Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman

Art for art’s sake is a vile catchword, but I confess it appeals to me’

Gentleman by day and thief by night, A. J. Raffles lives a double life. Taking ’Art for art’s sake’ as his motto, Raffles supports his debonair lifestyle by performing lucrative, artistic, and ingenious burglaries of the wealthy elite of Victorian London. Dedicated to his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle, Hornung’s first collection of Raffles stories, The Amateur Cracksman (1899), can be seen as an inverted spin-off of the former’s celebrated detective stories. But it is Raffles’ outlaw status that has drawn generations of readers to these swift-paced tales of a charismatic and cool-headed thief and his less worldly partner, Bunny. Hornung had Oscar Wilde in mind as much as Sherlock Holmes when he created Raffles, and the account of their double life offers one of the turn of the century’s most touching accounts of a same-sex couple.

Frequently adapted for stage and screen, Hornung’s original stories have never lost their power to captivate readers. Admired by writers like George Orwell, Graham Greene, and Anthony Powell, Hornung’s crisp prose evokes a late Victorian London of clubland bachelors, hansom cabs, champagne suppers, Australian heiresses, and South African diamond moguls.

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E. W. Hornung

Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. His publications include the monographs Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015), and Ruritania: A Cultural History (Oxford University Press, 2020). For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.