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1904 Collier's illustration by J. C. Leyendecker

Arthur J. Raffles is a British fictional character – a cricketer and gentleman thief – created by E. W. Hornung, who, between 1898 and 1909, wrote a series of 26 short stories, two plays, and a novel about him and his fictional chronicler, Harry "Bunny" Manders.

The first story, "The Ides of March", appeared in the June 1898 edition of Cassell's Magazine.^[1] The early adventures were collected in The Amateur Cracksman^[2] and continued with The Black Mask (1901).^[3] The last collection, A Thief in the Night (1904)^[4] and the novel Mr. Justice Raffles (1909)^[5] tell of adventures previously withheld. The novel was poorly received, and no further stories were published.^[6]

Hornung dedicated the first collection of stories, The Amateur Cracksman, to his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, intending Raffles as a "form of flattery."^[1] In contrast to Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny are "something dark, morally uncertain, yet convincingly, reassuringly English."^[7]

I think I may claim that his famous character Raffles was a kind of inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Bunny playing Watson. He admits as much in his kindly dedication. I think there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal a hero.

— Arthur Conan Doyle^[1]

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."^[8] Additionally, the "recognition of the problems of the distribution of wealth is [a] recurrent subtext" throughout the stories.^[1]

According to the Strand Magazine, these stories made Raffles "the second most popular fictional character of the time," behind Sherlock Holmes.^[1] They have been adapted to film, television, stage, and radio, with the first appearing in 1903.

Characters

Arthur J. Raffles

Raffles is, in many ways, a deliberate inversion of Holmes – 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.^[1][2]

Harry "Bunny" Manders

Bunny Manders, a struggling journalist, is Watson to Raffles' Holmes, his partner and chronicler. They met initially at school and then again on the night Bunny intended to commit suicide after writing bad cheques to cover gambling debts. Raffles, also penniless, but thriving, persuaded Bunny to join him instead.^[1][2]

Plots

The "Raffles" stories have two distinct phases. In the first phase, Raffles and Bunny are men-about-town who also commit burglaries. Raffles is a famous gentleman cricketer, a marvellous spin bowler who is often invited to social events that would be out of his reach otherwise. "I was asked about for my cricket", he comments after this period is over. It ends when they are caught and exposed on an ocean voyage while attempting another theft; Raffles dives overboard and is presumed drowned. These stories were collected in The Amateur Cracksman.^[2] Other stories set in this period, written after Raffles had been "killed off", were collected in A Thief in the Night.^[4]

The second phase begins some time later when Bunny – having served a prison sentence – is summoned to the house of a rich invalid. This turns out to be Raffles himself, back in England in disguise. Then begins their "professional" period, exiled from Society, in which they are straightforward thieves trying to earn a living while keeping Raffles's identity a secret. They finally volunteer for the Boer War, where Bunny is wounded and Raffles dies in battle after exposing an enemy spy. These stories were originally collected in The Black Mask, although they were subsequently published in one volume with the phase one stories.^[3] The last few stories in A Thief in the Night were set during this period as well.^[4]

Raffles was never quite the same after his reappearance. The "classic" Raffles elements are all found in the first stories: cricket, high society, West End clubs, Bond Street jewellers – and two men in immaculate evening dress pulling off impossible robberies.

Background

While Raffles and Bunny were based largely on Holmes and Watson, several of the Holmes stories, including the story of his return from the dead, were not published until after Hornung had published The Amateur Cracksman in 1899, and The Black Mask in 1901. Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in June 1892, in "The Adventure of the Final Problem" in the Strand Magazine, and did not write of him again until The Hound of the Baskervilles in August 1901. Doyle would return Holmes to life in "The Adventure of the Empty House" in October 1903, a decision which his biographers agree was due to the success of the Raffles stories.^[9]

The grand reveal scene in "The Adventure of the Empty House", when Holmes drops his disguise, parallels Raffles's own reveal scene in The Black Mask story "No Sinecure". Thus, while the pre-hiatus Sherlock Holmes stories were a primary influence for the Raffles stories, this relationship would later be reversed.^[9]

Adaptations

Film

There have been numerous films based on Raffles and his adventures, including:

• 
  Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1905), starring J. Barney Sherry^[1]
  


• 
  The Van Nostrand Tiara (1913), starring Reggie Morris
  


• 
  Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917), starring John Barrymore and Frank Morgan^[1][10]
  


• 
  Mr. Justice Raffles (1921) starring Gerald Ames^[11]
  


• 
  Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1925), with House Peters^[12]
  


• 
  Raffles (1930), featuring Ronald Colman and Bramwell Fletcher^[13]
  


• 
  The Return of Raffles (1932) starring George Barraud and Claud Allister^[14]
  


• 
  Raffles (1939), starring David Niven and Douglas Walton^[15]
  

Television

• 
  Raffles (1975), a made-for-TV film, with Anthony Valentine portraying Raffles and Christopher Strauli playing his partner Bunny Manders.^[16]
  


• 
  Raffles Valentine and Strauli reprised their roles in a television series produced by Yorkshire Television in 1977 and scripted by Philip Mackie. The series was intermittently repeated on ITV3 in 2006, and has been released on DVD.^[8][17]
  


• 
  The Gentleman Thief (2001), starring Nigel Havers^[18]
  

Radio and audio

• 
  Raffles (1985–1992), three series on BBC Radio 4 starring Jeremy Clyde as Raffles and Michael Cochrane as Bunny Manders.^[19] Clyde and Cochrane reprised their roles in a 1993 BBC World Service adaptation of Graham Greene's play The Return of Raffles.


• 
  Raffles, the Gentleman Thief, continuing radio series by Imagination Theater, scripted by M. J. Elliott, Jim French and John Hall.^[20]
  


• 
  Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman, read by David Rintoul.^[21]
  


• "Mr Raffles", a 1974 pop single by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel was inspired by the character.

Theatre

The story of A. J. Raffles was first performed on Broadway as Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman on 27 October 1903 at the Princess Theatre.^[22] The play moved to the Savoy Theatre in February 1904 and closed out in March of that year racking up 168 performances. It starred Kyrle Bellew as Raffles, a young Clara Blandick as Gwendolyn and E. M. Holland as Captain Bedford.^[23]

In Langdon McCormick's 1905 play, The Burglar and the Lady, Raffles went up against Arthur Conan Doyle's famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Former boxer "Gentleman Jim" Corbett played Raffles, who was portrayed as an American to match his casting. McCormick did not secure permission from either Doyle or Hornung to use their characters. A 1914 movie adaptation of the play removed Holmes but kept Raffles, again played by Corbett.^[24]

Graham Greene wrote a play called The Return of A. J. Raffles which differs from the Hornung canon on several points, including reinventing Raffles and Bunny as a homosexual couple.^[25][26]

Other appearances

• The Raffles character was continued by Barry Perowne with the approval of the Hornung Estate. Published in the story paper The Thriller during the 1930s and early 1940s,^[1] his series featured Raffles as a fairly typical contemporary pulp adventure hero and plays the role of detective alongside that of thief. When he picked up the series again in the 1950s, and once again during the 1970s, the stories were set closer to the late Victorian-setting of the original stories. Over the course of 50 years, off and on, Perowne produced around 60 short stories, some at novella length, and five novels featuring Raffles. Rare for a pastiche writer, Perowne's stories have been compared favourably with the originals.^[27]
  


• Jon L. Breen's story "Ruffles versus Ruffles" is based on the conceit that Hornung's Raffles and Perowne's Raffles are separate people, playing off the differing characterisation used by the two authors.^[28]
  


• The 1977 novel Raffles, by David Fletcher, is a fresh re-write of many of Hornung's original stories, deriving from the television series of the same year.^[29]
  


• 
  Raffles, Gentleman Thug is a strip in Viz that features a character who shares his name (plus the name of his assistant, Bunny) with the literary Raffles. He is depicted as an upper-class, late Victorian or early Edwardian version of a 'chav'.


• 
  Peter Tremayne wrote the 1991 novel The Return of Raffles in which Raffles becomes involved in a plot between rival spies.^[30]
  


• Around the turn of the 21st Century John Hall wrote eight Raffles pastiches, some of which appeared in the Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Some were adaptions of scripts he wrote earlier for the Imagination Theater radio series. They were collected in the 2007 book The Ardagh Emeralds.^[31]
  


• Adam Corres authored the 2008 novel Raffles and the Match-Fixing Syndicate,^[32] a modern crime thriller in which A. J. Raffles, a master of gamesmanship, explores the corrupt world of international cricket match fixing.

Raffles and Holmes

• 
  John Kendrick Bangs authored a 1906 novel, R. Holmes & Co.,^[33] starring Raffles' grandson (and Sherlock Holmes's son, by Raffles' daughter Marjorie), Raffles Holmes. The novel's second chapter tells the story of Holmes's pursuit of Raffles and his growing affection for Raffles's daughter. Bangs also wrote Mrs Raffles,^[34] in which Raffles's sidekick Bunny Manders teams up in America with the cracksman's hitherto-unchronicled wife.


• Several of Barry Perowne's Raffles short stories feature or reference Sherlock Holmes, including: "The Victory Match"; "The Baskerville Match" and "Raffles and an American Night's Entertainment".


• In 1932, Hugh Kingsmill's "The Ruby of Khitmandu", in which Raffles and Bunny were pitted against Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, was published in the April issue of The Bookman. A portion of the story was republished in the collection The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes (1944, edited by Ellery Queen).


• 
  Philip José Farmer put Raffles and Manders into a science-fictional situation in his story, "The Problem of the Sore Bridge – Among Others", in which he and Bunny solve three mysteries unsolved by Sherlock Holmes and save humanity from alien invasion.^[35]
  


• In one of Robert L. Fish's Sherlock Homes stories, "The Adventure of the Odd Lotteries" (1980), Homes and Watney encounter a cracksman and hypochondriac known as "A.J. Lotteries."^[36]
  


• The character of Raffles appeared in the TV film Incident at Victoria Falls under the name Stanley Bullard and played by Alan Coates. He encountered Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Hornung's brother-in-law.^[37]
  


• Raffles and Bunny feature in Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Ubervilles (2011), by Kim Newman, in a chapter depicting the gathering of the world's greatest criminals.^[38]
  


• In 2011 and 2012 Richard Foreman published a series of six Raffles stories, collected in a single volume, Raffles: The Complete Innings.^[39] These stories, contemporaneous with The Amateur Cracksman, begin with "The Gentleman Thief," in which Raffles and Bunny are hired by Sherlock Holmes to steal a stolen letter. Later stories in the sextet see Raffles and Bunny encounter H.G. Wells and Irene Adler. Foreman's Raffles is also more moralistic than the original: the gentleman thief often donates part of his ill-gotten gains to various charitable causes.


• The character was mentioned in the 2007 epistolary graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.^[40] Following this he recently appeared as a central character in the first chapter of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century, set in 1910.^[41]
  

Cameo appearances

• Raffles makes a cameo appearance in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula (1992). Although never mentioned by name, the character is described as an amateur cracksman (a reference to the title of the first short story collection), and mutters the epigram, "You play what's chucked at you, I always say."^[42]
  


• Raffles and Bunny also make a minor appearance in Lost in a Good Book, a 2004 novel written by Jasper Fforde. They are pulled out of the literary world into the real world to help crack a safe containing the stolen manuscript of Shakespeare's Cardenio.^[43]
  


• In the Doctor Who comic strip Character Assassin by Scott Gray (Doctor Who Magazine no.311, 12 December 2001), A. J. Raffles is a member of the villainous Sisyphean Society's inner circle in the Land of Fiction. The Master quickly kills him along with the other members of the Society.


• The Big Finish audio The Companion Chronicles: The Suffering by Jacqueline Rayner has the First Doctor comment that he learned his house breaking techniques "from Raffles". He almost certainly means nothing more than he picked up techniques from reading Hornung's stories, but sine Sherlock Holmes appears as a real character in the Doctor Who universe, it is possible that A.J. Raffles is real too.^[44]
  

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Larance, Jeremy. "The A. J. Raffles Stories Reconsidered: Fall of the Gentleman Ideal." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 57.1 (2014): 99-125.


• Rowland, Peter. Raffles and His Creator: The Life and Works of E. W. Hornung, Nekta Publications, London, 1999.
  ISBN 0953358321
  

External links

• 
  "Arthur J. Raffles".
  


• 
  Raffles stories on Project Gutenberg
  


• 
  A.J. Raffles public domain audiobook at LibriVox
  


• "Raffles and Miss Blandish", Horizon 10.58 (1944) – an essay by George Orwell
  


• "Raffles the Amateur Cracksman", a site about the 1970s TV series


• "Raffles Redux", a site with all of the Raffles Stories, complete with Annotations and Original Illustrations