Wednesday, April 29, 2009

More on Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman.

Over on the Guardian Books blog, Stuart Evers examines the morals of E. W. Hornung's A. J. Raffles—cricket player, man about town, and gentleman thief—and credits Hornung—Conan Doyle's brother-in-law—with considerable foresight. He writes, "Hornung, I believe, saw a new kind of crime story on the horizon: those of the hardboiled pulp novelists, and of the more psychologically acute writers such as Patricia Highsmith."

Evers points out that Atlantic Books has republished Raffles as part of its Classic Crime series (along with Sapper's Bulldog Drummond and Charles Dickens's Bleak House). Jim French Productions has been doing audio productions of Raffles for quite some time.

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