regshoe

At long last! I have reached the end of the E. W. Hornung read-through, which has only taken me about five years. I'm really quite emotional about it...

Old Offenders and a Few Old Scores (1923) is a set of Hornung's short stories collected and published posthumously. I'm not sure when they were all written—some had already been published in magazines many years earlier, others are definitely post-war, many are vague in their settings. Somewhat unexpectedly, it turned out to be one of the most difficult Hornungs to find—the only online copy I could locate was an HTML file from Project Gutenberg Australia, appropriately enough. The volume is introduced only somewhat patronisingly by Arthur Conan Doyle, who observes that 'At his best there is no modern author who, by the sudden use of the right adjective and the right phrase, could make a scene spring more vividly to the eyes of the reader.' —quite right too.

Anyway, the stories! They are absolutely classic Hornung, and really enjoyable. Crime, Australia, public schools, bewildering amounts of detail about cricket, dramatic plot twists, all sorts of originally and unexpectedly interesting characters, sudden use of the right adjective and the right phrase—they're all here and all as good as ever. The collection is divided into two parts which might have been named by Raffles fandom: the 'Old Offenders' are stories variously dealing with crime and other bad behaviour, while the 'Old Scores' are cricket stories as detailed and enthusiastic as anything Hornung (or indeed anyone else) ever wrote about the game.

Amongst the 'crime' stories, I especially liked 'The Lady of the Lift', though it's difficult to say why without spoilers—but it contains some particularly good examples of Hornungian prose, a main character about whom I would love to read a Raffles-type collection of stories and an excellent twist. There's another story—and here it's easier to discuss the big spoiler without naming the story than vice versa—which uses the trope of 'man falls in love with a woman disguised as a man without knowing she's a woman'; it's a fairly subtle example of it, but always interesting to find something else in Hornung's work that reads as just a little bit queer. Those are only two of several very interesting female characters in the collection! 'The Voice of the Charmer', which is not about crime as such, is perhaps slightly melodramatic but I did find the twist memorably horrible. There are a couple of stories about ingenious and dramatically terrifying murderers; and several set in Australia which make the most of Hornung's descriptively-precise love for that country, including one, 'The Poet of Jumping Sandhills', where one might suspect Hornung of making gentle fun of his own Australian literary efforts:

Yet the inauspicious fact remained that her brother had been there before her, not as a guest, but in a somewhat responsible position in which he had failed to give signal satisfaction. It was many years ago, in Olive’s childhood, but Philip Armitage had been writing bush stories ever since, with that station and its mighty paddocks for the unmistakable background of the often impudent picture. In the silly Old Country he was said to be taken quite seriously as a representative Australian writer.

Two of the cricket stories follow the same character, Chrystal, who is enormously keen on cricket but couldn't play his way out of a paper bag—the keenest rabbit in the whole cricket-warren, as Hornung puts it—and here again it's distinctly possible that Chrystal's author is indulging in a little comic self-deprecation. And the last one, 'A Bowler's Innings', is that rare thing, a Hornung story actually set in the north of England—it's about the meeting between a retired professional cricketer, now in his last illness, and an old fan who's writing a book, and makes a fitting and affecting end to the collection.

And that, I think, is it! I have read every single one of E. W. Hornung's books, and it was an absolutely worthwhile endeavour. There may be a few short stories published in magazines and never collected into books, which I might try to track down at some point; other than that, I must re-read Peccavi soon so I can write Jill crossover fic. And it's the Ides next week... :)