E. W. Hornung (1866–1921)
Author of Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman
About the Author
Series
Works by E. W. Hornung
The Complete Raffles Collection by E.W. Hornung (Unexpurgated Edition) (Halcyon Classics) (2010) 17 copies
Raffles Collection (The collected stories of A. J. Raffles. Four books in one volume!) (2000) 16 copies, 2 reviews
The Raffles Megapack: The Complete Tales of the Amateur Cracksman, plus Pastiches and Continuations (2013) 6 copies
Raffles, gentleman thief 6 copies
Le Premier Pas 2 copies
Gentleman and Players 2 copies
PR6015 .O687 Stingaree 1 copy
Camera Friend 1 copy
Rogue's March: A Romance 1 copy
Proezas de Raffles O Gatuno 1 copy
No Sinecure [short story] 1 copy
A Schoolmaster Abroad 1 copy
Out of Paradise 1 copy
E.W. Hornung - The Amateur Cracksman: "In my emotion I had at first to struggle for every word" (2018) 1 copy, 1 review
The Thousandth Woman 1 copy
Associated Works
The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes (2009) — Contributor — 198 copies, 6 reviews
101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories 1841-1941 (1941) — Contributor — 111 copies, 1 review
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: The Greatest Detective Stories: 1837-1914 (2019) — Contributor — 37 copies
Classic Crime Stories : 13 Tales from Edgar Allan Poe to Lawrence Block (2007) — Contributor — 5 copies
Raffles: Series 3: BBC Radio 4 full-cast [radio play] — Original author — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Hornung, Ernest William
- Birthdate
- 1866-06-07
- Date of death
- 1921-03-22
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Uppingham School
- Occupations
- writer
poet
tutor
journalist - Relationships
- Doyle, Arthur Conan (brother-in-law)
- Cause of death
- pneumonia
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Places of residence
- Mossgiel, New South Wales, Australia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
London, Middlesex, England, UK
Posillipo, Naples, Italy
West Kensington, London, Middlesex, England, UK
Arras, Artois, France (show all 8)
Amiens, Hauts-de-France, France
Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany - Place of death
- Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France
- Burial location
- Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
I bought a copy of 'The Collected Raffles' off eBay in the hope it would be fun, light reading. I was delighted to find it's a hoot. I'd vaguely heard of Raffles, mostly via him and Bunny showing up in Kim Newman's Victorian crime crossover extravaganza [b:Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles|10635411|Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles|Kim Newman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347793070l/10635411._SY75_.jpg|15544066]. In show more that, the narrator comments on Raffles and Bunny being a couple. From this I inferred that there would perhaps be some Holmes and Watson-level homoerotic subtext. This was a significant underestimate, as I found that the pair are absurdly married. In the first few stories, I enjoyed their hijinks while wondering why exactly these Edwardian fools were doing crimes. They aren't very competent thieves and earn enough from one jewel theft to live comfortably for ages, were they capable of budgeting. Raffles insists that it's better to live by crime than cricket, despite being manifestly better at the latter. Bunny is highly ambivalent about law-breaking until in the same room as Raffles, whereupon he decides crime is good as long as the hot guy he had a crush on at boarding school is doing it. Eventually it became clear to me that they steal things, sometimes using violence, because they get off on it. Raffles manipulates Bunny and conceals his plans, exciting mayhem ensues, they flee, Bunny complains until Raffles soothes and flatters him back into admiration. Both appear very happy with this dynamic; there is only one mention of bringing a third person into their crime relationship, quickly quashed.
What with the cricket and Raffles' affectations, he and Bunny are [b:Mike and Psmith|953232|Mike and Psmith (Psmith, #1)|P.G. Wodehouse|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348073756l/953232._SY75_.jpg|1938751] if they were amoral crime husbands. Although the pair would doubtless be extremely annoying people to encounter for multiple reasons, their shenanigans are a delight to read about. Stealing money is apparently too dull and bourgeois, so they inevitably go after jewels and silverware. Raffles' plans are either highly elaborate and full of dependencies or impulsive smash and grab, nothing in between. He also prefers to steal from people who he has taken against for some reason, or who seem like a challenge. The appelation 'amateur cracksman' is certainly apposite, as he behaves unprofessionally throughout. No wonder Moriarty didn't approve of him in Newman's novel! Bunny is literally only in it for Raffles, as he states: 'It was Raffles I loved. It was not the dark life we led together, still less its base rewards; it was the man himself, his gaiety, his humour, his dazzling audacity, his incomparable courage and resource.'
The Edwardian setting of the stories unfortunately comes with some racist and anti-semetic stereotypes, as well as plenty of colonialism. However, there are also high speed bicycle chases and telephones as plot devices. The tone is generally of melodramatic farce, which makes the stories great fun to read. Memorable incidents include Bunny being held hostage on a roof during a thunderstorm, Raffles repeatedly faking his own death, Bunny being a jealous bitch while on a cruise, the pair squatting in someone's house as a 'rest cure', Bunny flirting with an asthmatic guy after attempting crime on his own, and an awkward school reunion.
When I say that Raffles and Bunny seem married, this is the kind of thing I mean:
In the second volume of stories, our anti-heroes get caught up in spurious patriotic sentiment and go to fight in the Boer War. There's very little in the way of actual fighting, but Bunny recounts how he got shot in the thigh in this blatantly romantic fashion:
The final story in the collection is a letter from Bunny's nameless former paramour. He broke it off with her in order to run off with Raffles. Raffles then manipulated him into breaking into her house, and she hid him in a cupboard when this burglary went wrong. Raffles later went back to apologise to her and insist that wasn't Bunny's plan. Her letter includes these incredible lines:
An impressively understanding response to your fiance abandoning you for a criminal! It's worth noting that this magnetism doesn't seem to work on the many people who try to arrest, injure, and/or murder Raffles over the years. I enjoyed these tales of the crime husbands, who doubtless survived the Boer War and continued their jewel theft hobby for many more years. After faking his death twice before, obviously Raffles would do so again. show less
What with the cricket and Raffles' affectations, he and Bunny are [b:Mike and Psmith|953232|Mike and Psmith (Psmith, #1)|P.G. Wodehouse|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348073756l/953232._SY75_.jpg|1938751] if they were amoral crime husbands. Although the pair would doubtless be extremely annoying people to encounter for multiple reasons, their shenanigans are a delight to read about. Stealing money is apparently too dull and bourgeois, so they inevitably go after jewels and silverware. Raffles' plans are either highly elaborate and full of dependencies or impulsive smash and grab, nothing in between. He also prefers to steal from people who he has taken against for some reason, or who seem like a challenge. The appelation 'amateur cracksman' is certainly apposite, as he behaves unprofessionally throughout. No wonder Moriarty didn't approve of him in Newman's novel! Bunny is literally only in it for Raffles, as he states: 'It was Raffles I loved. It was not the dark life we led together, still less its base rewards; it was the man himself, his gaiety, his humour, his dazzling audacity, his incomparable courage and resource.'
The Edwardian setting of the stories unfortunately comes with some racist and anti-semetic stereotypes, as well as plenty of colonialism. However, there are also high speed bicycle chases and telephones as plot devices. The tone is generally of melodramatic farce, which makes the stories great fun to read. Memorable incidents include Bunny being held hostage on a roof during a thunderstorm, Raffles repeatedly faking his own death, Bunny being a jealous bitch while on a cruise, the pair squatting in someone's house as a 'rest cure', Bunny flirting with an asthmatic guy after attempting crime on his own, and an awkward school reunion.
When I say that Raffles and Bunny seem married, this is the kind of thing I mean:
"Now, what I want you to do is to go and take some quiet place somewhere, and then let me know, so that I may have a port in the storm when it breaks."
"Now you're talking!" I cried, recovering my spirits, "I thought you meant to go and drop a fellow altogether!"
"Exactly the sort of thing you would think," rejoined Raffles, with a contempt that was welcome enough after my late alarm. "No, my dear rabbit, what you've got to do is to make a new burrow for us both."
In the second volume of stories, our anti-heroes get caught up in spurious patriotic sentiment and go to fight in the Boer War. There's very little in the way of actual fighting, but Bunny recounts how he got shot in the thigh in this blatantly romantic fashion:
So we lay together on the veldt, under blinding sun and withering fire, and I suppose it is the veldt that I should describe, as it swims and flickers before wounded eyes. I shut mine to bring it back, but all that comes is the keen brown face of Raffles, still a shade paler than its wont, now bending to sight and fire; now peering to see results, brows raised, eyes widening; anon turning to me with the word to set my tight lips grinning. He was talking all the time, but for my sake, and I knew it. Can you wonder that I could not see an inch beyond him? He was the battle to me then; he is the whole war to me as I look back now.
The final story in the collection is a letter from Bunny's nameless former paramour. He broke it off with her in order to run off with Raffles. Raffles then manipulated him into breaking into her house, and she hid him in a cupboard when this burglary went wrong. Raffles later went back to apologise to her and insist that wasn't Bunny's plan. Her letter includes these incredible lines:
There is an absolute magnetism about Mr. Raffles that neither you nor I could resist. He has the strength of personality which is a different thing from strength of character; but when you meet both kinds together, they carry the ordinary mortal off his or her feet. You must not imagine you are the only one who would have served and followed him as you did. When he told me it was all a game to him, and the one game he knew was always exciting, always full of danger and drama, I could just then have found it in my heart to try the game myself!
[...]
It is not for me to condone it, and yet I know that Mr Raffles was what he was because he loved danger and adventure, and that you were what you were because you loved Mr Raffles.
An impressively understanding response to your fiance abandoning you for a criminal! It's worth noting that this magnetism doesn't seem to work on the many people who try to arrest, injure, and/or murder Raffles over the years. I enjoyed these tales of the crime husbands, who doubtless survived the Boer War and continued their jewel theft hobby for many more years. After faking his death twice before, obviously Raffles would do so again. show less
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.
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 show more 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. show less
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. show less
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 show more 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. show less
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. show less
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