"Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman" by E W Hornung

Classic crime capers in which the protagonist is a debonair villain.

Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and this is a collection of short stories, originally published in magazines, which twists the basic format of crime stories told by the slightly stupid sidekick so that the hero, instead of being the detective, becomes the criminal. 

There's a long tradition in English literature of romanticising thieves, from Robin Hood and Dick Turpin to Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The brilliant cricketer, ex-public school, sophisticated man-about-town character of Raffles is surely a progenitor of Psmith in the P G Wodehouse novels (starting with Mike and Psmith) and Lord Peter Wimsey in the novels by Dorothy L Sayers that start with Whose Body?

These stories are light-hearted pieces in which crime is portrayed as a bit of an adventure and the worst moral consequence of theft and even murder is nothing compared with the disgrace of failing to pay one's gambling debts. Nevertheless, the stories have an authentic ring achieved partly by careful research (how to break into a house using a diamond, brown paper and treacle) and by the author's effortless ability to recreate dialogue full of expressions used by Victorians in both the upper and the criminal classes.

Great fun.

Selected quotes:

• "I know a man when he gets his tongue between his teeth." (The Return Match)
• "I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success." (The Gift of the Emperor)
• "Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of chequers; why not reconcile oneself to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board." (The Gift of the Emperor)

December 2024; 140 pages

First published in 1899

I read the 2003 Penguin Classics edition

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God