stories, each one a separate confidence trick played by the same man on the same victim.

The victim is Sir Charles Vandrift, a South African diamond magnate who has made an enormous fortune and is traveling through Europe with his secretary, who narrates the stories. The con artist is a man calling himself Colonel Clay, although he goes by a different name and identity in every story. He turns up first at a Riviera hotel disguised as a Mexican mind reader and relieves Sir Charles of a substantial sum. He reappears in Switzerland as a clergyman with a stolen diamond. He turns up later as a Czech baron, a Tyrolean musician, an English duke, and various other figures, each time finding a way to take more money from Sir Charles while charming everyone around him.

The stories are funny and they are also genuinely well constructed. Allen plays fair with the reader. Each time, the moment of revelation comes after enough clues have been planted to make the trick make sense in retrospect. Sir Charles is a delicious figure, pompous and complacent and incapable of learning from any of his losses. The secretary who narrates the stories is in love with Sir Charles’s sister in law and provides the emotional ground beneath the comedy.

The book is one of the earliest detective story collections in English where the focus is on the criminal rather than the detective. The Raffles stories by E W Hornung followed a few years later and owe a clear debt to An African Millionaire. The book runs about three hundred pages and reads quickly. For readers who enjoy classic English magazine fiction from the 1890s, this is a small forgotten pleasure that deserves to be better known. It pairs naturally with the Sherlock Holmes stories from the same period and with the early Father Brown stories that came later.