[In the following excerpt, Butler examines Raffles as a manifestation of late-Victorian attitudes.]

[The] mantle of Robin Hood is [not] tailor-made for every outlaw thriller hero. As a matter of fact, the first really successful gentleman-crook character in English crime fiction had so little Sherwood Forest chivalry in his makeup that he should have been ashamed even to order a smoking-jacket in Lincoln Green.

His name was A. J. Raffles. He was the creation of Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung. He first appeared in the middle-to-late 1890s. And his immense popularity right through the turn-of-the-century period takes more than a little explaining, unless one makes a supreme effort to view him through late Victorian eyes.

Imagine, then, for a moment, that you are a solid citizen of the middle 1890s. You are intensely proud of Queen and Empire. You unhesitatingly accept that a public school upbringing puts a fellow a great many cuts above the rest, and that within that privileged circle sportsmen (particularly cricketers) are a super-elite. But the importance of sport and sportsmanship weren't the only things that your school impressed on you. It was a forcing-house for the ideas of an excited Empire at the height of its power and glory, and it flooded your head with high romantic ideals. The result is that you have been impregnated since childhood with vague yearnings to cut a dash, to be a hero, to give your life for your country; and yet you live in an England which, for all its Imperial splendours abroad, is unspeakably placid at home. Your mid-Victorian father and early-Victorian grandfather may well have had a similar boredom problem, but if they did they contemptuously dismissed it on religious grounds. Life to them—officially, at any rate—had to be viewed as a sombre, weary sacrifice; an occasion for daily taking up one's cross. But this kind of thinking, here in the 1890s, is somewhat out of date. There is a new mood abroad now, which has been building up for years; and it is a distinctly disturbing mood to someone already loaded with obscure dissatisfaction. You can't quote the Bible, for instance, without running the risk of being called 'pi'—short for 'pious', and a pejorative adjective as devastating as the comparable word 'square' s to become in the nineteen sixties. People don't talk about going to Heaven or Hell when they die: they use phrases like 'the other side of the Styx'. Similarly, they tend to philosophise about Moving Fingers Having Writ rather than the Will of God. It is the thing to read Swinburne rather than Tennyson. In the houses of fashionably highbrow friends (the 'trendies' of the day) you find a proliferation of books with wild, whirly art nouveau designs on their covers, containing pages of wild, whirly metaphysical speculation devoted to the theme that goodness is primarily a question of good taste, and that it is distinctly bad taste to suggest otherwise.

You are, in fact, not so much a late Victorian as a denizen of the fin de siècle no-man's-land, uncomfortably perched astride two centuries. You probably regard bohemians, aesthetes, anarchists and such as wild and wicked: at the sarne time you are fascinated by them. You are fascinated, for that matter, by anything that is uninhibited and bravura, although your whole upbringing pulls you back from admitting the fact. You are especially fascinated by lawlessness: by what the era is very significantly beginning to call 'The Romance of Crime'. Almost certainly one of your favourite authors is Arthur Conan Doyle, and one of your favourite characters his singularly un-pompous detective, Sherlock Holmes, a man who himself has his wild moments (symbolised by that cocaine bottle) and an undisguised respect for sportsmanlike opponents on the opposite side of the law. (That blackmailing adventuress, Irene Adler, for example: to Holmes she was always the woman, and you have long felt rather that way about her yourself.)

You have paddled, then, in the forbidden waters of vicarious crime half way up to your toenails: you are ready to plunge a little further—up to your ankles, maybe. And then suddenly along comes E. W. Hornung and these Raffles stories, and the next thing you know you're in up to the neck, gleefully committing burglaries right, left and centre, having (you might say) the crimes of your life.

It's all perfectly all right, you see. A. J. Raffles may be a cracksman, but he's an ex-public schoolboy and internationally famous as a cricketer: qualified, then, on all counts to be a member of the super-elite. And there is not even any need to battle with your conscience: Bunny, the narrator of the stories, obligingly takes that chore clean off your shoulders. Bunny does enough worrying about the ethics of each exploit for at least ten other men, and even though he is inevitably drawn into tagging along with Raffles, rather like the mesmerised rabbit which his name suggests, he never ceases to be half-disgusted with himself at the same time.

Floodgates were loosened within me, and the plain English of our adventure rushed over me as cold as ice. Raffles was a burglar. I had helped him to commit one burglary, therefore I was a burglar too. Yet I could stand and warm myself by his fire, and watch him empty his pockets, as though we had done nothing wonderful or wicked!

My blood froze. My heart sickened. My brain whirled. How I had liked this villain! How I had admired him! How my liking and admiration must turn to loathing and disgust! I waited for the change. I longed to feel it in my heart. But—I longed and I waited in vain!

('The Ides of March', from The Amateur Cracksman)

There are critics who complain bitterly about Raffles. Colin Waston, in his recent book, Snobbery With Violence (1971) writes, for example: 'There can scarcely be excluded from any theory of why the narration of his exploits sold so well the presumption that it reached some part of the reader's mind that was ready to applaud the success of even a bully and a thug, provided he had the right credentials.' Mr Watson takes particular exception to one of the later Raffles stories called 'The Wrong House', in which Raffles and Bunny accidentally break into a private tutor's establishment, and find themselves in a desperate war with a number of very courageous schoolboys. Bunny half-strangles one of them before he can induce him to release Raffles' hand, which happens to be protruding through a carefully cut hole in the tutorial establishment's front door. Snorts Mr Watson: 'Raffles described as "sporting" an expedition which has involved the carrying of firearms, attempted robbery, the near-strangulation and chloroforming of a perfectly innocent schoolboy, and the felling of another with a vicious blow to the face. The readers, it may seem, thus are being invited to enjoy vicarious sadism on the assurance that such things are quite acceptable in circles of society able to appreciate the licence of sportsmanship.'

This criticism leaves entirely out of account the fact that it is Bunny who narrates the story, and that at one point—the near-strangulation incident itself—his self-disgust becomes almost Poe-like in its intensity.

Oh, but it was villainous, my part especially … I began by saying I was not proud of this deed, but its dastardly character has come home to me more than ever with the penance of writing it down. I see in myself, at least my then self, things that I never saw quite so clearly before. Yet let me be quite sure that I would not do the same again. I had no desire to throttle this innocent lad (nor did), but only to extricate Raffles from the most hopeless position he was ever in; and after all it was better than a blow from behind. On the whole, I will not alter a word, nor whine about the thing any more …

('The Wrong House', from The Black Mask)

Poor old Bunny. A lot of charges can be laid at his door he lays most of them there himself) but I do not think sadism is one of them. On the whole, it is his contribution which gives the Raffles stories their especial flavour (the constant sense of a heart beating furtively, as fearful of the wrath of Heaven as of a tap on the shoulder from the police) and makes the series a major achievement on Hornung's part. To show a whole generation a living embodiment of their frustrated romantic urges (illicit romantic urges, if you insist) is itself a considerable thing to do; but to show, at one and the same time, the flaws in that embodiment—to split oneself in two, to be Raffles and Bunny, functioning throughout as both your reader's temptation and his conscience, his demon and his guardian angel—this is something that must, in popular crime fiction at any rate, be very nearly unique.

It is quite true that Raffles is a very curious creation, and often behaves preposterously. But what Hornung is presenting, criticising, evaluating—one could almost say, struggling with—is not really a man at all, but a dream. Other creators of dream heroes have unhesitatingly made them supermen. Raffles (to adapt a delightful phrase used in Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence to describe the incomprehensible behaviour of electrons) is a superman only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He bungles exploit after exploit, and it is nothing but the literal truth when he says to Bunny at the end of one of them: By Jove, we're jolly lucky to have come out of it at all!' n one occasion, Bunny is jolly unlucky. Raffles and he are caught on board a ship by a detective called Mackenzie, and are on the point of being arrested. Raffles's subsequent behaviour could only have got him classed as a cad and a bounder by any Victorian reader outside the fin de siecle era. He turns to a girl with whom he has been having an intense little shipboard romance.

Suddenly—an instant—and the thing was done—a thing I have never known whether to admire or detest. He caught her—he kissed her before us all—then flung her from him so that she almost fell. It was that action which foretold the next. The mate sprang after him, and I sprang after the mate.

Raffles was on the rail, but only just.

'Hold him, Bunny!' he cried. 'Hold him tight!'

And as I obeyed that last behest with all my might, without a thought of what I was doing, save that he bade me do it, I saw his hands shoot up and his head bob down, and his lithe, spare body cut the sunset as cleanly and precisely as though he had plunged at his leisure from a diver's board!

('The Gift of the Emperor', from The Amateur Cracksman)

A fascinating passage, that, for the student of thriller heroes—it shows that litheness and nonchalance by no means started in the era of the Saint—but it cannot be said that Raffles cuts a very good figure when he cuts that sunset. By that spectacular overboard leap (which wouldn't have come off if Bunny hadn't helped), he is cold-bloodedly leaving Bunny to face, alone, a voyage clapped in irons, followed by 'long imprisonment and everlasting disgrace'. Not that Bunny ever dreams of holding it against him. On their next meeting, years later, his very first reaction (once he realises that it is Raffles to whom he is speaking) is: "Oh, my dear chap, to think of having you by the hand again!' and not a word of complaint does he utter thereafter.

Obviously, the Raffles-Bunny relationship derives, basically, from the Holmes-Watson one. But, apart from the fact that they were contemporaries, and talked in the same late Victorian style, there are remarkably few real similarities between Sherlock Holmes and Raffles. Raffles is from the very outset a completely new kind of hero, and a far from prepossessing one. The chilling side of him comes across on his first appearance on the printed page. In the first Raffles story, 'The Ides of March', Bunny finds himself in dire financial straits after a card game at Raffles's flat. Later that night, he returns to the flat to appeal to Raffles for help. When this help does not appear to be forthcoming, he whips a pistol from his overcoat pocket and points it at his own temple, resolved on instant suicide. He expects, at the very least, to see a look of horror cross Raffles's face. Instead, all he sees is 'wonder, admiration, and such a measure of pleased expectancy' that he pockets the gun with an oath, saying: 'You devil! I believe you wanted me to do it!'

In actual fact, Raffles had not wanted Bunny to do it. He starts and changes colour at the very suggestion, and is suddenly all over Bunny with offers of friendship and help. 'I never dreamed you had such stuff in you, Bunny! No, I'm hanged if I let you go now. And you'd better not try that game again, for you won't catch me stand and look on a second time … There, let me have the gun!') But just for a moment, the Raffles mask had dropped, and we saw him for what he was: a bored sensationalist, a man whose inmost instinct was to regard any sort of flamboyant action, however violent, however tragic, however amoral, as a welcome relief from ennui; as, in fact, a jape. And I do not think there is any doubt that, when that mask dropped, thousands of fin de siecle readers glimpsed—to their fascinated horror—a mirror image of something in themselves.

There are, of course, many other sides to Raffles than this. Some people have called him a pasteboard, two-dimensional creation. In fact, his character has more facets than any of the diamonds he tries (often so unsuccessfully) to purloin. There is Raffles the cool, cricket-disparaging cricketer. ('Where's the satisfaction of taking a man's wicket when you want his spoons?') There is Raffles the implacably determined criminal. ('A stern chase and a long one, Bunny, but I think I'm well to windward this time.') There is Raffles the schoolboyish taunter. 'You've grown such a pious old rabbit in your old age.') here is Raffles the dignified observer of niceties. ('When we took old Lady Melrose's necklace, Bunny, we were not staying with the Melroses, if you recollect.') There is Raffles the passionate romantic about the one real love of his life, a simple Italian maiden called Faustina. ('Only to look at her—only to look at her for the rest of my days—I could have lain low and remained dead even to you! And that's all I'm going to tell you about that, Bunny; cursed be he who tells more!') There is the vulnerable Raffles, the very opposite of a durable desperado, ageing twenty years when his Faustina is killed by a Mafia-type gang; even his hair turns white at a stroke. And finally—a side of him usually forgotten—there is Raffles the patriot, who celebrates Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee by sending Her Majesty a priceless gold cup which he has just stolen from the British Museum. He makes quite a stirring speech into the bargain. ('My dear Bunny, we have been reigned over for sixty years by infinitely the finest monarch the world has ever seen. The world is taking the present opportunity of signifying the fact for all it is worth. Every nation is laying of its best at her royal feet; every class in the community is doing its little best—except ours. All I have done is to remove a reproach from our fraternity …')

Of all the many Raffles, it is, significantly, the underlying patriot who is dominant at the end. When the Boer War starts, Raffles rushes to volunteer, Bunny going along without hesitation, only 'a sudden regret that he had not always appealed to that part of my nature to which he was appealing now'.

Raffles has to dye his hair and fake his identity before he is accepted by the Army. Dyeing for his country, he calls it. An odd, ironic little joke of Hornung's, that—at the beginning of the short story that actually ends with Raffles's death from a sniper's bullet.

The last words which Raffles speaks describe how much he has been enjoying life at the front.

'It's not only been the best time I've ever had,
old Bunny, but I'm not half sure—'

Of what I can but guess; the sentence was not
finished, nor ever can be in this world.
('The Knees of the Gods', from The Black Mask)

It is tempting to try and finish that last sentence for Raffles. It might, I suggest, have gone: 'It's not only the best time I've ever had, old Bunny, but I'm not half sure it hasn't been the best time that any of us have ever had.'

He would have been speaking for his public as well as his fellow-officers. That public behind whose vague, bored longings for sensation has always been those basic, school-implanted urges to cut a dash; to be a hero; to die for their country.

And by Jove, through A. J. Raffles, gentlemen, cad, bounder, romantic adventurer, super-patriot and finally supreme sacrifice maker, they'd jolly well done the lot.