![]() ![]() ![]() There are many clear Holmesian parallels that allowed Hornung to mimic Doyle’s financial success. Raffles, in his 1944 essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” Orwell describes the thief as “one of the best-known characters in English fiction”-though, perhaps the bulk of that fame is limited to the British Isles. ![]() The Raffles and Bunny stories are notable not only for Hornung’s curious relation to Doyle, but also for their longstanding position in the popular consciousness, compared to some of their now-faded contemporaries. His old schoolmate, accomplice, and chronicler Harry “Bunny” Manders is not a doctor, but a financially distressed journalist. Raffles is a brilliant criminal, who steals from the wealthy of his own milieu to fund his own comfortable lifestyle of cricket and gentlemen’s clubs. Hornung took the alternative course to the justice-serving detective types that proliferated the market. In the absence of Holmes, plenty of fictional detectives had attempted to draw Doyle’s former audience. At the time of Raffles’ first appearance, Sherlock Holmes had already reached soaring heights success-and Doyle had already unceremoniously killed the character off in “The Adventure of the Final Problem,” published in The Strand magazine in 1893. ![]() Raffles (who first appeared in print in 1898) resembles his creator like Hornung, he is a thief. As a distorted reflection of Sherlock Holmes, A. ![]()
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