The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

The Don Q Adventures (1897-1923)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

The Don Q Adventures were written by Kate and Hesketh Prichard and began with “The Parole of Gevil-Hay” (Badminton Magazine, September 1897). Don Q appeared in thirty-one stories, two story collections, and one novel. Hesketh Prichard (1876-1922) was a successful author, big game hunter, and cricketer and was reportedly E.W. Hornung’s model for Raffles (see: The Amateur Cracksman). Kate Prichard (1851-1935), Hesketh's mother, was a novelist, short story writer, and political activist.

Don Q is a grim Spanish bandit active in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, operating with his gang in “the Andalusian highlands, stretching from Jerez to Almeria and beyond.”¹ Don Q is known to the locals as “Don Quebranta Huesos,” or “Don Bone Smasher,” the local name for the “bone-breaking” vulture whose features Don Q seems to share. Don Q is no ordinary thief or bandit chief, however. He is a sequestrador, one who kidnaps and holds for ransom, what Don Q describes as “the noblest rank of brigand.”² When his men discover a traveler making his way across the “magnificent desolation” which is Don Q’s home, they capture the traveler and escort him to the mountain headquarters where Don Q resides. Don Q then chats with his victim, usually cordially, for Don Q is an aristocrat to his bones and thoroughly believes in the duties of the host, which include a kindly courtesy. Don Q then disposes of “the disagreeables of business,”³ the setting of the ransom, which is always what he believes his victim, or the victim’s friends and family, or the victim’s country, can afford to pay. If the ransom is not paid, regrettable consequences follow. If not all of the ransom is paid, the consequences are equally regrettable; if only seventy-five percent of the ransom is forthcoming, only seventy-five percent of the kidnap victim will return to freedom.

As might be expected, however, Don Q is considerably more complicated than that. The Don Q stories are late Victorian versions of the räuberromane. But Don Q differs from earlier noble bandits in a few ways. He is not a noble-minded patriot, like Schiller’s Karl Moor (see: The Robbers) or Christian Vulpius’ Rinaldo Rinaldini (see: Rinaldo Rinaldini, The Bandit Chief). Don Q, though patriotic, views himself as an artist and is happy to kill, in varied and creative ways, those who displease him, as well as to earn money. Neither is Don Q a conscienceless murderer, like Edmond About’s Hadji Stavros (see: The King of the Mountains). Don Q has a strict code of honor from which he never deviates. Don Q is an anti-hero, approaching the limits of the Hero-Villain, although Don Q always maintains a firm hold on his passions. But he is clearly a man of great qualities, and is firmly within the räuberroman genre.

Don Q’s origins are tragic. Exactly what happened to him is not spelled out, but the implications and hints are that once, long ago in his youth, he was an aristocrat of noble blood, the intimate of presidents and kings. But a “blackness of treachery”⁴ descended upon him, preventing him from marrying his young love and forcing him into a loveless marriage. He fathered children but was unhappy, and “he knew but one way remained to carry the honour of his ancient name clear, and that was to give up all his great possessions and to die.”⁵ He faked his death, so well that all the world thought him dead, and took the name “Don Q,” making his way into the mountains becoming the renowned and widely feared sequestrador. His love went to a convent, eventually becoming a Mother Superior. A later origin, in Don Q’s Love Story (1909), contradicts the preceding, earlier story. The later version has Don Q as a young aristocrat who is framed for the murder of one of the Spanish Hapsburgs. Don Q then fakes his death, assumes the alias of Don Q, and takes to the mountains to live the life of a sequestrador. A few years later Don Q proves his innocence, marries his true love, and abandons the Don Q identity. 

Don Q is the undisputed ruler of the mountains. He is hated by the Governor of his province and by the government. Don Q’s work humiliates the local Civil Guard who never succeed in capturing him and are repeatedly defeated and embarrassed by him. Additionally, under Don Q’s rule, the mountains and Spain itself become known for his work, rather than for more genteel and cultured things. But the poor of the mountains and the plains love him, because he deals out local justice according to his own code, so that those who prey on the poor face his violent and final vengeance, rather than the inconstant and venal justice of the courts. Don Q says

I hold rule over a large region; I administer strict justice, which the law cannot do, since I know the true particulars in each case, and the executive relies on witnesses more or less prejudiced if not perjured. Truth up here is undiluted and pure as our own springs; down in the plains it has grown foul and corrupted.⁶ 

The Don Q stories were a hit with the reading public almost immediately. Percy Everett, the editorial director for Pearson’s Magazine, where most of the Don Q stories appeared, “acknowledged that Don Q was almost as popular as Captain Kettle [see: The Captain Kettle Adventures], both helping to build Pearson's circulation during the Edwardian era.”⁷ It is easy to see why the Don Q stories were popular, even if they are not extraordinary. The Don Q stories are similar to Gilbert Parker’s Pierre Adventures. The Don Q stories are not immortal, but they are entertaining and eminently readable and only a little dated. The Prichards are skilled technicians and create memorable and moderately well-written tales, much more entertaining than the stories in their Flaxman Low Adventures. Many of the Don Q stories have a significant plot twist to them, often good enough to surprise even a jaded modern reader. The stories are picaresque but told in a knowing, straight-faced, wry and sardonic way that elevates them above more humdrum picaresques. They are, basically, great fun.

However, they are not extraordinary, nor are they Art. What they are, instead, are good representatives of the general quality of short stories in the “Age of the Storyteller,” especially the 1880-1914 period. What sets this period apart in terms of its short stories is that a new innovation, the short story series, attracted writers who would otherwise be churning out good- to great-quality novels. Begun in The Strand, the short story series,

conceived as such and run in consecutive issues of the magazine, which would give readers some of the pleasures of a continuing serial without that form's drawbacks. A reader could dip into a series at any point, soon become familiar with the continuing characters, and yet experience a sense of closure at the end of each episode.⁸  

Practically invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, the

linked series of short stories, centred on recurring lead characters and conceived, in effect, as “situation comedy”. Such series were comedic in the sense that each story tended to end happily¼this was a form which was to be imitated, very rapidly and fruitfully, in areas more wide-ranging than just detective fiction¼the turn-of-the-century story-series, on the Holmes-and-Watson (or Jeeves-and-Wooster) model, was to have a huge presence in the popular culture of the twentieth century, ranging across the contents of British and American popular magazines (both “slick” and “pulp”), through radio broadcasting to television.⁹ 

The Don Q stories were popular without being revolutionary, fun without being extraordinary or Art, and long-running without being tedious or tiresome. In this they are like many another series to appear during the 1887-1914 period: essentially forgotten by readers today, but rewarding to those who make the effort to find and read them.

Recommended Edition

Print: K. Prichard, How Don Q Stood At Bay. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2014.

Online: https://archive.org/details/chroniclesdonq00pricgoog