The Collected Stories of A. J. Raffles, A Gentleman-Thief (ePub)

A. J. Raffles is an 'amateur cracksman' and a gentleman-thief who with his wit and ingenuity befools everyone to get what he wants. Raffles is an antihero. Although a thief, he never steals from his hosts, he helps old friends in trouble, and in a subsequent volume he may or may not die on the veldt during the Boer War. Additionally, the recognition of the problems of the distribution of wealth is a recurrent subtext throughout the stories. Raffles is, in many ways, a deliberate inversion of Sherlock Holmes on which he is based - he is a "gentleman thief", living at the Albany, a prestigious address in London, playing cricket for the Gentlemen of England and supporting himself by carrying out ingenious burglaries. He is called the "Amateur Cracksman", and often, at first, differentiates between himself and the "professors" - professional criminals from the lower classes. Content: The Amateur Cracksman The Ides of March A Costume Piece Gentlemen and Players Le Premier Pas Wilful Murder Nine Points of the Law The Return Match The Gift of the Emperor The Black Mask; or, Raffles: Further Adventures No Sinecure A Jubilee Present The Fate of Faustina The Last Laugh To Catch a Thief An Old Flame The Wrong House The Knees of the Gods A Thief in the Night Out of Paradise The Chest of Silver The Rest Cure The Criminologists' Club The Field of Philippi A Bad Night A Trap to Catch a Cracksman The Spoils of Sacrilege The Raffles Relics The Last Word Mr. Justice Raffles E. W. Hornung (1866-1921) was an English author and poet and also brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hornung is known for writing the A. J. Raffles series about a gentleman thief based on a deliberate inversion of the Sherlock Holmes series. Hornung dedicated his creation as a form of flattery to Doyle.