The Stories of the Three Burglars

The Stories of the Three Burglars

A householder in a country neighborhood twenty miles from New York recounts a season when his community was plagued by unsolved burglaries, prompting neighbors to adopt exaggerated precautions like pistols, watch-dogs, and jury-rigged alarms. The narrator, unwilling to endanger his wife, young son George William, or Aunt Martha with noisy contraptions, instead devises a subtler trap: with help from a physician friend, he prepares a nearly tasteless narcotic mixed into wine and leaves it nightly in the library along with biscuits, arranged to look like recently used refreshments, betting that any burglar would pause to drink before searching the house. After weeks of fruitless nightly setups, a crash finally wakes the household. The narrator and his manservant David descend to find three burglars unconscious in the library, felled by the drugged wine. They bind all three securely to a wooden settle with rope, then revive each in turn using an antidote-soaked sponge. The captives are a tall, articulate man; a stout, rough-spoken man; and a masked young man who turns out to be unarmed except for a work on civil engineering. Once revived, the tall man begs to explain himself, and Aunt Martha insists on hearing him out despite the narrator's skepticism. He tells an elaborate story casting himself as the son of a boat-builder dragged into crime as a boy by his father under the guise of a practical joke, then unfairly blackened forever by his father's later conviction, offering a self-serving anecdote about his supposed "rigidity" in defending a poor man against a rich one. The stout burglar, prompted by tea from Aunt Martha, tells his own unrepentant tales of a career cracksman's mishaps, including a botched job robbing a contractor and a farcical episode where he was hired to kidnap a man's daughter but grabbed the wrong girl. He also reveals, to the family's mixed pride and chagrin, that their house had been spared earlier burglaries only because the gang feared a baby's unpredictable crying might wake the household—not because of any of the narrator's defenses. The masked young man, once untied enough to speak, claims to be a newspaper reporter studying "Realism" who joined the expedition merely to observe burglary firsthand, and spins a long fantastical tale of a European romance in Carinthia involving a forbidden love, a jealous colonel killed by a mysterious invisible dog-like creature, and a dramatic escape from a collapsing castle tower—concluding with his marriage and immigration to America. His story earns sympathy from Aunt Martha and the narrator's wife, who vote to release him despite the narrator's suspicion. Just as the young man is freed and police are gathered outside, the narrator and David catch him kissing the maid Alice; David restrains him, and he is handed over to the police after all, to Aunt Martha's indignant reversal of opinion. Investigation of the house confirms forced entry through a kitchen window as described, with burglar's tools found outside. At trial, it emerges the three were professional criminals of considerable standing: the tall man, Lewis Mandit, a criminal mastermind; the stout man, Barney Fitch, a skilled burglar who turns state's evidence; and the young man, "Sparky," an educated ex-journalist turned expert forger and jailbreak specialist. Their burglary had no connection to the neighborhood's earlier crimes but was a targeted mission to steal legal documents vital to a pending lawsuit involving the narrator. All three, facing numerous other charges, receive severe sentences, and Aunt Martha ruefully concludes that her faith in the young "realist" was misplaced.

By Frank R. Stockton · First published 1868 · Genre: Humor, Crime, Adventure · 39,607 words

First lines

I am a householder in a pleasant country neighbourhood, about twenty miles from New York. My family consists of myself and wife, our boy, George William, aged two, two maid-servants, and a man; but in the summer we have frequent visitors, and at the time of which I am about to write my Aunt Martha was staying with us.

My house is large and pleasant, and we have neighbours near enough for social purposes and yet not too near or too many to detract from the rural aspect of our surroundings. But we do not live in a paradise; we are occasionally troubled by mosquitoes and burglars.

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The Stories of the Three Burglars is listed on Textopian as a novel by Frank R. Stockton, dated 1868 CE.

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Fairy Tale · Humor · Satire · Social Commentary · Moral Lesson · Children's Literature · Fantasy · Adventure · Comedy · Whimsy · Absurdity · Parody

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