Mr. Justice Raffles

The book Mr. Justice Raffles was written by E.W. Hornung in 1909. He played the well-known cricketer and gentleman thief A. J. Raffles in it. It was the final installment in his four Raffles novels which had originally started in 1899 with The Amateur Cracksman. In the UK Smith Elder & Co. London and Scribners New York published the book. The book was a full-length novel as opposed to the three former collections of short tales and it included darker themes. In it a weary Raffles becomes more and more pessimistic about British high society. He meets Dan Levy a dishonest moneylender who manages to seduce a lot of young men—mostly sons of the wealthy—by providing loans to them and then slapping them with exorbitant interest rates. Raffles decides to discipline Levy on his own. Raffles and his companion Bunny Manders sign up for service in the Second Boer War in 1899 when he is slain by the Boers towards the conclusion of Hornungs second collection of short stories featuring Raffles The Black Mask. This was supposed to be the patriotic conclusion to Hornungs tale of his hero.