A. J. Raffles, A Gentleman-Thief: 27 Crime Tales in One Volume (ePub)

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A. J. Raffles is an 'amateur cracksman' and a gentleman-thief who with his wit and ingenuity befools everyone to get what he wants. 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. Raffles is, in many ways, a deliberate inversion of Sherlock Holmes on which he is based - 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.
Content:
The Amateur Cracksman
The Ides of March
A Costume Piece
Gentlemen and Players
Le Premier Pas
Wilful Murder
Nine Points of the Law
The Return Match
The Gift of the Emperor
The Black Mask; or, Raffles: Further Adventures
No Sinecure
A Jubilee Present
The Fate of Faustina
The Last Laugh
To Catch a Thief
An Old Flame
The Wrong House
The Knees of the Gods
A Thief in the Night
Out of Paradise
The Chest of Silver
The Rest Cure
The Criminologists' Club
The Field of Philippi
A Bad Night
A Trap to Catch a Cracksman
The Spoils of Sacrilege
The Raffles Relics
The Last Word
Mr. Justice Raffles
E. W. Hornung (1866-1921) was an English author and poet and also brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hornung is known for writing the A. J. Raffles series about a gentleman thief based on a deliberate inversion of the Sherlock Holmes series. Hornung dedicated his creation as a form of flattery to Doyle.