E. W. Hornung

Ernest William Hornung invented A. J. Raffles, the cricketing gentleman thief whose burglaries reach us through his admiring accomplice Bunny Manders. Raffles arrived in an 1898 magazine story and was collected the following year as The Amateur Cracksman, with The Black Mask in 1901 and A Thief in the Night in 1905. Middlesbrough was his birthplace in 1866; Uppingham School gave him a lifelong attachment to cricket; and at seventeen he sailed for Australia, where two years as a tutor and station hand furnished the settings for A Bride from the Bush, his 1890 debut, and for Stingaree, the 1905 book whose title character is a bushranger. In 1893 he married Constance Doyle, sister of Arthur Conan Doyle, who rated the Raffles stories among the finest short fiction in the language. Their only child, Oscar, was killed near Ypres on 6 July 1915, aged twenty, and his father had the boy's letters home printed the year after. Hornung ran a YMCA canteen and library behind the lines in France in the last year of the war, and afterwards set up a rest hut in Cologne. He died of influenza in southern France in March 1921, at fifty-four.