A Thief in the Night

A Thief in the Night Is A Book of Raffles' Adventures By E.W. Hornung. One story, for example, has Raffles and Bunny visiting their old minor public school and re-enacting some of Raffles’ schoolboy exploits. Another has a supposedly dead Raffles visiting a museum in Scotland Yard that contains articles from his more famous crimes.

The last story is unusual in that it is told by Bunny’s former fiancée and shows Raffles in an unusually honourable light. One of the reasons that the Raffles stories remain popular is that Hornung makes no attempt to paint either Raffles, or his accomplice Bunny, as saints. They steal from the innocent as well as the greedy, and they are entirely prepared to kill if necessary. Many of their exploits end as fiascos and their life after Raffles’ “death” is frankly dismal.

Nevertheless, Raffles is always portrayed as charismatic, the kind of man people follow blindly against all sense. It makes the stories interesting in a way that the standard pot-boiler crime stories of that era often fail to do. Hornung keeps us on edge with an unexpected turn of events, often preceded by a witty set up.