‘The perpetrator of the most heartless frauds’: Swindlers, the New Economy and the Limits of Narrative

Abstract

‘The Nature of a Crime’ has long been seen as one of the more negligible works in both Conrad’s and Ford’s literary canons: one of Conrad’s biographers dismissed it as a ‘worthless fragment’.¹ Written in 1906 and published three years later in the English Review under the jocular pseudonym of Baron Ignatz von Aschendrof, even its authors seemed determined to marginalize it. Ford described it during its composition as ‘awful piffle’, while Conrad appeared to forget both the story and his co-authorship: ‘For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like the fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to notice by my collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover it was rounded.’² In keeping with such an ethereal yet ‘rounded’ fragment, this is a narrative of uncertainty. It is in the form of eight letters written by a man apparently to his lover, confessing to the embezzlement of a trust for which he has been appointed trustee, and announcing (and then renouncing) a plan to commit suicide. And yet, as we have seen, its narrator is a peculiarly unreliable one: from the story’s opening we are never sure what has been imagined, dreamt or recollected. Its title declares it to be a crime story, but its atmosphere and narrative strategy seem to put it at some distance from the detective genre.