Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman

I'm going into this blind, having just picked it up off a shelf without much context. But it's a series of short detective/crime stories, with a holmes/watson pair. Our Holmes is Raffles, a gentleman thief, and our Watson is Bunny, the bumbling initiate who helps out and documents the story.

I'm only four stories in, and thus far it's very uneven and weird - Raffles is always called a gentleman criminal, but he's not a polished, respected gentleman - he's a slightly rascally young man, the kind who is gentleman enough to get invited to parties and manor houses, but his real social capital is that he's very good at cricket. We find out, of course, that he's secretly addicted to being a jewel thief, and here he's just almost getting caught every time, or getting away by the skin of his teeth. I'm enjoying it!

Noted on February 18, 2025

Like the blood transfusion scene in Dracula (where you wonder: when were blood types discovered?), we have a similar thing here with fingerprints. There's a point at which they blithely leave fingerprints all over a crime scene - and go so far as to mention it - but without the idea that... fingerprints are incriminating? I had to look it up; this was published in 1899. This was before fingerprints were noted to be unique and could be good identifiers in a criminal investigation - but only two years before Scotland Yard established their fingerprint division!

Noted on February 18, 2025