A. J. Raffles

E. W. Hornung wrote a series of twenty-six short stories and one novel about the adventures of Arthur J. Raffles, cricketer and gentleman thief, and his chronicler, Harry "Bunny" Manders, in London, between 1898 and 1909. The first story, "The Ides of March", appeared in the June 1898 edition of Cassell's Magazine. The early adventures were published in The Amateur Cracksman and continued with The Black Mask. The last collection, A Thief in the Night and the novel Mr. Justice Raffles tell of adventures previously withheld.

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." In contrast to Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny are "something dark, morally uncertain, yet convincingly, reassuringly English."

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

A. J. Raffles (character)

Arthur J. Raffles is a character created in the 1890s by E. W. Hornung, brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. 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.

As Holmes has Dr. Watson to chronicle his adventures, Raffles has Harry "Bunny" Manders – a former schoolmate saved from disgrace and suicide by Raffles, whom Raffles persuaded to accompany him on a burglary. While Raffles often takes advantage of Manders' relative innocence, and sometimes treats him with a certain amount of contempt, he knows that Manders' bravery and loyalty are to be relied on utterly. In several stories, Manders saves the day for the two of them after Raffles gets into situations he cannot get out of on his own.

AJ

AJ, Aj, aJ, or aj may refer to:

People

A&J

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See also

A. J. Baker

A. J. (Jim) Baker (born 1923) is an Australian philosopher who is best known for systematising the realist philosophy of John Anderson.

He studied under Anderson at Sydney University and has taught philosophy in Scotland, New Zealand, the United States and Australia. He was a prominent member of the Sydney Libertarians and the Sydney Push.As of 2012, he continued to contribute occasional articles to The Sydney Realist.

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