Stingaree

Ten linked stories follow Stingaree, a dapper Australian bushranger who wears a monocle, holds up mail coaches, and outwits the mounted police across the Riverina and north-eastern Victoria. Hornung gives him the bearing of a gentleman and a code to match: he robs with style, dresses well, and boasts that he has never killed a man. Settlers, troopers, station-owners, and a few visitors from abroad drift through episodes that run by turns comic, romantic, and genuinely tense. Published in 1905 by the creator of Raffles, the gentleman thief, the book carries the same fascination with the charming criminal, only moved from London drawing rooms to the sunburnt Australian bush. It reads as a colonial cousin to those famous crime stories, told with wit and a clear fondness for its rogue.