A Thief in the Night Book Reviews

A Thief in the Night by Ernest William Hornung Book Summary

"These latest adventures of 'Raffles' and 'Bunny' are their most thrilling and exciting ones. The sentimental side of their story has never before been shown so dramatically and romantically, and the suggestion in this book of the final conclusion of their careers cannot but make these stories of the greatest interest to all readers." Boston Herald.

Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Hornung has created Raffles as an inverted representation of Sherlock Holmes. A J Raffles was a thief. He was a gentleman thief who lived in a good neighborhood in London and played cricket. Raffles' plots to steal are ingenious and of a higher quality than the "common thieves".
Out
of Paradise (excerpt)

If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but
back to our earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by
discretion in existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill some
small part of an infinitely greater blank, across which you may
conceive me to have stretched my canvas for the first frank portrait
of my friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint in
every wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it is no
service to his memory to glaze the fact; yet I have done so myself
before to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt
unduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded even
as I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to me
than any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations, and
as an earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest wrong
that even Raffles ever did me.

I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I
still would be to my friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides
of March when he led me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was
an ugly office, if you will. It was a moral bagatelle to the
treacherous trick he was to play me a few weeks later. The second
offence, on the other hand, was to prove the less serious of the two
against society, and might in itself have been published to the world
years ago. There have been private reasons for my reticence. The
affair was not only too intimately mine, and too discreditable to
Raffles. One other was involved in it, one dearer to me than Raffles
himself, one whose name shall not even now be sullied by association
with ours.

Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before
that mad March deed. True, her people called it "an
understanding," and frowned even upon that, as well they might.
But their authority was not direct; we bowed to it as an act of
politic grace; between us, all was well but my unworthiness. That may
be gauged when I confess that this was how the matter stood on the
night I gave a worthless check for my losses at baccarat, and
afterward turned to Raffles in my need. Even after that I saw her
sometimes. But I let her guess that there was more upon my soul than
she must ever share, and at last I had written to end it all. I
remember that week so well! It was the close of such a May as we had
never had since, and I was too miserable even to follow the heavy
scoring in the papers. Raffles was the only man who could get a
wicket up at Lord's, and I never once went to see him play. Against
Yorkshire, however, he helped himself to a hundred runs as well; and
that brought Raffles round to me, on his way home to the Albany...

Ernest William Hornung (7 June 1866 – 22 March 1921) was an English author and poet known for writing the A. J. Raffles series of stories about a gentleman thief in late 19th-century London. Hornung was educated atUppingham School; as a result of poor health he left the school in December 1883 to travel to Sydney, where he stayed for two years. He drew on his Australian experiences as a background when he began writing, initially short stories and later novels.

In 1898 he wrote "In the Chains of Crime", which introduced Raffles and his sidekick, Bunny Manders; the characters were based partly on his friendsOscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and also on the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, created by his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle. The series of Raffles short stories were collected for sale in book form in 1899, and two further books of Raffles short stories followed, as well as a poorly received novel. Aside from his Raffles stories, Hornung was a prodigious writer of fiction, publishing numerous books from 1890, with A Bride from the Bush to his 1914 novel The Crime Doctor.

The First World War brought an end to Hornung's fictional output. His son, Oscar, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in July 1915. Hornung joined the YMCA, initially in England, then in France, where he helped run a canteen and library. He published two collections of poetry during the war, and then, afterwards, one further volume of verse and an account of his time spent in France, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front. Hornung's fragile constitution was further weakened by the stress of his war work. To aid his recuperation, he and his wife visited the south of France in 1921. He fell ill from influenza on the journey, and died on 22 March 1921, aged 54.

Although much of Hornung's work has fallen into obscurity, his Raffles stories continued to be popular, and have formed numerous film and television adaptations. Hornung's stories dealt with a wider range of themes than crime: he examined scientific and medical developments, guilt, class and the unequal role played by women in society. Two threads that run through a sizeable proportion of his books are Australia and cricket; the latter was also a lifelong passion.

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