E. W. HornungKirja-arvosteluja

Gentleman thief A. J. Raffles and his accomplice Harry ‘Bunny’ Masters are the criminal mirror images of Holmes and Watson. Any resemblance is entirely intentional: the book bears the dedication ‘To A.C.D., This Form of Flattery’ and Hornung was married to Constance Doyle, Conan Doyle’s sister. Raffles is a dandy about town, a handsome, well-heeled member of late Victorian society who is also a diamond thief and burglar. He has a bachelor pad at the Albany, belongs to the best West End clubs and dines in grand houses as a guest before breaking into them and cracking the safe.

Raffles and Bunny met at their public school and are very close friends. Their relationship carries a delicious homoerotic subtext. At first I thought this was my fevered imagination but Hornung knew Oscar Wilde and it seems that echoes of the Wilde/Bosie dalliance were also entirely intentional. Raffles and Bunny inhabit a Wildean world of paradox, moral relativism and aestheticism. Raffles is criminal as artist relishing the conception, plotting and realisation of his crimes. He steals partly to maintain his lifestyle but also for the sheer creative fun of it. And there’s a whiff of socialism in the privileged air: challenged by Bunny about his depredations Raffles avers that crime is wrong but the distribution of wealth is wrong as well.

He has a talent for cricket and plays for England - ‘a dangerous bat, a brilliant field, and perhaps the very finest slow bowler of his decade’. His fame on the field provides cover for his secret life of larceny as well as allowing Hornung to spin parallels between the game of cricket and the game of crime. George Orwell had a talent for writing perceptive essays and he wrote one about Raffles. Orwell points out that cricket is the perfect sport for Raffles as it is bound up, in England at least, with notions of style and fair play; the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ to express ethical disapproval is not entirely obsolete even in the 21st century. By making his burglar a cricketer, observes Orwell, Hornung was ‘drawing the sharpest moral contrast that he was able to imagine’.

Raffles is an amateur cricketer, just as he is an amateur cracksman, and he regards with condescension the professionals in both occupations. Raffles, you understand, is a Gentleman and most emphatically not a Player. Which brings us to the essence of these delightfully absurd adventures: snobbery. By making his hero a toff Hornung catered to his readers fantasies about upper crust society but making his toff a criminal also enabled him to playfully subvert Victorian values. Raffles has it both ways with great panache and so does Hornung. These interrelated stories are awash with period charm, cleverly plotted and a rattling good read.

Further adventures of gentlemen burglars Raffles and Bunny.

I read this previously and found the tales of Raffles and his sidekick Bunny entertaining in a quaint, old-fashioned kind of way. Nothing groundbreaking, but likeable characters. The fact that they are gentlemen burglars makes it even more fun.

Not a bad story. I did enjoy it more than the Raffles tales but that's just me.

Hornung, E. W. The Amateur Cracksman. 1898. Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman. Penguin, 2003.
The Amateur Cracksman, a collection of linked short stories by E. W. Hornung, set the pattern for the subgenre of mystery thrillers featuring debonair thieves. It has been made into films and television dramas more than ten times. Raffles was the character that P. G, Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster aspired to be. Raffles’ more or less direct lineage includes John Robie of To Catch a Thief, Charles Lytton of The Pink Panther, and the eponymous Thomas Crown. Hornung’s hero, A. J. Raffles, is a Victorian gentleman and cricket star who supplements his income by cracking safes and purloining jewels. He has an old school chum named Bunny who acts as his subordinate partner in crime. There is also a police inspector rival, who is a likeable character but not a comic figure like Inspector Clouseau. David Niven played both Raffles and Lytton in the movies, in 1939 and 1963, respectively. Sadly, the media history is more intriguing to me than the Raffles stories. Hornung’s prose is too stodgy for my taste. 3 stars.

Super duper racist and anti semitic in places, but not without pleasures anyway. There's an element of social critique there, but I think mostly the stories are meant to just be a rollicking good time -- a fantasy of what one might do with a lot of social privilege and very scanty ethics.

https://donut-donut.dreamwidth.org/839347.html½

Had distinct preconceptions of what this was going to be like and they were not good. I just could not see how the concept of the gentleman thief could over many surprises or excitement but i was totally wrong. The amount of variety through this book is really good and it never feels dull or repetitive and Raffles doesn't come across as clever or flawless as one might expect. Ending comes rather suddenly and doesn't seem to well conceived but apart from that highly recommended.

This is my second consecutive century-old story and I'm happy to be on this track... The plot and the characters are excellent. The story moves at a good pace. Except for the "language" which is somewhat difficult to comprehend, this book is an enjoyable read.

I love this book!
Written/published at the turn of the 20th century, the writing seems at first a bit stilted and wordy, but that's Victorian Era writing for you! This is series of stories which we follow a gentleman thief and his protege on their thieving adventures.
It is a fun, light hearted series of stories, which could be stand-alone and i believe they were originally published as such in newspapers before collected in book form.
I must warn you. The ending knocked me out. The epilogue takes us to a different frame of mind. Please don't rush and read the epilogue first as it may ruin the fun of the bulk of the book!!!½

While the collection, particularly the first section, was quite interesting and novel- I did not feel a true affinity with the stories. The characters were the best parts, but the plots sort of went wayward and the style a little stringent and archaic at times. For these reasons, this collection gets its rating.

2.5 stars.½

A gentleman thief modeled after Sherlock Holmes. Thank you Project Gutenberg.

Full length novel; not quite sure when it takes place re the other stories. Before Europe. Right in line with his character, though.

Old school stories about a "gentleman thief" and his somewhat unwilling partner. Entertaining and probably extremely original when first released in 1899. Holds up fairly well.

Poor Bunny :(

Raffles is a unique depiction of a rogue burglar. The novel is one of style plus substance that succeeds in what Graham Greene would call "entertainment."

Well that was a rum little thing. Holmes and Watson as thieves written by Conan Doyle's brother-in-law. Only they're not terribly good. Raffles is far from perfect. He's a bit of a lunatic. Bunny contributes almost nothing. It's all a bit of a mess.

And yet... the stories contain the bare-bones tropes if every heist movie and anti-hero thief story ever told.

Though I do enjoy reading History, I'm not the type of person that picks up every war book and reads it by chance. According to this book, it's written, "'Chance' is no answer, unless the word be help to cover organic tissue of chances, each in turn closely related to some other chance, all component parts of a chance whole. And what sensation novelist would build a plot on such foundations and hope to make his tale convincing? Not, at my worst; and there were more of these chances still to come, albeit none that mattered as did those already recounted."

This book, though only 195 pages, took awhile for me to get through. I found myself going back and re-reading passages. The author is a YMCA volunteer who serves behind the lines of battle. He helped serve food and drink and kept up the mens morale while running their library. There's an interesting chapter on 'Writers and Readers". We learn they had a 'New Book Table' and the library ledger showed the tops books that were in use. It showed that 4 copies of the book, "The First Hundred Thousand" by Ian Hays (Jonn Hay Beith, authors actual name) were always out in circulation, finding it to be the most popular book. Next to that, Dickens was popular as was Lord Lytton.

The mood throughout this collection shows the loss that was felt during the war. "Then the two Segeants prepared the ground with gentle skill; and we knelt and put in narcissus bulbs, the primroses and pinks, the phlox and the saxifrage, that the boy's mother had sent him; and a baby rose tree from an old friend who loved him, in the corner of England that he loved best; it must be climbing up his cross, if it has lived to climb at all."

This is a beautifully written book about life and death in the trenches. The author speaks of a service with Holy Water and how chaplains would relay details of tradgety. It's a recounting of what was happening and being heard between the shell - bursts and what men would do to dispell anxiety over the loss of fellow comrades.

A.J. Raffles periodically re-surfaces as a classic character of popular fiction, and just as quickly drops out of sight again, exactly as E.W. Hornung frequently describes him doing in the 26 short stories and single novel that he devoted to Raffles - about half the output that Arthur Conan Doyle produced about Sherlock Holmes. Hornung, famously, was married to Conan Doyle's sister, and patterned his stories of the gentleman thief and champion cricketer Raffles, and his sidekick Bunny Mander, after the Holmesian example, while inverting the moral system. Conan Doyle was flattered and praised the stories, but was also troubled by them: "You must not make the criminal a hero."

Of course, it's exactly this inversion that has always provided Raffles' fascination. Should we root for him or not? Hornung comes up with ways for us to do so rather painlessly, but still, it's a dicey business. Each new Raffles story you read raises the issue all over again, and that, obviously, is an awfully good fictional hook.

The Raffles - Bunny relationship is also, in a different sense, "inverted" - a whole lot gayer than the Holmes - Watson partnership. Hornung was friendly with Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and is said to have based his duo partly on them. In the first Raffles story, "The Ides of March," a distinctly down-on-his-luck Bunny Mander is actually contemplating suicide over some gambling debts, but his old schoolmate Raffles persuades him that criminality is sometimes a better course of action than giving into depression. To become Raffles' partner-in-crime for the rest of the series, Bunny has to get off on shared improper behavior, and boy does he:

I'll do it again...I will...I'll lend you a hand as often as you like! What does it matter now? I've been in it once. I'll be in it again. I've gone to the devil anyhow. I can't go back, and wouldn't if I could. Nothing matters another rap! When you want me I'm your man.

If no sexual interpretation occurs to you while you are reading that, you have a cleaner mind than mine.

The first 16 Raffles stories were collected in two volumes of eight stories apiece, The Amateur Cracksman (1899) and The Black Mask (1901). Wordsworth Classics reprinted all these in one volume, Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman, in 1994, and it was in this form that I read and was delighted by them.

These first two volumes of Raffles stories are decidedly different, because at the end of the first, Raffles disappears and Bunny is packed off to prison. Their adventures after their reunion in the second collection cannot have the same carefree tone as before, and indeed do not, a fact that some decried as a diminution of the original impulse, but which I simply read as fictional development. Things have to happen in stories, as in life, and in good fictional series, the author follows through on the consequences of them happening.

Raffles comes to a rather improbable glorious end fighting in the Boer War in the last of these 16 stories, and when Hornung decided to revive the character with 10 more stories in A Thief in the Night in 1905, and a single novel Mr. Justice Raffles in 1909, he didn't "bring him back to life" a la Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Empty House," but set the stories in a period before Raffles' demise a la The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Raffles has been incarnated by at least 13 actors on screen and television, including John Barrymore, Ronald Colman, and David Niven. Anyone who can play elegant-but-larcenous has been eligible. Cary Grant would have worked.

A. J. Raffles, a gentleman thief, travels among the elite of the London social register. Invited for his classy manners and top cricket playing at many a manor and country estate, he is a bit of a Robin Hood-esque figure crossed with Sherlock Holmes. Being of good manners, he never steals from his hosts, but if there is something amiss he will make it all right.

Harry "Bunny" Manders, an old schoolmate, plays Watson to Raffles. Recording their many adventures while also being the partner in crime.

In "A Jubilee Present", Raffles becomes enamored with a priceless gold cup in the British Museum. Managing to steal it from out of heavy security, it finds it so beautiful that he can't melt it down to sell. Instead he presents it to Queen Victoria in tribute to her Diamond Jubilee. A bit of Robin Hood here.

This is the second collection of short stories recounting some of their adventure. The stories take place later in their careers. This was the first collection published. There are two other books of earlier adventures that were published later. I definitely plan to read them.

Interesting note is that E.W. Hornung was Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, and felt that Raffles was to be a form of flattery to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.

The adventures of Raffles, gentleman jewel thief, as told by his unwilling but adoring friend, Bunny. It's strange but diverting

recommended to me as: "They're basically Sherlock and Watson, but criminals. It's awesome. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/706
To make the Raffles books even better - not only are they basically Holmes and Watson but criminals; Hornung was ACD's brother-in-law, and Raffles and Bunny were pretty much an intentional Holmes and Watson parody, complete with OTT slashiness that might actually have been intentional.

Be warned for some A Product Of It's Time casual racism in one or two of the stories, though."

This is more of a historical curiosity now as the stories aren't very exciting or clever.

A.J. Raffles is a gentleman thief in late Victorian England whose main cover story of playing cricket allows him some outside excuse for travel. He has a sidekick named Bunny Manders who is the one documenting the stories. There is a main adversary as well in Inspector MacKenzie of Scotland Yard. If these parallels to Sherlock Holmes aren't enough for you, then you should also know that author E.W. Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The stories however usually involve simply quick and bold grabs without any particularly clever scheme, so in comparison to modern day heist thrillers this is pretty tame stuff. Still, it is interesting to see the anti-hero precedents being set here.

For another early (c. 1900) gentleman thief series of books I'd recommend Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin series where the lead character is also quite charming and witty.

This is one of those books that I felt I had to read because I've heard about it so much. It is a slim volume of short stories told in a continuous narrative. Bunny, the narrator, is a friend who was tricked into joining Raffles in crime. After the first time, future crimes naturally follow. The stories are simple, fun, old-fashioned ("It's a fair cop, guv'nor"), although Raffles is not as honourable as I was led to believe.½

Surprisingly enjoyable. There's an emotional shallowness that comes with pulp stories of this short length, but Bunny's curious devotion to Raffles and the uncanny moral void that they both operate in, manage to be unexpectedly moving. The finale of the collection especially, with Bunny's image of Raffles' head bobbing off towards land as he's clapped in irons, is powerful.½

"I say, Bunny. The Count has a stone of incomparable worth, the color of a Peacock's crown. Shall we attempt it tonight?"
"Surely, you must be joking. Won't his man impede us? He will not be attending the Ball at Hamptons with him, after all. I must say, you do take unwarranted risks."
Yeah, yeah. I know. Boring yet pretentious. The greatest Cricketer of the age a cat burglar. What nonsense. What rot. Don't bother. Good, it's not.