Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. HornungMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm going to have to stop saying that Goodreads has never once recommended me a book that I was interested in, because it recommended this one, based on the fact that I'd read one of P.G. Wodehouse's books - though it would have been more relevant to base it on my having read Hornung's friend Jerome K. Jerome's books, or Hornung's brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle's books, which influenced this one and were later influenced by it. I think the GR recommendation algorithm is basically "You read book A (ignoring the rating you gave to Book A), and someone else also read Book A (probably ignoring their rating too), and besides that they read Completely Dissimilar Book B. Would you like to read Book B?"
Anyway, I did enjoy this, though it's not my new favourite or anything. It's well written, and pioneered a type of protagonist that is not one I prefer: the competent man of action who is morally grey at best. James Bond is in the Raffles lineage.
Raffles is a "gentleman" who has turned to burglary rather than work to support his lifestyle. In the first story in this book (it's a collection of shorts), the narrator, known here only by his school nickname "Bunny," who fagged for him at their public school (meaning he was a younger boy who served an older boy), confesses to him that he's in desperate financial straits. He's hoping against hope that Raffles, who he remembers treated him kindly at school, will help in some way. His "help" consists of recruiting Bunny to be his partner in crime. Bunny and Raffles are essentially Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith, respectively, if Psmith was less eccentric and Mike had a much lower standard of ethics and was the younger by several years. Oh, and if it was Psmith, not Mike, who was a good cricketer.
Their adventures are varied rather than merely formulaic, and Raffles exhibits considerable skill and intelligence; they're partly based on Doyle's Holmes and Watson, and Bunny, while loyal, is definitely the junior partner and, on the one occasion when he does something on his own initiative, almost messes up the entire job. They're also partly based on Oscar Wilde (another friend of the author's and of Doyle's) and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and the homoerotic subtext is very nearly text. A lot of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction is Holmes/Watson slash, with really no textual support in the original stories; this... is at a different level. I did feel, though, that the attraction was at least primarily one way, that Bunny was in love with Raffles but not so much vice versa.
At the time it was published, there was much ruffling of feathers about making a criminal the hero (view spoiler), with reviewers saying things like "at least it isn't produced in a cheap edition" (because then the poor and uneducated would be corrupted, presumably, and that's an assumption that could stand a few paragraphs of unpacking, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader).
I plan to read the sequel, but I'm not champing at the bit to do so. It's well done, but not right in the centre of what I like to read.
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