If we are to believe novelists, England in the 1700s and 1800s featured two kinds of women: those who sat at home stewing about lost suitors, and con artists.
It used to be that books featured a whole bunch of the former but, in recent years, the scales have tipped in the direction of pickpockets and shysters, as evidenced by Alex Hay’s brand-new “The Queen of Fives.” Its (anti-?) heroine leads a collective of confidence women. She schemes to marry herself out of a life of crime and into a stately mansion, or maybe she’ll just swipe the money and forget the inconvenient husband.
She’d have plenty in common with, and probably try to pull the wool over the eyes of, heroines of recent books such as “The Other Side of Mrs. Wood,” in which two fake mediums battle each other to take advantage of wealthy believers in spiritualism, and “The Square of Sevens,” in which a poor young fortune-teller begins to think she’s the heir to a vast estate. (For more on these other titles, see below.)
In his clever “Queen,” which was inspired by actual events, Hay is especially strong on character. The book allies us most closely with Quinn le Blanc (not her real name), who is “London’s most talented con woman” and who is assisted by shadowy Mr. Silk.
Quinn is feisty, funny and perhaps a little too convinced that she’s always the smartest person in the room, a weakness that could bring her comeuppance when she tangles with wealthy Max Kendal, who suspects there’s something awry with Quinn but seems willing to entertain her affections anyway. Two bigger problems for Quinn may be Max’s brilliant sister Tor, who is determined not to have the family fortune torn from her just because she’s a woman who cannot inherit it, and their canny stepmother, who married for money and may also be willing to kill for it.
The three main characters in “The Queen of Fives” — Quinn, Tor and Lady Kendal — all are women, which feels like a bracing corrective to most literature of the male-dominated era in which it’s set (1898). There’s definitely a feminist bent to the book (Alex Hay is a man, incidentally) but it doesn’t feel like the writer is imposing present-day thought on a book that takes place 130 years ago. Instead, it feels like he’s acknowledging that women were central to the way Victorian England worked (see, also: Queen Vicky herself), even if it was not always acknowledged that they were calling the shots.
Another compelling element of this page-turner, and of several of the books below, is an awareness that con games are a way to bring together people from social classes that wouldn’t generally mix.
Quinn, like many of her swindler sisters, is not well-off. Having lost a few valued clients, she and Silk are making ends meet by cutting meat from their diet and letting scullery maids go. Their cash-strapped ilk wouldn’t generally be hanging out with the moneyed class. But, because they supposedly offer the wealthy chances to communicate with dead loved ones or because they can create the illusion that they possess the money to participate in expensive events like charity balls, con artists get to hang with lots of rich dopes — er, dupes. Well, both.