Are you familiar with the term "cracksman"? It's a word used to define a burglar or thief. What, then, is the definition of an "amateur" cracksman? For the answer to that, I suggest a session or two spent reading the short stories (and one novel) by E. W. Hornung about A. J. Raffles and his friend (and narrator) Bunny Manders. The first collection of stories about Raffles appeared in book form in 1899 under the title Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Raffles is a fine young Victorian Englishman-about-town, quite at home on the cricket field. At the same time, not to put too fine a point on it, he is a professional thief – although, in the earliest stories contained in this book, he appears to limit his robberies to those committed for the purpose of helping friends, or sometimes in punishing evil-doers. He certainly appears to be an immoral character; he’s no “Robin Hood” type, as he and his friend Bunny prefer to keep the proceeds of their exploits for their own use.
But let’s begin at the beginning. In the first of these stories, when Bunny Manders goes to visit A. J. Raffles at his London flat, he is on a grim mission indeed. He has just written bad checks to a group of men (including Raffles) to whom he has lost at cards. Facing ruin, he intends to confess to Raffles and then to kill himself. But Raffles has what he says is a better idea, and he persuades Bunny to accompany him on a jewel robbing expedition, hoping to steal enough in valuable jewels to cover those bad checks.
Do they succeed? Well, this IS the first story in a series…
Just as Sherlock Holmes really served as the prototype for the brilliant amateur detective working on the side of the law, you could argue that Raffles served as the literary prototype for the “gentleman thief,” a person who stood as the absolute opposite to Holmes, working against the law. In fact, you wouldn’t be so far off, given that Raffles’s creator, E. W. Hornung, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. We are told that Doyle admired Hornung’s writing – but not Raffles’s morality. Doyle believed – and stated – that one couldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) turn a thief like Raffles into the hero of the story. And yet the character was appealing, and a lot of imitators sprang up very quickly, including author Maurice Leblanc's French gentleman thief, Arsène Lupin. Still, as early thrillers of sorts, the stories about Raffles were remarkably popular and successful. Other authors later took over the characters, perhaps making them somewhat more palatable, especially to the moralists. But these original stories do have a certain charm and are written with considerable flair.
These stories, still in print after more than a century, are long out of copyright, and there are several editions of Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, including some free ones, floating around. You might enjoy one edition which has a very good introduction from the fine anthologist and bookshop owner Otto Penzler. Give these stories a try.
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