The WIC Play Reading Group: 5 June - The Return of A J Raffles

Firstly, huge thanks to Kyung-Sook and Rina for holding the fort during my absence. But I am so pleased that you have realised that you really don't need me! THANK YOU BOTH very very much!

In June we will be reading The Return of A J Raffles by Graham Greene.

I have to confess that I was rather surprised when a friend introduced me to this play - Graham Greene? THE Graham Greene? Well, yes it is. And I have to confess that on reading the play it is a little more, ahem, explicit, than the Radio 4 versions of Raffles' adventures that I have recently enjoyed!

The Return of A. J. Raffles, first published in 1975, is an Edwardian comedy play in three acts, written by Graham Greene and based somewhat loosely on E. W. Hornung’s characters in The Amateur Cracksman. It is surprisingly funny!

Set in the late summer of the year 1900, the story revolves around the infamous burglar and cricketer, A. J. Raffles—presumed dead in the Boer War—who returns to Albany where, with his friends Bunny and Lord Alfred Douglas - known to his friends as Bosie - he plots to rob the Marquess of Queensberry, partly for the money and partly for revenge against the Marquess for his treatment of their friend (Lord Alfred Douglas's lover), Oscar Wilde. The robbery takes place at The Marquess’ house in Hertfordshire, where Raffles and Bunny are interrupted by the Prince of Wales and a Scotland Yard detective, who discover the Prince’s personal letters have also been stolen.

The fictional Arthur J. Raffles – a cricketer and gentleman thief – was created by E. W. Hornung, who, between 1898 and 1909, wrote a series of 26 short stories, two plays, and a novel about him and his fictional chronicler, Harry "Bunny" Manders.

Hornung dedicated the first collection of stories, The Amateur Cracksman, to his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, intending Raffles as a "form of flattery." In contrast to Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny are "something dark, morally uncertain, yet convincingly, reassuringly English."

I think I may claim that his famous character Raffles was a kind of inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Bunny playing Watson. He admits as much in his kindly dedication. I think there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal a hero.

— Arthur Conan Doyle

Raffles is an antihero. Although a thief, he "never steals from his hosts, he helps old friends in trouble, and the recognition of the problems of the distribution of wealth is recurrent subtext throughout the stories.

According to the Strand Magazine, these stories made Raffles "the second most popular fictional character of the time," behind Sherlock Holmes. They have been adapted to film, television, stage, and radio, with the first appearing in 1903.

Characters