British Classics PDF EPUB Audio

The Amateur Cracksman

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First published: 1899
Pages: 131

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Read by Kristin Hughes (1974-2021) · 5 h 25 min · 8 parts

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The Ides of March
48:39
A Costume Piece
36:10
Gentlemen and Players
41:49
Le Premier Pas
36:44
Wilful Murder
32:38
Nine Points of the Law
38:27
The Return Match
34:51
The Gift of the Emperor
56:06

The Amateur Cracksman (1899) is a public domain work.

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About this book

This 1899 collection introduced A. J. Raffles to the world and made the gentleman thief a fixture of crime fiction. By reputation he is a celebrated cricketer and an ornament of fashionable London; in secret he funds that life by robbing the very drawing rooms that welcome him. His old schoolfellow Bunny Manders, drawn into the first burglary out of desperation, becomes his accomplice and admiring narrator. Across these linked stories the two plan audacious thefts, outwit the dogged Inspector Mackenzie, and skirt disaster with more style than caution. Hornung, brother-in-law to Arthur Conan Doyle, built Raffles as the mirror image of Sherlock Holmes, and readers have been charmed by the reversal ever since.

About the author

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.