Raffles Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 8)

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is Raffles by E.W. Hornung, Penguin 63.

This is the second time so far in this series that the book under consideration is a collection of short stories, rather than an entire novel — the previous occasion, of course, being H.C. Bailey's Mr Fortune, Please, which we read back in August 2024. The Penguin edition of Raffles contains eight short stories, six of which had been published between June and October 1898 in the monthly Cassell's Magazine. These, plus two new stories, were then collected the following year in a book titled The Amateur Cracksman. This is the volume that was then republished by Penguin in July 1936, with the altered title of simply Raffles.

If you've been listening along with all of the green penguin episodes, you might have spotted something unusual here — this is the first time that Penguin's crime strand had selected a book that came from the previous century. The seven previous titles they had republished were all from the 1920s and 1930s, with the earliest being Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair At Styles, which had first come out in 1920. Raffles, meanwhile, has been out in the world for 37 years by the time this book joins the Penguin ranks. It certainly wouldn't be the last time that nineteenth century crime fiction appeared, but it's interesting that this was the first older selection. It's a testament, I think, to the enduring popularity of E.W. Hornung's eponymous creation. When this edition came out in 1936, just in the 1930s alone there had already been two film adaptations, with a third still to come before the decade was over.

A.J. Raffles, Mayfair clubman and gentleman thief, is by far the most famous creation of author E.W. Hornung. Ernest William Hornung had been born in 1866 to a Hungarian father and English mother, the youngest of their eight children. He went away to boarding school at the age of 13, first in Scotland and then to the famous public school Uppingham in Rutland. It was there that his love of cricket fully blossomed — that will be important later. Unfortunately, young Willie Hornung's health did not strengthen alongside his love of the game, and by the time he was 17 he was chronically ill with asthma. His family decided to send him to Australia, where it was felt that the climate would be more conducive to recovery and good health. He spent two years there, which he later recalled as a very happy time, working as a tutor and on various remote sheep stations as a labourer. It was also during this time that he started writing, contributing stories to a weekly magazine and beginning work on a novel. He returned to England in 1886 and began work as a journalist and a writer in London, with most of his fiction until the first Raffles story in 1898 drawing on his Australian experiences. In September 1893 he married Constance Doyle, sister of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, and in 1895 the couple had a son, Arthur Oscar Hornung, named for his uncle and for the Hornungs' friend Oscar Wilde. The Raffles character appeared in three short story collections and a novel, which was just one portion of Hornung's overall literary output, but as is often the case with writers with one very famous creation, his other work, which included war poetry and reporting as well as his Australian-inspired stories, faded quickly from the public consciouness after his death from influenza and pneumonia in 1921 at the age of 54.

Joining me to discuss Raffles is Dr Darryl Jones, Professor of Modern British Literature and Culture at Trinity College Dublin. His area of research is the nineteenth century and popular literature. He is the general editor of the Oxford University Press Sherlock Holmes, which is the first new complete scholarly edition for a generation, and his new biography of M.R. James is will be published by OUP next year.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Darryl gives this one and why.

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Caroline: I think a nice place to start would be to understand what was your first encounter with Raffles ?

Darryl: My first encounter with Raffles was a kind of sideways encounter via George Orwell and Orwell's great essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish". I was a very avid and still am a very avid reader of Orwell. And Orwell's essay sets up two different kinds of crime fiction. He's writing in the 40s. Nostalgic for him, a version of the kind of crime fiction that he grew up with, of which Raffles is the example that he chooses, which is heavily class based which he rather approves of, in fact. And in which crime is practised by gentlemen who have a moral code and he compares this with James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

And more generally, I think with what he sees as a kind of pernicious American noir, with its violence, with its bully worship, with its siding with the strong over the weak — those kinds of things. So I think that was the first time I encountered Raffles.

Although even saying that, I realise that's not true. The first time I encountered Raffles was in 1977, when Yorkshire Television broadcast a series of the Raffles stories with Anthony Valentine as Raffles and Christopher Strauli as Bunny, and I remember watching those then. My first encounter with Raffles, that would have been in 1977 when I was probably 10 years old.

Caroline: That's incredible. Yes, I feel like quite often with these like great late 19th century detectives, it is the other forms that they come into our lives first. And then you find out, oh, they were stories, they were books first. I definitely had that with Sherlock Holmes.

Darryl: Gosh yeah.

Caroline: Speaking of, I wanted to ask you, the first thing you see when you open this first collection of Raffles stories is this dedication from author E. W. Hornung, and it reads, to "A.C.D., this form of flattery "

Now, you're a great Sherlock Holmes scholar. Could you tell us what does this mean and what should we read into it?

Darryl: There are a number of things, I think to read into it. One is that E. W. Hornung, Willie Hornung the author of the Raffles stories, was Arthur Conan Doyle's brother in law who had married Conan Doyle's sister, Connie. They played cricket together and Hornung was a writer.

He'd spent his formative young adulthood in Australia. Moved to Australia after leaving school, been a tutor, worked as a kind of a farmhand or ranch hand in New South Wales. Came back to London, started to make a living writing Australian themed fiction to a kind of modest degree of success.

And it was probably, although Conan Doyle himself is a notorious self dramatist and self publicist as well. But it was Conan Doyle who claimed at least that he had, not the inspiration for Raffles, but that he gave Horning the suggestion that a counterpart, an inversion of Sherlock Holmes would make a good series, one that would sell.

And Raffles was published in Cassell's Magazine in the late 1890s, 1898. So it's one of these series that fills a slight vacuum during the absence of Sherlock Holmes, the death of Sherlock Holmes, the missing years between The Final Problem and The Hound of Baskervilles. It's a form of flattery, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, in a number of ways, then for Holmes is what I think the dedication is getting at.

Caroline: And thinking about him in that way, as an inversion, what are the salient points of Raffles's character, do you think, that either came from Holmes or are a reflection of him?

Darryl: Whether it comes from Holmes or not, I think the salient point about Raffle's character is that these are stories about class. Raffles, it's made very clear, is a public school boy. It's never quite stated which school he went to. But Horning himself went to Uppingham and apparently Uppingham was celebrated for its cricket and Raffles is a great cricketer.

And from cricket from his, great prowess and cunning we are frequently told as a slow bowler, as a spin bowler, Raffles has the patience, the cunning and the skill that enables him to commit crimes. So he is, rather like Holmes, I think, simultaneously an establishment figure, a figure who belongs, who comes out of w late Victorian class system, who understands that world, who's able to move within it and who's able to move within particularly London. Both Holmes and Raffles in their stories give us often minutely detailed depictions of London street by street, house by house, district by district.

So from Raffles, we learn how to get to places on the underground, for example where hansom cabs will take you. What street abuts onto what street? What districts are being newly built? What kinds of people live where? So he both is very strongly of this metropolitan but also class based establishment world while standing outside of it as well which enables him to move within but also observe this world.

Caroline: I think the key inversion, isn't it, between Holmes and Raffles is one is on the side of light and the other isn't. One's a detective and the other is a criminal. And I'm just going to pause here to say that we are now entering the spoiler zone. And I was interested to hear your thoughts on that because coming back to these stories after, I think it's years since I last read them, I was really struck by the sort of Robin Hood qualities, shall we say, of Raffles. He only steals from the rich or crass colonials who deserve it. He never steals from people in genuine need. Is that Hornung trying to develop some kind of moral sense of criminality?

Darryl: I think it is. Conan Doyle found the stories dangerous and said, you must not make the criminal a hero. This is what he says in his own autobiography. But there is something irresistible about this and Bunny who's Raffles's sidekick, his kind of Watson figure, his amanuensis, finds Raffles irresistible in a variety of ways. But Raffles has a code. He certainly does. And it's all wrapped up in cricket, the thing we hear about him in almost every story is his prowess at cricket, the fact he's a public school gentleman.

So he has this gentleman's code. Yes, he will not abuse hospitality. He's proudly patriotic. At the very end of the Raffles series, he atones for his crimes by fighting and dying heroically and nobly in the Boer War in service of the British Empire but even before that, he steals a priceless pearl that the Kaiser is sending to a Polynesian who has disrespected Queen Victoria. So he steals that in a kind of patriotic gesture. He sends a medieval cup in another story, a golden medieval cup as a jubilee present to Queen Victoria. So he's intensely patriotic.

He won't abuse the laws of hospitality. That is to say, and Orwell makes this point. He may go to houses and steal from people in the houses, but he doesn't steal from his hosts while he's in the house. He may steal from other guests, but they often have it coming.

And yes, very much there is unscrupulous, untrustworthy or boorish colonials, Australians, South Africans don't come well out of the stories either. I'm bound to say, they're stories that betray all the racial prejudices of their time. And so Raffles doesn't seem morally troubled. Bunny occasionally has fits of conscience. Raffles never seems to have any fits of conscience about these things but he has the instincts of a public school boy.

Caroline: I find it so fascinating, the niceties of this moral code. Where the very first story starts we have Bunny has given a dishonorable check to some mutual friends of theirs, incurred for gambling debts, and we don't know how seriously to take this, but he is considering killing himself. He's got a gun, shall we say, and to Raffles, it's much less morally dubious to do some crime to solve this problem than it is for Bunny to kill himself. Which is just such an interesting way, I think, to open a story in 1898.

Darryl: Yeah, I think that's right. And the stories have an interesting take on violence, I think, throughout. We're not sure whether Bunny having gambled away his inheritance having blown 200 pounds on the baccarat tables in one night and that's the end and it's all gone. Whether he's going to do himself in or not.

In one story when Raffles's fence discovers Raffles's identity, Raffles goes around apparently with every intention of killing him and says that if Bunny tries to stop him, I'll shoot you. And again, we're never quite sure whether he means these things or not, but he's sufficiently amoral in his way, quite possibly to mean them.

Caroline: Yes, that story, I think it's called "Wilful Murder", is very striking to me because that seems to me almost like Hornung saying, oh no, he is capable of bad things. Don't be fooled by the cricket and the easy manner and the charisma. This is a bad person too, which I think is such an interesting addition that he goes out of his way to confirm that.

Darryl: I think that's right. But yet I think both Hornung and Bunny, who speaks for Hornung and speaks for the reader as well is ensorcelled, is completely fascinated, is hypnotized by Raffles. One of the things that I hadn't realized, like you, it had been a while and I remembered them as being, oh, perhaps slightly camp and slightly homoerotic, but they're extraordinarily gay stories.

Again to my mind, completely and ambiguously. And there's a number of scholars of Raffles have pointed out, Raffles sits pretty much precisely halfway between Sherlock Holmes on the one hand and Oscar Wilde on the other. For every discussion of cricket, there's also a discussion of aesthetics and art, he believes in art for art's sake. Bunny is always affirming his love for Raffles.

There's an extraordinary scene in one of the later stories, "The Emperor's Gift", where Raffles suddenly appears stark naked about to commit a crime for reasons that are never quite explained. He's going to crawl naked over the sleeping body of the person in the next room in order to steal the pearl.

I think Raffles and Bunny are a kind of gay couple. They're not dissimilar to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas for example. Even to the extent of in "The Emperor's Gift" that they're off to the island of Capri and off to Naples which was a kind of gay haven.

And Raffles says, we will bask together on the island of Capri. The relationship between the pair of them is very interesting. And it's in its odd way, quite modern.

Caroline: I completely agree, I had the exact same reaction when reading it for this. I think in my mind, I thought, Oh, you know, it's one of those kind of Victorian homosocial things. There's only male characters in the book, et cetera, et cetera. And then I read it again. I was like, no, no, no, they are definitely in love. This is no projection whatsoever.

And not even that the dynamic between them. Right at the very start, that first story where Bunny has this terrible problem and Raffles is going to solve it for him with a crime, Bunny describes how immediately the weight lifts as soon as Raffles takes charge, and he feels this kind of incredible swell of affection that someone else has taken authority over him. And I don't know, it's a sort of intimate kind of control and back and forth that I just think doesn't exist in friendship.

Darryl: And the the stories are full of these moments of what I think of as extraordinary innuendo about Raffles trying to penetrate through small spaces and there are loads of them and sometimes as in this one he's naked and I'm thinking, yeah, to what extent is Horning aware of what he's writing? And I think quite aware. I really do. One of the things that a number of editors and scholars have commented on is, we're told many times that Raffles lives in the Albany Mansion Building in the West End of London.

All kinds of people lived in the Albany, including a mutual friend of both Hornung and Oscar Wilde, a man called George Cecil Ives, who was a cricketer, a graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a gay campaigner. It's where Ernest lives in The Importance of Being Earnest in the same rooms, in fact, as George Cecil Ives, quite deliberately in the same rooms. It's where Lord John Roxton lives in Conan Doyle's Lost World, another very homoerotic tale. And Roxton, of course, is based on Roger Casement, the great gay icon and Irish nationalist hero.

And that novel, The Lost World, ends with Malone and Lord John Roxton hand in hand walking off for another adventure. Yes I think that there really is something very interesting going on. No wonder Conan Doyle thought they were dangerous.

Caroline: Yes, that's true, that does give a slightly different complexion to his assessment, doesn't it? Should say a bit about Bunny as a character, because he is, of course, very different to Raffles. He is, as you said, the Watson to Raffles's Holmes. What else do we learn about him through the stories?

Darryl: So he was Raffles's "fag" at public school. That is to say he was his servant. I'm not being a product of the English public school system myself I don't have a first hand knowledge of this. Younger boys were taken up as servants, dogsbodies, factotums by older boys, by sixth formers in a relationship which again had a kind of homoerotics to it but was profoundly rooted in a kind of hero worship as well. Bunny worships Raffles from their days in school together, where Raffles was the older boy. He was the captain of the school cricket team.

He's all of these things. So Bunny is a public school boy, but not a university man, we're told. Unlike Raffles, who not unusually in these kinds of stories, simultaneously seems to have gone to both Oxford and Cambridge, depending on which particular story that you're reading.

But nevertheless, he comes from this establishment background, and he's trying to make his living semi successfully as a writer and we're told that he writes articles, disguised articles about Raffles's exploits as well. And at the end of of the cycle that completes The Amateur Cracksman, the first volume which sees at the end of "The Emperor's Gift," Bunny is arrested and Raffles dives off the ship into the Bay of Naples and the last thing that Bunny sees is a head, what he thinks might be a head, bobbing up and down in the waves in the distance. Can he have survived?

And Bunny is sentenced to 18 months in prison in Wormwood Scrubs. And when next we meet him he's come out the other side. He's been released, but he's been disowned by his relatives, by his family. He's living in a garret, in an attic, in Holloway, unwashed, unshaven.

But trying to make his living as a writer. There's also, I think, this sense that as with Watson and Holmes that the Bunny a figure for Horning himself as well. He's the person who may be writing the stories that we're reading.

We never discover his name or we don't discover his name until the very last story and his name is Harry Manders. So there is something anonymous about Bunny. In fact, Bunny is probably his his public school nickname, isn't it?

Caroline: I will admit I had to ask my husband for kind of cricket consultation on this episode because he is a big cricket fan. I don't know so much about it. Apparently Bunny or rabbit is a nickname you give to someone who's not very good at cricket or a bad batsman.

Darryl: A bad cricketer, that's right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So Bunny is a kind of is wimpy, literary cove at school. He writes for the school magazine. But he's not a jock. He's not a kind of hunky alpha sportsman like Raffles. So that's the nature of the relationship, I think, between them.

Caroline: I also had to ask Guy to help me understand the distinction between amateur and professional in the sport at the time, which is highlighted, I think, very cleverly in the story in this collection called "Gentlemen and Players", in which he's comparing the gentlemen and players thing in cricket, where you have the sort of public school university toffs playing the professional cricketers with the same in crime, you know, because Raffles very much considers himself an amateur in both senses, and it would be dishonourable to be a professional criminal. Again, this is so interesting as a minute distinction when you're approaching crime that, oh, well, I don't do it professionally. I'm an artist.

Darryl: Yes, he is the amateur cracksman, and so absolutely a gentleman and a player. In fact, the whole book, every single story, it seems, deploys cricketing metaphors of various kinds. And so this gets back to something I was saying earlier about the Raffles stories fundamentally being stories about class because on those occasions where it's a story about the double life, of course it is and again, this is made clear as well, a bit like Jekyll and Hyde, like The Importance of Being Earnest, a bit like Dorian Gray, here is Raffles, Mayfair clubman by day, cat burglar by night, but also, there's a kind of double in the sense that it's the gentlemen and the players. And there are stories in which we meet Raffles's working class counterparts, the actual professional criminals who really do, they're made to talk in core blimey governor, sort of East End cockney accents, aren't they? There are a couple of stories, there's "Gentlemen and Players" and then there's a later one called "The Return Match", so another kind of cricketing metaphor in which, Raffles encounters his counterparts, the professionals, or as he often calls them, the professors they are, professors of crime, which I confess, I'm not familiar with that term, that word used in that context of kind of professionals anywhere else, but that's what these people are.

But at the very beginning of the second volume, The Black Mask, after the social disgrace that Bunny has occasioned by his period in Wormwood Scrubs. Raffles has returned to London in disguise. Disguised as Mr. Maturin, a very interesting, name in this context, I think. But they don't have clubs that they belong to anymore. They can't be seen out in society, they're not to be seen wandering through Mayfair streets in their white ties. What Bunny says at the beginning of the second one is, "Amateur cracksmen no longer, but professionals of the deadliest die, knowing nobody, without a club between us." So they have become also professionals, and so they are declassé, they've fallen down through the class system as well and end up as versions of their working class counterparts.

Caroline: It really intrigues me through their progression through the first set of stories with how we see them make this distinction to themselves that, well, we only steal when we need to. So they will have periods where Bunny's happily penning his poems for the magazines and living off that.

And then they run down their store of funds and then he goes back to Raffles and they do another job, but there's no sense of profit. It's just trying to live a sustainable life with an address in Piccadilly and a club in Mayfair. The prospect of course of getting what you might consider a real job is obviously not to be done, not to be countenanced, crime instead. But yes, it's very interesting that they then make that transition into having to become professionals because they lose those other markers of amateur high classness.

Darryl: Yeah. If I can read this is the point that Orwell makes, one of the most interesting points that he makes about class in the Raffles stories. "Raffles, no less than Great Expectations, or Le Rouge et le Noir is a story of snobbery, and it gains a great deal from the precariousness of Raffles's social position. A cruder writer would have made the gentleman burglar a member of the peerage, or at least a baronet. Raffles, however, is of upper middle class origin and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm."

That's how Orwell reads it, and you can see that in the sense that they always need the money, these are not people who live off estates and all the money. In a way, they have to work for a living, and maintaining the life of a gentleman clubman in Mayfair in the late 1890s turns out to be quite expensive. And it struck me, I know that they lose value through the process of fencing the goods, but nevertheless, some of these jewels that they pinch are of enormous value. We're talking tens, on occasion hundred thousand pounds. Historians tell us that, if we want to translate the 19th century pound to today, multiply it by about a hundred is a reasonable rule of thumb right across the century.

So you know, we're talking things that are worth hundreds of thousands, occasionally millions, and so my goodness, they burn through cash, don't they? So this is an expensive lifestyle that they lead.

Caroline: Yes, you would have thought that, you know, if they successfully sold one Velazquez painting, then you'd never have to work another day again in your life. But no, they're back again for the diamonds.

Darryl: You and I may not have to work again in our lives, but we don't have the overheads that these guys have.

Caroline: Very true. Yes. I also found something that Orwell wrote where he used the Raffles stories as an example of what he called a good bad book, which I think is a fascinating phrase. I'd love to hear your take on it.

Darryl: Orwell is very much in favor of good bad books it should be said. It's not a phrase that I would use. It's not a phrase that anybody would use today. I would call them popular fiction. I would call them genre fiction. But these are works which don't necessarily make any great pretension to literariness and Orwell is writing, he's an approximate contemporary of people like F. R. Leavis, for example. So he's writing at a time when literary intellectuals were doing a lot of work to form this idea of a canon. And this often involved disparaging, sometimes denouncing, as in a work like Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public, denouncing the sort of ill effects of the wrong kind of literature read by the wrong people for the wrong kind of reasons in the wrong kind of place, generally on your suburban commute, when you're on the omnibus or whatever. And so a whole generation of writers were in danger of being swept aside. And Orwell finds himself very much in favor of this kind of writing. And so he particularly, I think, is drawn to the genre fiction of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, so the kind of writing that he himself would've grown up reading.

And at the classier end, this includes writers like Wells, for example, or Galsworthy, Conan Doyle, but also, writers like Hornung, who he admires very much or a book like King Solomon's Mines or a writer like H. Rider Haggard. Now I think we're used to I'm very glad to say, used to reading these kinds of writers for themselves, but also for the very revealing light they cast upon their times. I think that's a good bad book for Orwell. And a good bad book is a jolly good thing, I think is what Orwell is saying.

And again, because Orwell himself is acutely aware of class, Raffles is not the only lower, upper middle class figure, that's exactly the class that Orwell assigns to himself. He knows that, for example, there's a great fascination with reading school stories, reading Billy Bunter and things like that amongst working class adolescents. He's got a great essay called Boy's Weeklys, which is all about this. He loves the concept of the good, bad book. And I think Raffles is a wonderful example of a novel, which, may not, if you're a rigorous modernist canon former, you may not have much to say about it, but which for the rest of us is great.

Caroline: Yes, that's very much how I feel about it. Something else I want to consider in relation to the 19th century, very early 20th century companions, is the Raffles stories as crime fiction because I think they are wonderful character portraits, they're great suspense fiction in lots of ways, but are they good crime fiction?

Darryl: Yeah, I was wondering about this as well, and I'm not sure. I found myself reading them, again, over the last couple of weeks and being fundamentally uninterested in the crimes, very interested in the world, very interested in Raffles and Bunny and their relationship. Interested in the concept of the public school gentleman who turns to crime and uses his skills in other means. Is it partly because there's no element of whodunnit about it because we always know whodunnit, Raffles done it. He does have a nemesis, Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, as a kind of dour quite dogged Scottish person. He's quite sketchily drawn in and, is pursuing, getting closer, circling around Raffles as the first collection, goes on until he turns up at the end in a fake beard.

But there's not much sense of detection and not really outside a couple of stories where we learn about Raffles's miraculous ability to get through small spaces, there's not very much about the kind of mechanics of crime either, is there? There's a lot about the sense of courage and determination that Raffles himself needs to do this, but not much more than that. I don't know do they work as crime fiction and detective fiction. I'm not sure.

Caroline: Yeah, that's sort of where I arrived as well, because they're not puzzles, as you say, it's always going to be clear who did it. They're not even howdunnits in the sense that comes a bit later where it's all about well, yes, we know who the criminal is, but how is he get away with it? It's not even like that really. Most of the surprises either come from Raffles keeping secrets from Bunny, and thus the reader, which is a major technique of the suspense in them. There's a lot of that, yes.

Or occasionally there's a little twist at the end, like, I think this story, I think it's called "Nine Points of the Law", the one about the Velasquez painting, where Bunny is sent in to act as a diversion, takes an opportunity to steal the painting and then Raffles tells him that was the copy I'd already switched them. And you know, that's a kind of little reveal at the end in the way that you might expect in a crime story. But it's for comic purposes, it's not really about the crime at all. The more I thought about it and the more I read them, I thought these are barely about crime at all. These are about, you know, a lovely gay couple in the 1890s, living on their wits. This is what this is about.

Darryl: Yes, and that's how I thought of it as well. Yes, yeah.

Caroline: Which, is fascinating as well. I am very far from being an expert in all of the ways that Raffles was adapted for first the stage and then the screen. I have watched the David Niven film which obviously in some ways ruins things by removing all suggestion of gayness and introducing Olivia de Havilland. But in other ways it's still quite camp. But I wonder the extent to which that very enduring afterlife that Raffles has had in other formats is to do with the fact that it's not the crime that you take from it at all, it's the characters and the relationships.

Darryl: Yeah, I think that's probably right. He's a great role, as you say for David Niven and Ronald Colman. For, handsome, charming, upper crust, perhaps at times slightly caddish mustachioed English leading men. It's a great role for an Englishman who looks good in evening wear. I've not seen it, but I gather that Graham Greene adapted in the middle 1970s a very openly gay stage adaptation continuation of Raffles, which was not a great success. Nick Daly writes about it in his introduction to the new Oxford Raffles. But otherwise, I'm not sure.

Caroline: Yes, there's certain archetypes of what we now think of as late Victorian crime, like stealing a pearl and cracking a safe, but he doesn't explain them or dwell on them or really go into any detail in the way that, because I think there is certainly in the decades to come, there is a sense that crime fiction does demand certain technical details. That we need to talk about fingerprints and footprints and, you know, Sherlock Holmes does all of that as well. There's none of that in Horning.

Darryl: Yeah, this is, and this is immediately before fingerprinting, it's a couple of years before fingerprinting comes in and my goodness, you can tell. We're told they leave their fingerprints all over the place. So yes, I think that's right. But that's not where the stories are at all, you're quite right. The kind of mechanics of it, the technical details of it are not what Horning is interested in, no.

Caroline: And I should say, even saying that I don't know that this has many of the trappings of crime fiction, I don't care in the least. It doesn't matter in the slightest. They're still brilliant and delightful stories to read, but it's just interesting that they ended up in the Penguin Crime series and I think they've been very consistently tagged as crime fiction, perhaps because of the Holmes-Conan Doyle connection more than anything else, but yes, I think at an attempt at an isolated examination, they don't hold up that way.

Darryl: We don't even get him as, or not very much, at least, of Raffles doing what in my memory of it, he would do, which is cat burgling, scaling up drain pipes dressed in black and climbing through windows. He doesn't do very much of that either, does he?

Caroline: No, I had the same memory, and I don't know whether I'm remembering a television version.

Darryl: Maybe that's what we both are, yeah.

Caroline: But yes, I don't think there's a single instance in this first collection at least of him shinning up a drainpipe. There's the bit you described previously where he does the sort of Bruce Willis-Die Hard thing of climbing through a ventilation shaft but not wearing any clothes.

But that's I think the closest we get to that sort physical engagement with burglary. No, it's definitely not a characteristic in the way it is actually in some other crime fiction of that period and immediately later.

Well, I think bringing us to the end here, having talked about its value as crime fiction, I would now like to ask you how many green penguins out of five would you like to award Raffles?

Darryl: So I thought about this long and hard for exactly the kinds of reasons that we've just been talking about, which is, how crimey are these really? So in a very kind of fiddly, precise way, I was torn between three and a half and four, but I decided, oh let's be generous because they are great, and I enjoy them so much and there's so much to get out of them. So four.

Caroline: Wonderful. Four out of five for Raffles.

Well, thank you so much for joining me, Darryl, for this reconsideration of the stories. And uh, I hope plenty of people will also be encouraged to go back and read them as we were and find that they're not exactly as we remembered them.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Darryl Jones. You can find out more about him and keep up with his work on Bluesky, where he posts as @profdarryljones.bsky.social.

If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/raffles. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.