RAFFLES - THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN
Gentleman by day and thief by night, A. J. Raffles lives a double life. Taking 'Art for art's sake' as his motto, Raffles supports his debonair lifestyle by performing lucrative, artistic, and ingenious burglaries of the wealthy elite of Victorian London. Dedicated to his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle, Hornung's first collection of Raffles stories, The Amateur Cracksman (1899), can be seen as an inverted spin-off of the former's celebrated detective stories. But it is Raffles' outlaw status that has drawn generations of readers to these swift-paced tales of a charismatic and cool-headed thief and his less worldly partner, Bunny.