The Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung
Mar. 19th, 2019 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeI managed to time things so I could get to this one for the Ides of March :D It's always good to revisit old favourites—this is my fourth time reading the Raffles stories and they're just as enjoyable as the first time round.
In case you've somehow managed to remain in ignorance of the Raffles stories until now... The Amateur Cracksman (1899) is a set of interconnected short stories, the first of four books, following a young man only ever referred to by the nickname Bunny, who finds himself in desperate financial circumstances and turns for help to his old school friend A. J. Raffles. Raffles can indeed find the money he needs... by robbing a jewellery shop. Raffles and Bunny become partners in crime, and the stories follow their adventures across a series of variously successful burglaries, while evading pursuit by the canny Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard. The stories are great fun, but they have the sort of darker side that you might expect from a relationship founded on crime and deception, and reveal occasional serious thematic depths. They are also, at least by the standards of the 1890s, extremely gay. You should read them!
I've already said quite a bit about Raffles elsewhere, so for this series I want to concentrate on how these stories fit into the context of E. W. Hornung's work up to this point.
So it's obvious that some of the major themes and trappings of the Raffles stories are things we've seen before: crime, cricket, Australia, professional writing, public school backstories, etc. have all made appearances in the earlier works. But these are treated rather differently here, and crime in particular is far more complex and morally ambiguous than it has been. The Unbidden Guest and The Rogue's March explore how basically good, sympathetic people could be driven to criminal acts out of desperation, but both their major criminals are firmly redeemed and back on the side of the angels by the end. And Irralie's Bushranger flirts with the idea that there could be a sort of romantic fascination in crime—but, having done so, it swerves back to the view of the criminal as a straightforward, unsympathetic villain.
The Amateur Cracksman, however, takes neither the 'narrow road' nor the 'broad, broad road' when it comes to crime and criminals. Raffles is a deeply flawed character who lies all the time to everyone including himself, repeatedly keeps information about his plans from Bunny despite apparently appreciating both the practical difficulties and the emotional hurt this causes, and, er, keeps stealing other people's things. But he's also charming, gracious, genuinely kind and cares deeply about Bunny. Bunny is clearly desperately in love with Raffles and can be forgiven a little partiality, but he's not entirely irrational to like Raffles as much as he does. And Raffles is not purely mercenary about his crimes: he cares about art ('for art's sake'!) and obviously steals partly for, as it were, the love of the game. The association of unrepentant crime, not just with a complicatedly sympathetic character, but with type and symbol of proper British gentlemanly virtue—what more so than cricket, after all?—is a very interesting feature of these stories, and certainly far more so than anything in Hornung's earlier works.
There are some more trivial differences, like the structure and shape of the stories. The episodic structure of the book, partway between a novel and a typical collection of unrelated short stories, allows for the development of long-term story arcs and character development in relatively little page-space, something which I think becomes more important and is better taken advantage of in the later Raffles stories, but which is certainly present here.
One last very noticeable feature. The gay subtext of the Raffles stories is infamous and has been discussed at some length elsewhere, but something that's struck me reading through Hornung's works up to this point is how suddenly it appears. Apart from 'After the Fact', the proto-Raffles story in Some Persons Unknown, and a few other places where you could read something into it if you really wanted to, there isn't much in the way of overtly queer themes in Hornung's earlier work. It's as if the thing springs into being fully formed with the Raffles stories, and I do have to wonder what was going on there. Finally successful enough to ditch the conventional het romances and write what he really wanted to? Unconscious influence of some of Raffles's real-life models? Or just trying something new? In any case, it's certainly noticeable that The Amateur Cracksman is the first of Hornung's long-form works not to feature a prominent central heterosexual romance.
I'm going to put the Hornung read-through on hiatus for a while now, as I have too many other books I want to get to, but it's been great fun so far and I look forward to continuing eventually.
In case you've somehow managed to remain in ignorance of the Raffles stories until now... The Amateur Cracksman (1899) is a set of interconnected short stories, the first of four books, following a young man only ever referred to by the nickname Bunny, who finds himself in desperate financial circumstances and turns for help to his old school friend A. J. Raffles. Raffles can indeed find the money he needs... by robbing a jewellery shop. Raffles and Bunny become partners in crime, and the stories follow their adventures across a series of variously successful burglaries, while evading pursuit by the canny Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard. The stories are great fun, but they have the sort of darker side that you might expect from a relationship founded on crime and deception, and reveal occasional serious thematic depths. They are also, at least by the standards of the 1890s, extremely gay. You should read them!
I've already said quite a bit about Raffles elsewhere, so for this series I want to concentrate on how these stories fit into the context of E. W. Hornung's work up to this point.
So it's obvious that some of the major themes and trappings of the Raffles stories are things we've seen before: crime, cricket, Australia, professional writing, public school backstories, etc. have all made appearances in the earlier works. But these are treated rather differently here, and crime in particular is far more complex and morally ambiguous than it has been. The Unbidden Guest and The Rogue's March explore how basically good, sympathetic people could be driven to criminal acts out of desperation, but both their major criminals are firmly redeemed and back on the side of the angels by the end. And Irralie's Bushranger flirts with the idea that there could be a sort of romantic fascination in crime—but, having done so, it swerves back to the view of the criminal as a straightforward, unsympathetic villain.
The Amateur Cracksman, however, takes neither the 'narrow road' nor the 'broad, broad road' when it comes to crime and criminals. Raffles is a deeply flawed character who lies all the time to everyone including himself, repeatedly keeps information about his plans from Bunny despite apparently appreciating both the practical difficulties and the emotional hurt this causes, and, er, keeps stealing other people's things. But he's also charming, gracious, genuinely kind and cares deeply about Bunny. Bunny is clearly desperately in love with Raffles and can be forgiven a little partiality, but he's not entirely irrational to like Raffles as much as he does. And Raffles is not purely mercenary about his crimes: he cares about art ('for art's sake'!) and obviously steals partly for, as it were, the love of the game. The association of unrepentant crime, not just with a complicatedly sympathetic character, but with type and symbol of proper British gentlemanly virtue—what more so than cricket, after all?—is a very interesting feature of these stories, and certainly far more so than anything in Hornung's earlier works.
There are some more trivial differences, like the structure and shape of the stories. The episodic structure of the book, partway between a novel and a typical collection of unrelated short stories, allows for the development of long-term story arcs and character development in relatively little page-space, something which I think becomes more important and is better taken advantage of in the later Raffles stories, but which is certainly present here.
One last very noticeable feature. The gay subtext of the Raffles stories is infamous and has been discussed at some length elsewhere, but something that's struck me reading through Hornung's works up to this point is how suddenly it appears. Apart from 'After the Fact', the proto-Raffles story in Some Persons Unknown, and a few other places where you could read something into it if you really wanted to, there isn't much in the way of overtly queer themes in Hornung's earlier work. It's as if the thing springs into being fully formed with the Raffles stories, and I do have to wonder what was going on there. Finally successful enough to ditch the conventional het romances and write what he really wanted to? Unconscious influence of some of Raffles's real-life models? Or just trying something new? In any case, it's certainly noticeable that The Amateur Cracksman is the first of Hornung's long-form works not to feature a prominent central heterosexual romance.
I'm going to put the Hornung read-through on hiatus for a while now, as I have too many other books I want to get to, but it's been great fun so far and I look forward to continuing eventually.
