Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman

5 hrs. 52 min.

Language Russian

Author Ernest Hornung

Narrator Vadim Maksimov

Description

Ernest William Hornung (1890–1921) was an English writer, creator of a series of books about Arthur Raffles, an amateur burglar in Victorian England. The first collection of stories about his adventures was published in 1899 under the title “The Amateur Cracksman.” Stories about Raffles—the “highly moral” thief—and his sidekick Menders brought the author nationwide fame. An interesting detail: Hornung’s brother-in-law was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, and many contemporaries perceived Raffles’s namesake, an anti-hero criminal with an aristocrat’s manners, as a parody of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Doyle wasn’t bothered by this caricatured borrowing, while Hornung openly admitted the influence of his famous relative.

What makes Raffles attractive? He is a gentleman, a man of principles. He is handsome and in excellent athletic form—the English cricket champion. And at first meeting, nothing reveals in the elegant London dandy his true passion—an irresistible urge to steal. Raffles’s crimes are highly inventive and stir up the comfortable, measured life of high society. Will the capital’s nobility be able to protect their treasures from the clever thief? But listen…