Raffles, Gentleman Thief

by E.W. Hornung

A selection of the best classic crime stories featuring the much-loved rogue, Raffles

‘Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger, and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course, it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists’

Dashing man about town, first-class cricketer and master Raffles is the ultimate gentleman thief. Here we find the debonair rogue cracking a jeweller’s safe on Bond Street, stealing from the nouveau riche, spiriting away a priceless pearl, outwitting the law at every turn – and, of course, bowling like a demon – all with the assistance of his plucky sidekick Bunny Manders. This new selection of Ernest Hornung’s much-loved crime stories is taken from his three Raffles collections, The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask and A Thief in the Night.

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2026

About the author

Ernest William Hornung known as Willie, was an English author, most famous for writing the Raffles series of novels about a gentleman thief in late Victorian London.

In addition to his novels and short stories Hornung wrote some war verse, and a play based on the Raffles stories was produced successfully. He was much interested in cricket, and was "a man of large and generous nature, a delightful companion and conversationalist".

Reviews

[Zuuru · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very weak 2 stars.

I went into this blind, thinking the cover was nice and the subject seemed fun. I'm not gonna bother with a long list of things I honestly hated about the book, but at some point I realized the stories desperately needed consistent secondary characters. You spend so much time with Raffles and Bunny that you kind of end up bored with their personalities and voices. Bunny isn't very interesting and I couldn't really understand why Raffles kept him around aside from, I dunno, being lonely in his choice of "careers". Probably something one could disagree with me on, but Bunny should've been a woman. Not even to insert an element of romance (very easy to do it either way lmao), but aside from the chapter taking place in South Africa during the Second Boer War, there was an element to his personality that seemed better suited as a companion-in-thievery if Bunny were a woman. Even then, with the war chapter, a female Bunny could've been a field Nurse and you still could've gotten the only emotionally strong part of the whole tale.

[Siri Olsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raffles, Gentleman Thief is a collection of short stories featuring Mr. A. J. Raffles, the Victorian-Edwardian gentleman rogue created by E. W. Hornung. The collection contains stories from all three short story collections, The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask, and A Thief in the Night, but does not feature the novel Mr. Justice Raffles. This was my first encounter with Raffles, who was famously conceived as an inversion of and homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. I was very charmed by both main characters, though I must say that Raffles' sidekick Bunny Manders stole my heart more than the main character himself. The homoerotic/homoromantic undertones between the two are surprisingly overt for their time, which I was very happy to see. That said, I didn't find the stories themselves to be as engaging or interesting as the Holmes-stories. Raffles and Bunny are undoubtably fantastic characters, but their exploits are either totally commonplace or so over-the-top that you can't help but wonder if a simpler approach might not have been more effective. Whereas Holmes solves the majority of his cases, Raffles has a much lower success rate, and when he does land a big win, he tends to either lose it again or deliberately relinquish it out of a sense of propriety, making you wonder how exactly he manages to make a living from his thieving. A couple of months on from reading, I can't recall more than the vague outlines of most of the stories, but the characters remain very vivid in my mind.

[Sebastian Swallow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good japes from start to finish - the obverse of Sherlock Holmes!