[In the following excerpt, Chandler examines the characterization of Raffles.]

The most popular literary rogue of recent times owes to the most popular of literary detectives his birth and characteristics. Hornung's Amateur Cracksman (1899), dedicated to Conan Doyle, betrays with its sequels, Raffles (1901) and A Thief in the Night (1905), the distinguishing traits of Sherlock Holmes. Raffles is secretive and taciturn, a non-professional who excels in ability those of the trade, and a gentleman when not engaged in business. He is gifted with analytic powers of no mean order. He has his fastidious specialities,—cricket and Sullivan cigarettes. His cleverness is heightened by contrast with the surprised stupidity of his associate, the narrator Bunny, who reflects Doyle's Dr. Watson. Raffles's exploits, like many of Sherlock Holmes's, are chronicled by episodes in short story form, and they make their appeal by similar devices to the same emotions.

The great difference between the two groups of fictions is the reversal of point of view. But in this reversal the rogue is at a disadvantage morally and intellectually. To offset his intellectual disadvantage, Raffles is given peculiar and difficult undertakings, as well as special qualities,—"his high spirits, his iron nerve, his buoyant wit, his perfect ease and self-possession." His cleverness and breeding are meant to blind admirers to his moral disadvantage; but the whole question of right and wrong is blinked. Though he dies as a patriot in the Boer War, he is still the rogue and adventurer, and all his creator's attempts to portray him as a hero, rather than an anti-hero, deservedly fail.

Raffles himself holds to the theory propounded by Fielding. Human nature is a chess-board, a thing of alternate black and white. "Why desire to be all one thing or all the other," he asks, "like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? Let us know all squares of the board and enjoy the light the better for the shade." As a matter of fact, he does not know what conscience means. To speak of him as "forever dazzling one with a fresh and unsuspected facet of his character" indicates what his creator wished him to do, rather than what he does. At first, even his skill fails to be convincing. The burglary of the jewelry shop in "The Ides of March" is altogether too simple. When he disguises as a policeman and rescues his pal by apprehending him, Raffles is better; but Mackenzie, the Scotch detective with whom he must frequently contend, is far from the equal of Holmes.

When all is said and done, however, Raffles is an entertaining fellow. His initial crime, an Australian bank robbery, may be too desperate for the first offense of a respectable amateur cricketer; and the purposed killing in cold blood of the fence, in "Willful Murder," is quite out of Raffles's character, as is his tragic love passage, in "The Fate of Faustina" and its sequel, wherein the band of the Camorra seeks melodramatic revenge. But who cares? The individual incidents hold the attention, they are well told, and afford a surprising variety of adventures. They range from the capture in broad daylight of a gold vase from the British Museum, and its presentation in a biscuit box as a jubilee gift to the queen, to the purloining of a Velasquez from the parvenu who for a song has bought it of the owner's scapegrace son.

Here are narrow escapes, as well as daring thefts. The hand of the rogue thrust through the hole he has cut in a door is caught by elated schoolboys. When apprehended for stealing the emperor's pearl he dives from an ocean steamer. He wounds and chloroforms himself to color the escape of a blackmailer. He is bound and gagged before a clock arranged to discharge a revolver at a certain hour. He evades the police by pretended invalidism, and a former sweetheart by a feigned death and funeral. Few of these tricks hark back to the literature of roguery, as does by exception the use of duplicate boxes for the stealing of jewels in "No Sinecure." They are chiefly imaginative inventions, careless of the facts of criminology. A romantic glamour, indeed, is upon every exploit. Raffles admits having queried on entering the lists, "Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger, and a decent living were all going begging together?"

Just this combination of danger, romance, and excitement is well exemplified in such a story as "To Catch a Thief." Here Raffles plays the detective as well as the rogue, selects Lord Ernest Belville as the mysterious society robber, discovers his loot concealed in a pair of Indian clubs, and surprised by his rival, captures and releases him, only to be followed and captured in turn. Then, at dead of night in the midst of a thunderstorm, Raffles dodges Lord Ernest on the roofs, and in a lightning flash sees him tumble down the gulf of an alley to death.

In the face of such plausible roguery and of Raffles's occasional heroism, Thackeray's wholesome advice in Catherine is worth remembering: "Let your rogues in novels act like rogues, and your honest men like honest men; don't let us have any juggling and thimblerigging with virtue and vice, so that, at the end of three volumes, the bewildered reader shall not know which is which; don't let us find ourselves kindling at the generous qualities of thieves, and sympathizing with the rascalities of noble hearts."