He was beyond comparison the most masterful man whom I have ever known.
(Bunny on Raffles)

Ernest William Hornung wrote a series of twenty-six short stories and one novel about the adventures of by far his most successful fictional character, Arthur J. Raffles, cricketer and gentleman thief. The stories are told in the first person by his assistant and chronicler, Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders. The series was published between 1898 and 1909.

The first story, The Ides of March, appeared in the June 1898 edition of Cassell’s Magazine and the first eight adventures were collected in The Amateur Cracksman (1899), with further stories in the successive volumes The Black Mask (1901) and A Thief in the Night (1904), followed by the full-length novel, Mr. Justice Raffles in 1909.

Hornung dedicated The Amateur Cracksman to his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, and openly declared that Raffles was a deliberate inversion of the Sherlock Holmes formula, with a faithful amanuensis recording the daring exploits of a clever, bold, resourceful, upper-class English criminal rather than detective. Raffles, as Hornung’s dedication to this volume makes clear, was intended as a ‘form of flattery’.

The eight stories in this first collection are:

1. The Ides of March

Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders is invited to a game of baccarat at Raffles’s rooms in the Albany, a posh apartment block in a little square just off Piccadilly. (Bunny himself lives in rooms in Mount Street.) Bunny was Raffles’s fag at public school. He loses badly at the card game and ends up having to write cheques for £200 to all the other players. When they’ve all left, Bunny tearfully confesses to Raffles that he hasn’t got the money, in fact he hasn’t got any money.

Suavely and confidently, Raffles confides in the young chap that – neither has he! Despite living in a swanky apartment and doing nothing except play a spot of cricket in the summer, he is in fact penniless. The interest in this first story is how Raffles converts Bunny to a life of crime. First he gets him to admit that he needs to do something for money, even something desperate. Then he reminds Bunny of how they used to break the rules at school and asks how he’d feel about ‘breaking the rules’ now. Step by subtle step, Raffles generally leads Bunny on to the brink of admitting that, yes, he would even steal to get the money.

‘Do you remember how we used to break into the studies at school? Here goes!’

At which point, after pausing and considering a bit, Raffles asks him to come along to borrow some money from a friend who lives round the corner. ‘At this hour?’ Bunny asks. ‘Chop, chop old chap’, says the suave head of the cricket eleven, and leads Bunny out into the foggy muddy pavements of Piccadilly.

Raffles takes Bunny to Bond Street and then unlocks the door which gives on to stairs leading up to a flat above a high-class jewellers. ‘So where’s this friend?’ Bunny asks, as a sinking feeling comes over him. Slowly he realises that the flat is empty, abandoned, vacant. The realisation dawns that… Raffles has come to burgle the jewellers.

Over the next few hours Bunny watches Raffles at work, and very impressive it is, too. Raffles has previously reconnoitred the place, and realised that the vacant apartment shared a backyard with the jewellers. So he had approached the estate agent expressing interest in buying the flat and was given a key.

This is how he comes to be able to let himself and Bunny in, taking Bunny through the flat and then down into the basement area between the two properties. Here Raffles crosses the line by breaking open the window into the jewellers. Through the kitchen and up the stairs where they discover… a very strong mahoganny door blocking entry into the jewellers shop.

Raffles removes the lock by painstakingly drilling a series of holes round it. Beyond it is a metal grille door, but Raffles has a set of skeleton keys, one of which opens it. they’re in!

Raffles posts Bunny as a lookout at the street window of the flat and loots all the jewellery he can find, pausing whenever Bunny makes a sign that the local policeman is walking by.

Then they wash their hands and faces (all that drilling was dirty work), lock up what can be locked up, exit and stroll back along Piccadilly to Raffles’s flat. That’s it.

‘Enjoy it?’ Raffles asks Bunny. I’ll quote the entire exchange because, in a sense, it’s the crucial temptation scene, the moment when Bunny passes over to the Dark Side.

‘Like it?’ I cried out. ‘Not I! It’s no life for me. Once is enough!”
You wouldn’t give me a hand another time?’
‘Don’t ask me, Raffles. Don’t ask me, for God’s sake!’
‘Yet you said you would do anything for me! You asked me to name my crime! But I knew at the time you didn’t mean it; you didn’t go back on me to-night, and that ought to satisfy me, goodness knows! I suppose I’m ungrateful, and unreasonable, and all that. I ought to let it end at this. But you’re the very man for me, Bunny, the – very – man! Just think how we got through to-night. Not a scratch – not a hitch! There’s nothing very terrible in it, you see; there never would be, while we worked together.’

He was standing in front of me with a hand on either shoulder; he was smiling as he knew so well how to smile. I turned on my heel, planted my elbows on the chimney-piece, and my burning head between my hands. Next instant a still heartier hand had fallen on my back.

‘All right, my boy! You are quite right and I’m worse than wrong. I’ll never ask it again. Go, if you want to, and come again about mid-day for the cash. There was no bargain; but, of course, I’ll get you out of your scrape – especially after the way you’ve stood by me to-night.’

I was round again with my blood on fire
‘I’ll do it again,’ I said, through my teeth.
He shook his head. ‘Not you,’ he said, smiling quite good-humoredly on my insane enthusiasm.

‘I will,’ I cried with an oath. ‘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!’

And that is how Raffles and I joined felonious forces on the Ides of March.

2. A Costume Piece

Big, brash, loud multi-millionaire Reuben Rosenthall turns up from the diamond fields in South Africa, dominates the newspapers and gossip columns, and holds a huge dinner inviting all the press, at which he boasts of his enormous fortune, the two huge diamonds in his tie-pin and ring, introduces the prize fighter, Billy Purvis, as his bodyguard and pulls out a gun and wants to decorate the hall wall with bullet holes until talked out of it by his hosts.

Well, in case we hadn’t realised it before, this second story gives the author the opportunity of showing just how much Raffles considers himself an artist of crime, an ‘insatiable artist’. Stealing stuff for the sake of it is common and vulgar. The real artist likes a challenge.

Raffles would plan a fresh enormity, or glory in the last, with the unmitigated enthusiasm of the artist.

And few challenges were more obvious than the richest man in Britain offering to take on all-comers.

Raffles takes Bunny to the studio which he rents down an alley in Chelsea. He tells the landlord he’s an ‘artist’ and needs all these costume and props for his models. In fact, the costumes and props are disguises for all occasions.

A few days later, Bunny finds Raffles masquerading as a smelly old tramp near Rosenthall’s hired house in St John’s Wood. Raffles tells him the job will be the next evening.

So they dress up as Shoreditch roughs and sneak through the garden of the house next door. When they see Rosenthall, Purvis and two ladies of the night loudly exit the house and pile into a carriage which sweeps off down the drive, Raffles says, ‘Go go go.’

They leap over the wall, but have barely made it through the open french windows into the dining room before all the lights go on and they find themselves looking down the barrel of a bunch of revolvers.

Rosenthall and Purvis have double-bluffed them, known about their plans for weeks. Raffles immediately starts talking in a broad East End thief dialect. He uses the one piece of information he has about Rosenthall which is that the millionaire is suspected of receiving stolen diamond. This infuriates Rosenthal and his man, Purvis, makes a lunge at Raffles, but this momentarily blocks Rosenthall’s line of fire and Raffles is out of the window in flash, over the wall, through the bushes and gone.

While the other two search for him, Bunny legs it upstairs and hides in a bedroom where, after some searching, Rosenthall and Purvis finally find him and drag him downstairs.

They are just considering what to do with him, when there’s a ring at the door and a policeman walks in who says he is responding to reports of a disturbance from alarmed neighbours. Rosenthall and Purvis indicate that Bunny was one of the burglars at which point the constable briskly handcuffs Bunny and frog marches him out of the building, telling Rosenthall and Purvis that reinforcements will be along in a minute to investigate the burglary.

The policeman is, of course, Raffles, in yet another of his disguises. Well, their plan to rob Rosenthall didn’t come off, so be it:

‘But, by Jove, we’re jolly lucky to have come out of it at all!’

3. Gentlemen and Players

Raffles is, of course, a master of cricket, the ultimate English idea of the gentleman’s game:

a dangerous bat, a brilliant field, and perhaps the very finest slow bowler of his decade,

His cricket prowess gets them invited to a house party down at Milchester Abbey, seat of posh Lord Amersteth, who is hosting a week of Gentlemen versus Players competitions.

Every detail of this story reads like a P.G. Wodehouse comedy, from the deaf old dowager with her ear trumpet, to the callow son of Lord Amersteth, to the dainty young lady, Miss Melhuish, who sits next to Bunny at dinner and tells him an awfully, frightfully, scandalous secret.

Bunny’s reaction to the whole situation, and to Raffles’s imperturbably sang-froid, is priceless.

Of course Raffles has accepted the invitation because he plans to steal the jewels of the posh guests. But Miss Melhuish’s Big Secret had been that one of the guests is a detective from London because two famous London thieves are in the neighbourhood.

This leads to all kinds of comic complications, especially on the part of Bunny, who completely fails to realise that the Scottish ‘photographer’ he spends an hour chatting with after dinner is the detective. Bunny is now terrified that the two London thieves being pursued are him and Raffles.

But they’re not. It is a different set of London thieves. This gang proceeds to carry out an audacious burglary, with inside help from some of Lord Amersteth’s servants, and the room of the Dowager Marchioness of Melrose with the fine jewels is broken into.

Everyone is woken by the rumpus made by the London detective grappling with one of the ‘inside men’ i.e. one of the servants who had helped with the job. Raffles, first on the spot, volunteers to take over holding him guard while the detective – Mackenzie of the Yard – goes dashing out into the garden to try and catch the rest of the gang who have meanwhile shinned down a rope from her Ladyship’s room and are escaping through the garden.

Things take a slightly serious turn when Mackenzie is shot, though survives. The thieves get away. All the guests stay up the rest of the night, discussing the events, on through breakfast and the cab journey to the nearby station and the train ride home.

Only when the train has arrived at Paddington and Raffles and Bunny are alone in a hansom cab, does Raffles reveal that in all the confusion he had darted into the Marchioness’s room and – stolen her necklace!

Burglary as wizard wheeze!

4. Le Premier Pas

Raffles tells Bunny about his first caper. He was on a cricket tour of Australia when his hand was damaged in Melbourne. He desperately needed funds and, asking around and giving his name to people, was amazed to come across a doctor who knew of a relative of Raffles’s who was a bank manager. Who had just taken up a new position in a township fifty miles south, name of Yea.

Raffles saw the opportunity to go and beg money from this distant relative so he borrows the doctor’s fat old mare (who needs an outing) and sets off along a dusty road in the Outback.

At a forest of eucalyptus trees a horse comes bounding out, with a bloody saddle. Raffles blocks it, grabs the reins just as another horseman comes riding up. This horseman is a very rough looking man. He gives the explanation his mate just rode into the branch of a tree, got a bloody nose and fell off, and that he’s come to fetch his horse.

Puzzled, and a little scared, Raffles rides on, arriving at the township of Yea at sunset. He goes to the bank and makes himself known to the man there and then – realises that he’s walking into a big misunderstanding. His namesake, W.F. Raffles, hasn’t yet arrived and the bank official (Ewbank) mistakes Raffles for the new manager.

There is a moment in the conversation when Raffles could have cleared up the misunderstanding, been honest, and waited for his distant relation to arrive. In that moment, he recollects the rough guy and wild horse he saw earlier, and wonders whether they were bushwhackers who had waylaid his namesake. Maybe his namesake has been delayed, kidnapped or even shot.

In that moment, partly out of need and partly for the fun of the thing, Raffles decides to impersonate his namesake and see what opportunities arise.

There follow a couple of pages of comedy as Raffles desperately tries to keep up with what Ewbank knows about the new manager, not least the story that he once saw off an armed robber at his previous job. All this Raffles has to bluff his way through, and finds it nerve-racking but also very exciting.

He asks for a full tour round the bank, and then stays up late jawing with Ewbank, emptying his own drink when the other isn’t watching, trying to get Ewbank as drunk as possible. Eventually Ewbank goes to bed. So does Raffles – for a few hours. Then he sneaks out and saddles the mare, then sneaks down into the bank and, using the keys Ewbank has shown him, lets himself through a door, which leads to steps down into the strong room. Here he fills his pockets with gold sovereigns, carefully balancing the weight. But then—!!!!

He hears banging at the front door of the bank! Caught in the act!!

The banging keeps on till the drunk Ewbank stirs and comes downstairs. Raffles overhears it all. His namesake has arrived and, yes, he was captured and tied up by the bushwhackers. But has worked his way free and here he is more dead than alive.

Raffles hears all this, trapped downstairs in the strong room with the blood pounding in his ears. Ewbank realises that he has been taken in by an imposter (Raffles) and becomes very angry. He grabs his revolver and he and the other Raffles quietly go upstairs to the bedroom where they think our hero is asleep.

Which gives our hero the chance to very, very quietly tiptoe up the stairs from the strong room, along the corridor to the back door, out into the paddock, climb onto the mare and walk her very slowly out into the shadow of the other buildings and towards the road out of town.

There follows a vivid description of Raffles’s ride through the forest of eucalyptus at night with his head pressed against the horse’s mane. He arrives back at Melbourne, stashes the gold in his hotel room, returns the horse to the doctor who is a little puzzled and suspicious but does nothing.

The cricket tour ends. The team return to England. Raffles has discovered a new hobby – thieving!

5. Wilful Murder

Bunny learns that Raffles fences his stolen goods by dressing up in the outfit of an East End crook, and going to meet a fence and swindler named Baird. He puts on a thick slum accent for the purpose – all part of the fun of the game. Except that on his most recent visit, Baird for the first time sees though him and follows him back towards his apartment. Raffles realises he’s being followed. This could be serious.

He takes Bunny for dinner and for the first time Raffles talks about the joys of burglary, giving a surprisingly shallow speech about what larks it would be to have committed a murder and then walk into the club where all the chaps are discussing it and knowing that you are the culprit.

He then sets off to Willesden (which, it is fascinating to learn, was in 1899 still a village on the edge of open countryside) where Baird lives, with Bunny in reluctant but half-fascinated pursuit. They climb over the spiked gate into Baird’s garden, sneak up to the house and carefully cut open the glass with the diamond and treacle trick (look it up) before – discovering Baird’s body at their feet, his head beaten to a bloody pulp with a nearby poker.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

Upstairs they find young Jack Rutter, for some months now a byword among polite Society for dissolution and demoralisation. They discover he was deeply in debt to Baird, with no way to escape, was threatened with ruin and had finally – taken matters into his own hands by battering the old fence and loan shark to death.

Reeling from this discovery, Raffles decides they must take Rutter with them and they leave the house as quietly as they can. All the way home the man is raving that he has done the crime and he must hand himself in, with Raffles begging him to shut up.

Bunny doesn’t see his hero for a few days and, when he does, learns that Raffles took Rutter – still keen for martyrdom at the hands of the law – to his Chelsea hideout, where he fixed him up with a disguise, then caught the train together to Liverpool, where he bought Rutter a ticket to New York and a new life.

6. Nine Points of the Law

Raffles answers an advert in the Daily Telegraph promising two thousand pounds for anyone prepared to take A RISK. He and Bunny are invited to the chambers of a rather shady lawyer and told the problem.

Sir Bernard Debenham has a disreputable son who has drunk and gambled his way into debt. Last time he went down to Sir Bernard’s big country house in Esher the father refused to bail the son out any more. Whereupon the son secretly cut out of its frame a priceless Velasquez painting. He smuggled it up to town and sold it to an unscrupulous Australian tycoon and collector who’s visiting the Old Country, the Honourable J. M. Craggs, M.L.C.

The task is: to reclaim the stolen Velasquez.

Raffles sets off on a whirlwind tour, training it down to Esher to see Sir Bernard, then back up to town, hurrying in and out and not telling Bunny any of his plans.

Then, abruptly, he tells Bunny to make a dinner date for all three of them in Craggs’s rooms at the Metropole Hotel. Bunny assumes he is to be a decoy. He imagines that while he talks to Cragg in one room, Raffles will go to work to extract the rolled up painting from the map carrier in the other room (which is where they’ve discovered it’s hidden).

Bunny shows up for the dinner date at the Metropolem but Raffles doesn’t, and sends a telegram of apology. In actual fact, a little way into the meal, Bunny thinks he can hear Raffles working in the adjoining room and so raises his voice and laughs at inappropriate moments, all the while being subjected to hours of excruciating conversation about the wonderfulness of Australia. It becomes clear that Cragg is a vulgar bore who only bought the picture to upstage an equally vulgar rival back in Oz.

Finally, Cragg insists on showing Bunny the painting itself, and the latter nerves himself for the stream of Australian abuse which will no doubt issue from the millionaire’s mouth when he discovers that the picture is gone. Except that it isn’t. Cragg gets out the map case, opens it, takes out the Velasquez, unfurls it and generally shows off about it.

Bunny is appalled. Raffles must have muffed his opportunity.

Bunny lets Cragg replace the painting, and carries on drinking hard with him until Cragg is so drunk that Bunny has to help him back into his room, where he promptly passes out.

Bunny nips back to his own rooms in Mount Street (which are in Mayfair, only a short cab ride from the Metropole, which was at Charing Cross), then returns, letting himself back up to Cragg’s room. Here he puts a chloroform-soaked hankie over the big man’s nose to make sure he really is out for the count.

Then he extracts the painting from the map case, wraps it round his own body under his coat, gets a cab to Waterloo, and the first train to Esher. He takes a hansom cab to Sir Bernard Debenham’s house where he finds Raffles and, beaming with pride, tells him how he’s saved the day.

Except that he hasn’t. As the reader well suspects, Raffles had successfully carried out the retrieval of the painting, and had replaced the real Velasquez with a fake.

It was procuring this fake which had entailed all the rushing round town which Bunny had partly witnessed. Bunny has gone and taken – the fake! Oh well, Cragg won’t find out till he opens up the case in Australia and will probably be too embarrassed to make a fuss.

Bunny is so mortified that he declares on the spot that he’s going to pack in this life of crime, and go straight!

7. The Return Match

In the third story in this volume, Gentlemen and Players, Raffles and Bunny had gone down to Milchester Abbey for a week of cricket and been caught up in an attempted burglary. Most of the gang had eventually been caught, including the infamous ringleader, Mr. Reginald Crawshay.

Now, in his rooms at the Albany, Raffles reads to Bunny a newspaper report that Crawshay has escaped from Dartmoor prison. Not only that, but he’s stolen the clothes of at least two different civilians in order to escape in disguise.

Raffles suspects he’s heading to London. Why? Because Crawshay wrote Raffles a letter in which he politely and facetiously looked forward to a return match with our hero i.e. revenge. Barely has Raffles finished reading all this, than Mr. Reginald Crawshay emerges from the shadows of the hallway into Raffles’s own flat. Here is right there! Ah. This is tricky.

After much banter it emerges that all Crawshay actually wants is for Raffles to help him get away, and out of England.

Crawshay has, after all, one enormous advantage over our heroes, which is that he knows that they stole the Marchioness’s jewels. He could blackmail them if he wants to. It’s asmuch in Raffles and Bunny’s interest to help him escape, as it is in Crawshay’s. After agreeing that he’s got them over a barrel, our heroes leave Mr Crawshay with his feet up in front of a fire

They set off towards a station but haven’t even got out of the little square in front of the Albany before they walk past a figure they recognise as Inspector Mackenzie, the Scotland Yard detective who was shot and injured down at Milchester Abbey.

They turn and say good evening to him and are alarmed to discover that the police have tracked Crawshay all the way across London to these very buildings. Raffles reminds the inspector of the service he did the police at Milchester and asks to come along in their investigations. So Mackenzie allows Raffles and Bunny to accompany him up to a vacant room, which the Albany’s manager says funny noises have been heard coming from.

A copper then climbs out onto the lead roof and discovers a rope tied round a chimney, and dangling down above a window… six rooms in. Crawshay must have come up to this empty room, climbed along the roof, then let himself down to the window of… of which room? Mackenzie asks the manager.

Quick as a flash the latter replies, ‘That would be Mr Raffles’s rooms, sir’. ‘Aha’, says Mackenzie. Bunny feels his heart beating fit to burst.

But Raffles is coolness itself and says this has all been very interesting but in fact he now has to rush off for an appointment. He will leave his key with the constable downstairs. Mackenzie can’t say fairer than that.

Looking out the window Bunny sees him hustle, wrapped up tight against the cold fog, towards the entrance to their staircase. And a minute or so later re-emerge, stop with the constable guarding the staircase the police are investigating, and hand over the key, before moving briskly towards Piccadilly.

Then, with a heavy heart, Bunny follows Mackenzie and the police as they go down one flight of stairs, collect the key Raffles has left with the constable, and then go along and up Raffles’s flight.

They open the door to Raffles’s apartment but, instead of finding Crawshay lounging in front of a fire, they find… the figure of Raffles on the floor in front of the fire, with blood on his forehead from a gash and a bloodied poker nearby!!

Coming round, Raffles groggily tells Mackenzie that Crawshay was laying in wait and attacked him before making off with his coat. Bunny of course realises it was another wizard wheeze – Raffles, under extreme pressure, devised the plan of giving Crawshay his coat and instructing him to swaddle himself in it and give his apartment key to the waiting policeman before making his getaway, leaving Raffles to hit himself with the poker, not too hard, making it all look as if Crawshay hit him and escaped.

Just the kind of ‘sport’ which Raffles lives for.

8. The Gift of the Emperor

‘Violence is a confession of terrible incompetence.’

The opening of this story requires a historical footnote. Hornung uses rather facetious and obscure language to refer to what I take to be an actual historical event – which is that the King of Fiji in some way snubs some kind of gift or compliment from Queen Victoria; and to emphasise the snub, the Kaiser of Germany sends an immensely valuable pearl to the king.

This little diplomatic spat caused a storm of indignation in Britain but, more importantly for our hero, it meant that a jewel of immense value was very publicly being sent by steamer to the South Seas.

Thus it is that the story opens with Raffles booking a berth on the German steamer which is transporting this pearl to the South Seas.

We discover that Bunny really has gone through with his threat to give up his life of crime. He is trying to make a career as a freelance writer and, as a consequence, has been forced to give up his Mayfair flat and move out of London to suburban Thames Ditton.

Nonetheless, Raffles manages to persuade him to come on this jolly trip. Maybe he will get some writing done!

Thus it is that Raffles and Bunny take ship to Hamburg where they board the steamer. Raffles quickly identifies the courier of the pearl as one Captain Wilhelm von Heumann. Raffles annoys Bunny by paying lots of attention to a whippersnapper of a young Australian girl, which Bunny thinks is uncharacteristic and distraction from the job in hand. Until he realises that von Heumann has himself been paying the girl a very heavily Teutonic wooing, during which he has shown her the pearl: thus Raffles is flirting with her solely to ascertain its hiding place in the German’s cabin.

Once he does so, Raffles reveals his ingenious plan to Bunny. He strips naked and climbs through the ventilator shaft which connects his ventilator to those of all the other cabins on the same level (including von Heumann’s).

Von Heumann routinely drinks too much at lunchtime, so it is a doddle to suspend a hankie dipped in chloroform over the snoring German’s face until he is really unconscious – and then climb into the cabin, find the pearl, prise it out of its setting, and clamber back into the ventilator shaft, clip von Heumann’s ventilator back into place, and so back to his cabin and the anxiously waiting Bunny.

Like a scene from hundreds of heist movies.

But his triumph is quickly dashed. As the ship steams out of Genoa a new passenger is put aboard. It is none other that Inspector Mackenzie, Raffles’s old nemesis. After a tantalising delay wondering what the inspector’s presence portends, Raffles and Bunny are called into the captain’s cabin, wherein sit von Heumann, Mackenzie and a very beefy first mate.

Long story short – Mackenzie has a warrant for Raffles’s arrest, invoking the Marchioness jewels and two other burglaries. Now they all suspect him of stealing the pearl. Looks like they’ve got him bang to rights. After pretending to get a bit cross, Raffles gives up and shows them where he’s hidden the pearl – inside one of the bullets of his revolver.

But Raffles begs one last request before they put the cuffs on him. He says he’s gotten engaged to the young Australian lassie he’s been chatting to throughout the voyage, and he asks permission to say goodbye to her.

So the forces of law and order escort Raffles to the part of deck where the young lady is promenading, and he gives her a farewell kiss. Then – in a flash – pushes her aside, leaps up onto the rail, waves goodbye to all and sundry, and makes a perfect dive into the sea beneath.

It is sunset and Raffles is immediately hidden in the gathering shadows of the boat and the waves.

Bunny is thrown into the brig in shackles but he thinks he saw, before they dragged him away from the rail, a small dark shape bobbing on the water. Was it the head of a swimmer making for the shore and freedom? Did Raffles survive?

Power, love and control

Bunny was Raffles’s fag at their public school. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see how it is this master-and-servant relationship which is revived in the first story and forms the basis for everything which follows. Bunny doesn’t enter into a working partnership with Raffles, so much as become his hero-worshipping slave.

It is interesting to learn that Hornung deliberately injected into the relationship a little of the feeling between Oscar Wilde and his ill-fated lover, Alfred Douglas. Raffles is very, very languid at some moments, drawling outrageous cynicisms though his cigarette smoke, while Bunny is so very much in boyish awe of him.

One had not to be a cricketer oneself to appreciate his perfect command of pitch and break, his beautifully easy action, which never varied with the varying pace, his great ball on the leg-stump – his dropping head-ball – in a word, the infinite ingenuity of that versatile attack. It was no mere exhibition of athletic prowess, it was an intellectual treat, and one with a special significance in my eyes. I saw the ‘affinity between the two things’, saw it in that afternoon’s tireless warfare against the flower of professional cricket. It was not that Raffles took many wickets for few runs; he was too fine a bowler to mind being hit; and time was short, and the wicket good. What I admired, and what I remember, was the combination of resource and cunning, of patience and precision, of head-work and handiwork, which made every over an artistic whole. It was all so characteristic of that other Raffles whom I alone knew!

Isn’t that very final sentence the sentiment of a lover? An adoring lover, smug in the knowledge that he, and only he, knows all the secrets of this charming and fascinating man.

I looked at Raffles. I had done so often during the evening, envying him his high spirits, his iron nerve, his buoyant wit, his perfect ease and self-possession.

There was never anybody in the world so irresistible as Raffles when his mind was made up… His arm slid through mine, with his little laugh of light-hearted mastery.

As he spoke he was himself again – quietly amused – cynically unperturbed – characteristically enjoying the situation and my surprise.

I confess to some little prejudice against her. I resented her success with Raffles, of whom, in consequence, I saw less and less each day. It is a mean thing to have to confess, but there must have been something not unlike jealousy rankling within me.

‘his little laugh of light-hearted mastery’

Morality?

I have little or no patience for ‘morality’ in art or literature. ‘Morality’, Freud says somewhere, ‘is obvious’, and I agree. Be decent and respectful to each other would be a start, quite a big start, for most people. Discussing arcane points of ‘morality’ is not only interminable and tedious but also irrelevant to most people’s day-to-day lives.

I can see, however, that a theme or thread running through the stories is the tension between Bunny’s hero worship attraction towards Raffles and his dazzling amorality, and the repulsion generated by his traditional ‘morality” or moral code – stealing is wrong (although it may just be – like so many ‘moral feelings’, based on cruder physical motives: Stealing is nerve-wracking and dangerous).

Anyway, I can see how this set of stories could easily be read not as a set of eight straight dashing exploits, but as a very Victorian morality tale of record of Bunny’s fall from decent behavour, then attempt to free himself by forswearing burglary, and then his come-uppance.

In the last story Raffles gets away, Bunny is clamped in irons and – we learn, rather surprisingly – is sent to prison.

Of what followed on deck I can tell you nothing, for I was not there. Nor can my final punishment, my long imprisonment, my everlasting disgrace, concern or profit you, beyond the interest and advantage to be gleaned from the knowledge that I at least had my deserts.

Public school amorality and the British Empire

I can’t help noticing that Rudyard Kipling’s collection of short stories about amoral but dashing schoolboys, Stalky and Co., was published in the same year as Raffles, 1899. Stalky and his pals are also fiercely amoral, ducking school rules, conducting feuds and vendettas and punishments – but nonetheless bound by their own schoolboy notions of honour and silence.

However, they are very different in tone – Kipling’s schoolboy stories are, as so often, cruel, gloating and sadistic, whereas Hornung’s are light and gay. Kipling’s style is clipped and sometimes all but unreadable, whereas Hornung’s are meant to be easy-to-consume after-dinner reading.

But both of them share the assumption that public school-educated chaps can get away with more or less anything, because deep down (sometimes very deep down) they are honourable and decent.

It isn’t doing things which are immoral or criminal which brings disgrace. It is doing anything vulgar or crude. It is doing anything which is ‘bad form’. It is letting the side down. After the Indian Mutiny there was a new emphasis among the British ruling classes in keeping up tone, maintaining the form of the thing, playing the game.

It wasn’t necessary to be strictly legal or play by the rules – after all, the empire had been built by a load of chaps who generally bent the rules, often to breaking point. But all this was redeemed by the fact that they were chaps like us. White men who know how to play the game, especially the game of games, the epitome of the spirit of the British Empire – cricket. Raffles’s expertise at cricket is a simple indicator that deep down, right at bottom – no matter how many burglaries and other crimes he is involved in – he is, ultimately, one of us.

Comedy

It is a comedy. Nothing serious happens and if it does it is glossed over with high good spirits, while Bunny paints both his and Raffle’s characters with humorous self-deprecation, in the stylishly amused tone of the moneyed upper classes. Arriving at a house party in the country, Bunny is overwhelmed by poshness.

The chief signs of festival were within, where we found an enormous house-party assembled, including more persons of pomp, majesty, and dominion than I had ever encountered in one room before. I confess I felt overpowered. Our errand and my own presences combined to rob me of an address upon which I have sometimes plumed myself.

‘Address’ is here used in an older sense meaning self-possession and self-presentation. ‘An address upon which I have sometimes plumed myself’ simultaneously combines toffish self-depreciation with toffish assertion. ‘Plumed’. To plume oneself. What a great word.

I’m not really familiar with P.G. Wodehouse but this feels like a precursor of the brisk, upper-class amusement of the Jeeves stories. Lots of the writing is done with great timing and dryness.

‘Candidly, and on consideration,’ said the lawyer, ‘I am not sure that you ARE the stamp of men for me – men who belong to good clubs! I rather intended to appeal to the – er – adventurous classes.’
‘We are adventurers,’ said Raffles gravely.

Language and style

I suffered from a persistent ineffectual feeling after style.

I’ve just been reading the detective stories of Arthur Morrison, more or less contemporary with Hornung, and found myself continually comparing the two writers.

Obviously, Hornung’s stories are light and funny and stylish, whereas Morrison’s are effective little puzzles but often a little dull. But the one really striking difference between them is in their use of language.

Morrison, in all his works, makes heavy weather of using pretentiously archaic and ‘literary’ words like ‘withal’ and ‘ere’ and ‘thereunto’ (none of which appear in Hornung). In his stories about East End slums, this vocabulary is used partly to create a bitter irony between the pompous language and the savage events being described. In his detective stories it is maybe intended to denote the author’s literary abilities and provenance.

But where Morrison uses posh English to create a tone or voice – Hornung uses French and Latin. The narrative voice of Bunny, and the direct speech of Raffles, use Latin or French tags with the blithe confidence of the expensively educated. Morrison’s prose is trying to appear literate and educated. Hornung’s prose effortlessly is so.

‘Enfin, he begs or borrows.’

‘Ergo, as we’re Britishers, they think we’ve got it!”

The man was au fait with cracksmen.

The diamond, the pot of treacle, and the sheet of brown paper which were seldom omitted from his impedimenta.

‘One of the most complete young black-guards about town, and the fons et origo of the whole trouble.’

‘He gives me carte blanche in the matter.’

‘And I had done it myself, single-handed – ipse egomet!’

Not only given to quoting tags from foreign languages, Raffles is just the type of languid dandy who easily quotes from the flowers of literature (Bunny is surprised to find in Raffles’s rooms at the Albany quite so many volumes of poetry – ‘there had always been a fine streak of aestheticism in his complex composition’) or makes knowing references to classic literature.

I particularly liked the moment when Raffles comes across bunny dozing in his bed on their long sea voyage, and knowingly remarks: ‘Achilles on his bunk’.

The poetry quotes aren’t extensive or particularly impressive – he quotes pretty obvious Major Poets such as Tennyson and Keats – it’s more that they indicate the cultured hinterland which Raffles can draw on at will.

A half-educated man uses long, pretentious English words, sometimes not entirely accurately. This was what made listening to trades union leaders in the 1970s so funny.

A well-educated man, by contrast, doesn’t need to – he can use common or garden English prose most of the time, but sprinkle it with just enough Latin and French tags, or casual quotes from the higher literature, to signal his cultural savoir faire.

Raffles’ and Bunny’s Latin and French and Keats and Tennyson offer the same kind of reassurance on the cultural level, that Raffles’s cricketing prowess does on the sporting front – assuring the educated reader of his day and, maybe, still, of ours, that he is one of us!

Arthur Raffles, gentleman thief (standing) and his sidekick Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders

Related link

• The Amateur Cracksman online

Related reviews

• Fiction of the 1890s
• Nineteenth century Britain reviews