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E. W. Hornung wrote a series of twenty-six short stores and one novel about the adventures of Arthur J. Raffles, gentleman thief, and his chronicler, Harry "Bunny" Manders, in London, between 1899 and 1909.

Hornung's Raffles stories are collected in:
 * The Amateur Cracksman (the early period, in which Raffles really is an amateur thief)
 * The Black Mask (after Raffles's and Bunny's exposure) (U.S. title: Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman)
 * A Thief in the Night
 * Mr. Justice Raffles (novel).

The inexpensive paperback Wordsworth Classics (UK, 1994) edition of Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman contains all the stories in The Amateur Cracksman and The Black Mask.

Arthur J. Raffles
Raffles is, in many ways, a deliberate inversion of Holmes – he is a "gentleman thief", living at the Albany, a prestigious address in London, playing cricket for the Gentlemen of England and supporting himself by carrying out ingenious burglaries. He is called the "Amateur Cracksman", and often, at first, differentiates between himself and the "professors" – professional criminals from the lower classes.

Inspector Mackenzie
Inspector Mackenzie is a fictional Scottish police officer. He is a recurring character in the Raffles stories written by Ernest William Hornung. Mackenzie is a Scotland Yard detective, on the trail of a Gentleman thief who has committed a number of burglaries on members of British High Society.

Mackenzie is continually frustrated by Arthur Raffles whom he has suspected for many years, but has never been able to provide a shred of evidence in proof of Raffles' presumed crimes. Despite the mutual antipathy, there is a cordial relationship and a grudging respect between the two. While Mackenzie is constantly outwitted by Raffles, it is suggested that he is a very diligent and effective policeman when it comes to other cases.

Occasionally he and Raffles work together, such as in the short story The Gift of the Emperor in which the two cooperate to recover a pearl from a German emissary on the orders of the Foreign Office, thereby saving the British government from an embarrassing scandal.

In the latest novel, Mackenzie was caught red handed with a diamond of insurmountable value and the tables are changed.

Plot details
The "Raffles" stories have two distinct phases. In the first phase, Raffles and Bunny are men-about-town who also commit burglaries. Raffles is a famous gentleman cricketer, a marvellous spin bowler who is often invited to social events that would be out of his reach otherwise. "I was asked about for my cricket", he comments after this period is over. It ends when they are caught and exposed on an ocean voyage while attempting another theft; Raffles dives overboard and is presumed drowned. These stories were collected in The Amateur Cracksman. Other stories set in this period, written after Raffles had been "killed off". were collected in A Thief in the Night.

The second phase begins some time later when Bunny – having served a prison sentence – is summoned to the house of a rich invalid. This turns out to be Raffles himself, back in England in disguise. Then begins their "professional" period, exiled from Society, in which they are straightforward thieves trying to earn a living while keeping Raffles's identity a secret. They finally volunteer for the Boer War, where Bunny is wounded and Raffles dies in battle after exposing an enemy spy. These stories were originally collected in The Black Mask, although they were subsequently published in one volume with the phase one stories. The last few stories in A Thief in the Night were set during this period as well.

Like Sherlock Holmes after his disappearance into the Reichenbach Falls, Raffles was never quite the same after his reappearance. The "classic" Raffles elements are all found in the first stories: cricket, high society, West End clubs, Bond Street jewellers – and two men in immaculate evening dress pulling off impossible robberies.

Film
There have been numerous films based on Raffles and his adventures, including:
 * Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1905)
 * Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1917), starring John Barrymore and Frank Morgan
 * Mr. Justice Raffles (1921) starring Gerald Ames
 * Raffles (1925), with House Peters
 * Raffles (1930), featuring Ronald Colman
 * Return of Raffles (1933)
 * Raffles (1939), starring David Niven

Television

 * Raffles (1975), a made-for-TV movie, with Anthony Valentine portraying Raffles and Christopher Strauli playing his sidekick Bunny Manders.
 * Raffles (TV series) The two reprised their roles in a well-regarded television series produced by Yorkshire Television in 1977 and scripted by Philip Mackie. The series was intermittently repeated on ITV3 in 2006, and has been released on DVD.
 * The Gentleman Thief (2001), starring Nigel Havers

Audio

 * Raffles (1985–1993), four series on BBC Radio 4 and World Service starring Jeremy Clyde as Raffles and Michael Cochrane as Bunny Manders.
 * Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman, read by David Rintoul.
 * Raffles, the Gentleman Thief, continuing radio series by Imagination Theater, scripted by M. J. Elliott, Jim French and John Hall.

Theatre
The story of A. J. Raffles was first performed on Broadway as Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman on 27 October 1903 at the Princess Theatre. The play moved to the Savoy Theatre in February 1904 and closed out in March of that year racking up 168 performances. It starred Kyrle Bellew as Raffles, a young Clara Blandick as Gwendolyn and E. M. Holland as Captain Bedford.

Pastiches
The Raffles character was continued by Barry Perowne. During the 1930s and early 1940s, his series featured Raffles as a fairly typical contemporary pulp adventure hero and plays the role of detective alongside that of thief. When he picked up the series again in the 1950s, and once again during the 1970s and 1980s, the stories were set closer to the late Victorian-setting of the original stories, featuring a version of Raffles who only ever committed crimes for reasons of compassion.

In 2011 and 2012 Richard Foreman published a series of six Raffles stories, collected in a single volume, Raffles: The Complete Innings. These stories, contemporaneous with The Amateur Cracksman, begin with "The Gentleman Thief," in which Raffles and Bunny are hired by Sherlock Holmes to steal a stolen letter. Later stories in the sextet see Raffles and Bunny encounter H.G. Wells and Irene Adler. Foreman's Raffles is also more moralistic than the original: the gentleman thief often donates part of his ill-gotten gains to various charitable causes.

John Kendrick Bangs authored a 1906 novel, R. Holmes & Co., starring Raffles' grandson (and Sherlock Holmes's son, by Raffles' daughter Marjorie), Raffles Holmes. The novel's second chapter tells the story of Holmes's pursuit of Raffles and his growing affection for Raffles's daughter. Bangs also wrote Mrs Raffles, in which Raffles's sidekick Bunny Manders teams-up in America with the cracksman's hitherto-unchronicled wife.

Graham Greene wrote a play called The Return of A. J. Raffles which differs from the Hornung canon on several points, including reinventing Raffles and Bunny as a homosexual couple.

Peter Tremayne wrote the novel The Return of Raffles in which Raffles becomes involved in a plot between rival spies.

Philip José Farmer put Raffles and Manders into a science-fictional situation in his story, "The Problem of the Sore Bridge – Among Others", in which he and Bunny solve three mysteries unsolved by Sherlock Holmes and save humanity from alien invasion.

The 1977 novel Raffles, by David Fletcher, is a fresh re-write of many of Hornung's original stories, deriving from the television series of the same year.

Adam Corres authored the 2008 novel Raffles and the Match-Fixing Syndicate, a modern crime thriller in which A. J. Raffles, a master of gamesmanship, explores the corrupt world of international cricket match fixing.

Other character appearances
The character was mentioned in the 2007 epistolary graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Following this he recently appeared as a central character in the first chapter of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume III: Century, set in 1910.

The character of Raffles appeared in the TV film Incident at Victoria Falls under the name Stanley Bullard and played by Alan Coates. He encountered Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Hornung's brother-in-law.

Raffles makes a cameo appearance in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula (1992). Although never mentioned by name, the character is described as an amateur cracksman (a reference to the title of the first short story collection), and mutters the epigram, "You play what's chucked at you, I always say."

Raffles and Bunny feature in Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Ubervilles, also by Kim Newman, in a chapter depicting the gathering of the world's greatest criminals.

Raffles and Bunny also make a minor appearance in Lost in a Good Book, a 2004 novel written by Jasper Fforde. They are pulled out of the literary world into the real world to help crack a safe containing the stolen manuscript of Shakespeare's Cardenio.

Parody
In one of Robert L. Fish's Sherlock Homes stories, "The Adventure of the Odd Lotteries", Homes and Watney encounter a cracksman and hypochondriac known as "A.J. Lotteries". Raffles, Gentleman Thug is a strip in Viz that features a character who shares his name (plus the name of his assistant, Bunny) with the literary Raffles. He is depicted as an upper-class, late Victorian or early Edwardian version of a "chav".

Jon L. Breen's story "Ruffles versus Ruffles" is based on the conceit that Hornung's Raffles and Perowne's Raffles are separate people, playing off the differing characterisation used by the two authors.