E. W. Hornung

• Born: June 7, 1866
• Birthplace: Middlesborough, Yorkshire, England
• Died: March 22, 1921
• Place of death: Saint Jean-de-Luz, France

Type of Plot: Inverted

Principal Series: A. J. Raffles, 1899-1909

Contribution

Having borrowed from Arthur Conan Doyle the basic framework of a highly intelligent hero and an admiring disciple who records his deeds, E. W. Hornung inverted the Holmes stories: As a modern alternative to master detective Sherlock Holmes, he offered A. J. Raffles, master thief. In the Raffles tales, Hornung creates an uncommon blend of detective and adventure fiction; while Bunny’s ignorance of the finer points of Raffles’s criminal plans allows some scope for a reader’s detective abilities, the stories’ main interest lies in the thieves’ exploits outside the law. The element of danger (and snobbery) in these adventures in society crime inspired much English thriller fiction of the 1930’s; Raffles initiates a tradition of gentleman outlaws that includes Leslie Charteris’s the Saint, John Creasey’s the Toff, and his own reincarnation in Barry Perowne’s series. Hornung, however, was writing moral as well as adventure stories, a dimension apparent in Bunny’s alternating devotion to and revulsion for Raffles. Although the Raffles stories are protothrillers, they are also a serious literary record of public-school boys gone half-wrong and of their fluctuating friendship.

Biography

Ernest William Hornung was born in Middlesbrough, an English manufacturing town, on June 7, 1866, the youngest son of John Peter Hornung, a solicitor. He was educated at Uppingham; there, he learned to play cricket, which remained a lifelong interest. An asthmatic, he emigrated to Australia for his health in 1884 and spent two years there as a tutor. Returning to London in 1886, Hornung became (like Bunny) a journalist and magazine writer; his first novel was published in 1890. In 1893, he married Arthur Conan Doyle’s sister, Constance, at Doyle’s home and settled near him in Sussex; Hornung’s dedication of the first Raffles collection, “To A. C. D. This Form of Flattery,” acknowledges Doyle’s influence on his work. To his great pleasure, in 1907, Hornung was elected to the Marylebone Cricket Club, the sport’s governing body.

In the years between 1890 and 1914, Hornung wrote numerous articles for journals such as Cornhill Magazine and published at least twenty-three novels and several collections of short stories. This body of work ranged from romances and adventure stories—including the bushranger novels drawn from his Australian experiences—to the novels such as Fathers of Men (1912) that were considered more serious literature. Although Hornung is best known for his Raffles stories, he also experimented with detective fiction: The Crime Doctor (1914) follows the career of John Dollar, a physician who not only solves crimes but also runs a sanatorium for potential and reformed criminals.

Despite the fact that Hornung suffered from asthma, at the beginning of World War I he volunteered for service. After two years with an antiaircraft unit, he was sent in 1916 to France to establish a YMCA library and rest hut for soldiers; he distinguished himself at the siege of Arras, leaving the front only after his library had been captured. His experiences in France and his grief over the loss of his only child, a son killed at Ypres, emerge in the poetry and memoirs published from 1917 to 1919. His already delicate health further weakened by military service, Hornung settled in Saint-Jean-de-Luz after the war; he died there on March 22, 1921.

Analysis

With twenty-six stories and a novel, E. W. Hornung created a character whose name has entered the language as the synonym for a daring and successful thief. In “To Catch a Thief,” for example, Raffles steals another burglar’s plunder after discovering it hidden in a pair of Indian clubs, while in “The Raffles Relics” he steals an exhibit of his own burglary tools from Scotland Yard. In this sportsman-adventurer-thief, Hornung presents a complex villain-hero.

Although Raffles is a criminal, Hornung goes to some lengths to establish his admirable qualities; thus, he emerges as something of a hero. The title of the first collection of stories, The Amateur Cracksman (1899), makes an important point: Because he is an amateur thief, Raffles’s crimes seem less sordid than those of a “professor” or East End professional criminal. In addition, he is an amateur athlete, a gentleman cricketer who turns to burglary, he insists, only because he is chronically in need of money. That is, playing cricket as a professional (like stealing as an East End “professor”) would be considered declassé. In contrast, he plays as a gentleman amateur, for love of the game rather than for money; thus, he is forced into crime. Along with establishing him as an amateur and a gentleman, Raffles’s cricket has a third function: Like his amateur cracksman standing, it is intended to undercut the seriousness of his crimes. Both Raffles and Bunny tend to refer to burglary in cricketing rather than criminal terms: Waiting to burgle a house is like waiting nervously to enter a match; suffering a series of unrewarding burglaries is “playing a deuced slow game.” The word “sport” is frequently used to suggest that crime, at least as Raffles and Bunny play it, is, like cricket, simply an exciting game. This important point is further reinforced through the sportsman’s code that Raffles translates into an ethics of crime. Although he is not averse to breaking the law, he does eschew some activities; using drugged whiskey is “not a very sporting game,” for example, while committing murder is “not the game at all.” This code functions to redeem or at least palliate his crimes, because it acts as a measure less of right and wrong than of style; Raffles’s adherence to his own code papers over the criminality of his thefts by making them seem merely an aspect of his insouciant style.

“Gentlemen and Players”

The story “Gentlemen and Players” illustrates all the aspects of Raffles’s character that are intended to ease the reader into accepting the criminal as a hero. The title refers to the distinction made at the time between Gentleman (amateur) and Player (professional) cricketers, a distinction very important to Raffles. As a gentleman, he is ordinarily loath to abuse his position as guest by stealing from his host’s home, but he is insulted that Lord Amersteth invites him to Milchester Abbey only to play cricket; his anger at “being asked about for my cricket as though I were a pro” shows the importance he attaches to his amateur athlete status. The equal importance of his amateur cracksman status appears in the distinction Raffles makes between himself as a “Gentleman” thief and Crawshay, a competing East End “Player” thief; both men are interested in a valuable necklace belonging to Lady Melrose, like Raffles a houseguest of Lord Amersteth. His determination to steal the necklace and thereby “score off” both Crawshay, the professional thief, and Mackenzie, the professional detective, displays his pride as an amateur cracksman, while at the same time, it illustrates the analogy Raffles often draws between burglary and cricket: To “score off them both at once” would be “a great game.” Along with this sporting rationale for stealing the necklace, Raffles offers several other reasons meant to excuse the crime: Not only are both he and Bunny hard up again, but “these people deserve it, and can afford it.” Finally, the burglary itself, like his admirable cricket, exhibits Raffles’s daring and skill; as Bunny remarks, both require a “combination of resource and cunning, of patience and precision, of head-work and handiwork.” The manner of the theft—while the professional thieves succeed in stealing Lady Melrose’s jewel case, Raffles has already emptied the case of the necklace while its owner slept—is intended to impress the reader with Raffles’s daredevil style.

Another aspect of Raffles’s style, apparent in “Gentlemen and Players” as well as in the other stories, is his racy conversation. Raffles’s slang (which establishes him as a knowing insider), his self-assured wit, and his gift for casuistry all help to convert the reader to his own view of his crimes.

By presenting Raffles as an amateur criminal, true sportsman, and witty speaker, Hornung created a figure with great reader appeal. Furthermore, the stories are told from Bunny’s point of view, another technique that Hornung uses to draw the reader into Bunny’s view of Raffles. Bunny’s inability to stay on the right side of the law, however, seems to bear out Doyle’s fear that these stories of a criminal-hero might be “dangerous in their suggestion.” Thus, Bunny becomes as important a figure in these adventures as Raffles himself: As narrator, partner in crime, and devoted friend, he as well as Raffles is Hornung’s exercise in the creation of a multifaceted character.

“The Ides of March”

In the first Raffles story, “The Ides of March,” Hornung carefully establishes the origin of the complex relationship between these two men, and with it Raffles’s fascination for Bunny. Their initial relation—the story begins with Bunny’s memory of fagging for Raffles at school—foreshadows the later partnership and friendship, in which Raffles is the “irresistible” and “masterful” leader with Bunny the “incomparably weaker” follower. Bunny, who remembers with admiration Raffles’s kindness and daring, turns to him afer spending his own inheritance and passing several bad checks; Raffles promises his help but instead tricks Bunny into partnership in a burglary. It is clear to the reader that Raffles is not the friend he seems; even Bunny notices his “fiendish cleverness” in subtly persuading him to make their partnership permanent. To this suggestion of a satanic temptation are added allusions to magic: Bunny is “spellbound and entranced” during the burglary, so that “a fascination for [Raffles’s] career gradually wove itself into my fascination for the man.” Although Bunny realizes the criminality of his new career, he seems unable to free himself from Raffles’s spell. In fact, in “The Gift of the Emperor,” the final story of the first collection, Bunny earns an eighteen-month prison sentence for his loyalty to Raffles; by the time of the second set of stories, The Black Mask (1901), he himself states that he and Raffles are no longer amateur cracksmen but rather “professionals of the deadliest dye.”

The Black Mask

This shift to professional crime follows logically from Hornung’s clear portrayal of Raffles’s less admirable side and its effect on Bunny; it is, however, not a complete shift. Hornung often redeems Raffles by presenting him as a patriot: In “A Jubilee Present,” he steals a gold cup from the British Museum only to send it anonymously to Queen Victoria, “infinitely the finest monarch the world has ever seen”; “The Knees of the Gods,” the final story of The Black Mask, concerns Raffles’s discovery of a military spy and concludes with his heroic death in the Boer War. On the other hand, many stories in this collection show a less sporting Raffles; in “The Last Laugh” and “To Catch a Thief,” for example, he is responsible for two murders and one more or less accidental death.

A Thief in the Night

Bunny, too, has become increasingly unscrupulous; in “The Spoils of Sacrilege,” a story from the final collection, A Thief in the Night (1905), he goes so far as to burgle his ancestral home. It might seem that the once-admirable Raffles would no longer be Bunny’s hero, and in the prefatory note to A Thief in the Night, Bunny admits that the previous stories have “dwelt unduly on the redeeming side.” Although some of these later stories, particularly “Out of Paradise,” show Bunny attempting to portray Raffles at his worst, the final story again redeems his hero; “The Last Word” is a letter from Bunny’s former fiancée, who broke her engagement in “Out of Paradise” as a result of Raffles’s treachery, revealing that Raffles had later attempted to reunite them and asking Bunny to visit her. This promise of romance, seemingly out of character in a series of adventure tales, is actually a fitting conclusion to the Raffles stories, because it emphasizes the good-friend aspect always present but sometimes shrouded by his villainy.

The Crime Doctor

Overall, the character of Raffles poses for the reader a question Hornung asked in an earlier story: “Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction?” The complexity suggested here continues in Hornung’s last two mystery novels, Mr. Justice Raffles (1909) and The Crime Doctor. In the former, Raffles reminds Bunny that he is indeed a villain; this very recognition indicates, however, that his moral sense is more developed than that of his disciple. The Crime Doctor has as its hero a detective rather than a criminal, but John Dollar is more interested in preventing than in solving crime; like a novelist he admired, the darkly realistic George Gissing, Hornung is here concerned with the difficult social and financial position of England’s new and growing educated class. In all of his mysteries, Hornung is clearly moving toward a more complex art than that of “old-fashioned fiction.”

The Raffles stories were widely read in early twentieth century England, in part because a criminal with standards must have seemed significantly more admirable than the high-stakes gamblers surrounding the prince of Wales and in part as a relief from the horrors of the Boer War. Several films, beginning with a 1905 silent and reaching their high-water mark with the 1939 Raffles, testify to the character’s continuing hold on the popular imagination; starring such romantic leading men as John Barrymore and David Niven, these films emphasize not only Raffles’s daredevil charm but also his Robin Hood-like chivalry. Although accurate as far as it goes and interesting testimony to the power of one aspect of the stories, this film version of Raffles is significantly less complex than the Hornung’s three-dimensional Raffles. His second creation, the reluctant thief Bunny, is equally engrossing. Like Holmes’s Watson, Bunny serves as the foil to a unique character, as a less outré sidekick whose qualities are more accessible to the reader. Nevertheless, Bunny is in his way as complex as Raffles: sometimes plucky and sometimes a rabbit (hence his nickname), fascinated by his friend yet hampered by scruples. By witnessing Bunny’s struggles of conscience, the reader is led to share his ambivalent admiration for Raffles.

Principal Series Characters:

• A. J. Raffles , an amateur cricketer and thief. A gentleman with a public school background, Raffles turns to burglary partly for the money but mainly for the adventure. Although a criminal, he adheres to a sporting code of ethics and eventually dies a hero in the Boer War; his is the character of the villain-hero.
• Harry “Bunny” Manders , a writer and thief, is the first-person chronicler of the Raffles adventures. Converted to crime by Raffles and occasionally conscience-stricken, Bunny nevertheless remains Raffles’s hero-worshiping partner throughout a series of burglaries and adventures.

Bibliography

Butler, William Vivian. The Durable Desperadoes. London: Macmillan, 1973. Study of the representation of outlaws in literature. Bibliography and index.

Chandler, Frank Wadleigh. The Literature of Roguery. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907. An early and influential study of Hornung and other picaresque portrayers of the rogue in fiction.

Green, Richard Lancelyn. Introduction to Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman. London: Penguin, 2003. In addition to this introductory commentary on Hornung’s novel, Green supplied notes for this edition, which he edited.

Haining, Peter. Foreword to The Complete Short Stories of Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman. London: Souvenir Press, 1984. Haining, a scholar of pulp and detective fiction, offers important insights into Hornung’s work.

Kestner, Joseph A. The Edwardian Detective, 1901-1915. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Hornung is compared to his fellow Edwardians in this tightly focused study of the British detective genre.

Orwell, George. “Raffles and Miss Blandish.” In The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Secker and Warburg, 1968. Orwell, one of England’s most famous authors and essayists, compares the moral landscape of James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish with that of Hornung’s Raffles stories.

Rowland, Peter. Raffles and His Creator: The Life and Works of E. W. Hornung. London: Nekta, 1999. Comprehensive biography and literary analysis that gives equal time to Hornung and to his most famous creation. Bibliographic references and index.

Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience. 1971. Reprint. New York: Mysterious, 1990. A reception-based study of the crime genre, focusing on the attitudes of mystery readers and the methods employed by fiction to cater to and reinforce those attitudes.