Mr Justice Raffles Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 16)

Green Penguin Music

Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is Mr Justice Raffles by E.W. Hornung, Penguin 101. That's right, we are finally out of double digits!

This book was first published in 1909 and then joined the Green Penguin series in August 1937. It was the fourth and final volume from Hornung to feature his best-known character, the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles. You may remember that earlier in the Green Penguin Book Club series I discussed the first collection of Raffles stories with Darryl Jones back in April 2025; now we get to look at the last one. And crucially, Mr Justice Raffles is the only novel-length outing for Raffles. All of his other appearances are in short stories.

We also have something interesting happening with continuity in this four-book series. At the end of the second Raffles short story collection, The Black Mask, Hornung brought his hero's journey to an end by having Raffles and his bosom companion Bunny Manders both abandon their lives in London to enlist to fight in the Boer War. In the third collection, A Thief in the Night, Bunny flashes back to some earlier cases prior to their departure, and in this novel, Mr Justice Raffles, we are doing the same thing. The timeline isn't chronological between the four books, in effect.

There's yet another nice parallel here between Hornung and his brother in law, Arthur Conan Doyle. Just like Doyle, who killed off Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" only to cave to popular demand (and offers of further publisher's fees) to resurrect the character again the following decade. With his third and fourth Raffles volumes that came out after he'd already given his series its ending, Hornung was doing something similar.

Joining me to discuss Mr Justice Raffles is Katie Lumsden, an author and freelance editor who has a great passion for nineteenth century literature. She runs the YouTube channel, Books and Things, where she reviews and recommends classics and historical fiction. She's also the author of three historical novels, with her newest, the upcoming The Christmas Tree Murders, marking her first foray into crime fiction.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Ronaldo gives this one and why.

We are now going to be entering the spoiler zone, so stop here if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to hear major plot details.

So maybe we could start with the period more generally. I know you read a lot of 19th-century Victorian Edwardian literature. What is it that you like about that period? 

Katie: I think there's a lot of things. I find the history really fascinating, the 19th- and sort of early 20th-century British history.

There's just a massive amount of change happening. A massive amount of social change, technological change, political change. All of that stuff I think is really, really interesting, but also lends itself really well to interesting fiction. There's a lot of social criticism in the 19th century. Yeah, authors complaining about the society that they live in and having views for a better world. And I find all of that really interesting. I think a lot of Victorian literature is actually quite radical and very critical of the society around them and the problems that they see in their society. And I think all of that stuff I find really interesting.

I also think there's a bit of a sort of snowball effect. I got really into 19th-century literature as a teenager, and so by this point I've read a lot of it and I really love it, but also because I've read a lot of it that sort of gives me extra context and extra points of interest when I read new books from 19th century.

So I think there's probably books I've read from the 19th century that if I were to read them not having read any other books from 19th Century, I wouldn't find 'em very interesting. But because I'm reading them sort of in the context of the other things I've read, I can think, oh, that's a different plot line that you don't usually see, or that's quite a subversive take for the time. That's a book that feels really pro-feminist, which I might not have noticed if I wasn't very used to like the gender roles in the rest of Victorian literature and stuff like that. So I think having read a lot of 19th century literature improves my enjoyment of and interest in 19th century literature as well.

Caroline: That makes a lot of sense. I feel the same about the interwar detective fiction years. It's definitely been long enough of me reading now to feel like the anomalies really jump out at me. The originality really stick out and so on. And yeah, the more you read, the more you know. So I think I'm right in saying before we agreed to do this, you hadn't read any Raffles though?

Katie: No. I had heard of Raffles, but I hadn't read any yet. I've read a lot of 19th-century literature, but there's always some bits that pass by or that I don't end up coming to. And I think especially because through my YouTube channel where I talk about books a lot, I run a reader on called Victober, and Victober is all about reading Victorian literature.

Therefore, because I got this thing about reading Victorian literature, I read a lot of Victorian literature and there are some authors who are like on the cusp of Victorian and Edwardian slip by the wayside a bit and that I don't end up coming to, because a lot of her books are from the Edwardian period technically.

And I just ended up reading less than the Edwardian period, even though it was very similar in lots of ways to the late Victorian period and there's a lot of crossover and a lot of authors that do. So you are sort of writing in both. But I think that's meant there were a few of those sort of like very late Victorian/ Edwardian authors who I haven't read so much.

And also because there's sort of so much Victorian literature and so much, yeah, 19th-century, high 20th-century literature that I want to read, I end up with a big list and lots of authors who never end up coming to the top of it. But I'd heard of Raffles ages ago and thought Raffles sounded interesting and it's been really interesting to finally read some Raffles.

I think especially because there's so many similarities to Sherlock Holmes and it's sort of the flipped Sherlock Holmes. I also have read some of the Arsène Lupin short stories who were another sort of gentleman thief character in French literature from a similar time, I think, maybe a time earlier than Raffles.

So that's quite an interesting point of comparison too. I also read earlier this year, a collected short stories called The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, which is a series of late Victorian crime short stories, a bit like the Sherlock Holmes stories, a bit like the Raffles short stories are the same character, the same sort of nemesis sometimes, but different stories and their crime stories too about a sort of international gang of criminals led by a woman, and it's all quite fun. And I think Raffles fits into that late Victorian tradition in a really interesting way.

Caroline: Very much so. Prior to this, he was entirely a short story character, which feels a bit more conventional for the genre and the time. So even though I'd read some of the stories before, it was really interesting to see how Horning was going to stretch him out in this way.

Actually, I ended up feeling that in the longer form he felt more Victorian. He feels more sort of frothy and Edwardian to me in the short stories. I don't know what you thought. 

Katie: Yeah, it's an interesting thought. So I read The Amateur Cracksman, which is the first sort of collection of Raffles stories as well as Mr. Justice Raffles. And I probably enjoyed the short stories more, I would say, but I feel like I have that same feeling with the Sherlock Holmes stories. I prefer the stories to the novels, and I think there's something about that short form that works very, very well for these kind of stories. Yeah, I guess Mr. Justice Raffles is an Edwardian novel in the sense of being published in the Edwardian period, but it is, I think, set in the Victorian period. The idea is that it was written after the events happened and there is something quite Victorian about quite a lot of it. Yeah, and I guess the sort of late Victorian, early Edwardian period have so much in common and there is this shift in power dynamics.

I think it's quite interesting that the Raffles stories are very much about the sort of upper class men committing crimes and part of the humour of it is that they are these gentlemen thieves, but also that's part of the edge and that's part of the, like distaste in them I think. Because here are these two really privileged public school boys stealing.

And often I think in the short stories there's quite a lot of like them as the old money figures stealing money from new money figures, which I thought was quite interesting and tells you a lot about how people are thinking about the changes in the economy and who holds the power and who holds the wealth and in the late Victorian period, which I found.

Yeah, very fascinating. 

Caroline: Definitely. I think the sort locus of morality in Raffles is almost more interesting to me than it is in say, Sherlock Holmes, because we never doubt, I think that Sherlock Holmes is a moral figure, that he is trying to do the right thing. Whereas I think we always doubt that Raffles is, and he sometimes even tells us to doubt him, that he's not a kind of Robin Hood figure stealing from the rich to give to the poor. No, he's stealing from the rich to help other rich people or to enrich himself a lot of the time. 

Katie: Yeah. And to help him live a very lavish upper class lifestyle, not to help him get by.

Which I think is really interesting. They're sort of fun stories because you have to hate Raffles, but also he's very charming and Bunny the narrator adores Raffles. So you're seeing Raffles through the eyes of someone who absolutely worships him, which definitely colours your view of him in a really interesting way.

They're fascinating stories and the novel too, for having a real edge of darkness while also being presented in this like, oh, the Raffles cool way, but you know. But he's also not, and I think that juxtaposition, that tension between Bunny's view of Raffles and you as the reader, your view of Raffles, the tension between that I think makes them really interesting.

Caroline: Definitely. Yeah, and I think another part that really struck me about this novel as opposed to the short stories is that in the short stories, you get more of a sense of Raffles and Bunny having an enterprise that they plan heists essentially. 

Katie: Yeah. 

Caroline: They get themselves invited to places to play cricket and then they steal things, but it's part of a scheme.

Whereas the novel, it feels very much like things just keep happening to them, that there's no grander plan. You know, first they discover that a friend has got a bad check, and then they go and try and sort that out, and then something else happens, and then something else happens, and then they end up kidnapping someone and so on.

Partly it has that slightly Penny dreadful cadence to it, but also, they just feel less in control. And that was an interesting reading experience for me. 

Katie: Yes, it sort of does feel like a novel written by a writer who wrote mostly short stories. 

Caroline: Yes. 

Katie: And I think the plotting definitely feels tighter in the short stories than in the novel, which again, actually I think is the same with a lot of the Sherlock Holmes novels.

The plotting is really weird in quite a lot of them. The Hound of the Baskervilles, I love. But the other three have to do some weird things with plot and structure, which don't work for me as well as the short stories. I think actually both the Raffles stories and the Sherlock Holmes stories have this thing in common where Sherlock and Raffles are not honest with Watson and Bunny.

So you as an narrator are in the dark, which means you as a reader are in the dark because the narrator is in the dark, and I think that can only be sustained for so long in a satisfactory way. I think that's less satisfactory in a novel than in a short story. And also Raffles a bit like Sherlock Holmes, they're not prime stories where you can really guess, or where there's sort of a mystery to solve. There's something different. And I think that also works better in a short story form than a novel. Yeah, there are twist moments in Mr. Justice Raffles, but I think the way the Raffles short stories work is not a form that like lends itself as well to a full length novel.

Caroline: I definitely found it harder going than reading the Raffles short stories, which are always slipped down very delightfully. And particularly the character of Raffles, but also Bunny, he started to tire me a bit by about three quarters of the way through. Because sometimes you just want to know what's going on.

Yes. It's interesting to me that this was chosen to be published by the Green Penguin Series, right in the heart of what we call the golden Age of Detective Fiction. But it's not anything like Golden Age detective fiction. It's very much a throwback to the pre First World War popular fiction. So it doesn't have that fair play element that people so liked in the detective stories of the 1930s.

So it was a bit of an anomaly almost in the series in that way. But perhaps an interesting contrast for people therefore. But something that really sticks out very far in this story, I feel is the antagonist, a Mr. Daniel Levy, who is this money lender that Raffles has decided to take down. And the portrayal of him in the book is just unrelentingly antisemitic in a way that I think readers of 19th- and some 20th-century fiction, the seconder money lender character comes on the horizon, we are braced for what to expect, and this is definitely one of the worst ones. Does that chime with your experience? 

Katie: Yeah, I would say so. You know, I read a lot of 19th-century literature and you are constantly encountering things that make you wince as a modern reader. 

Caroline: We are now going to be entering the spoiler zone.

So stop here if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to hear major plot details. 

Katie: But I think there are lots of books in which that's like three paragraphs and you can move on and there's plenty in the book to find really interesting. And sometimes there's much more complicated things. You know, there's lots of Victorian literature that should, that is simultaneously racist and anti-imperialist at once.

And where there are more complicated things at play and sort of something more interesting to, to look at from an academic perspective. But I think Mr. Justice Raffles is just sort of... the book is at its heart, intensely antisemitic, and the antagonist is very important throughout the book and is always portrayed in a very antisemitic way, which makes it a very difficult read.

Both in the sense that it's quite like unpleasant to read, but also I was definitely on the villain for most of the book because Bunny and Raffles are just so awful about him and the whole portrayal of him is so horrendous that I just wanted him to win. So I think that also flips your reading experience of it as a modern reader because you're not reading it in the way that Hornung is expecting you to read it, I suppose.

There are a few Victorian books, like Trilby is another one by George du Maurier, where antisemitism is so much a feature of the story and the plot and the villain that it's hard to read as a modern reader and it's hard to see beyond that. And I think having read some of the Raffles short stories, there are definitely problematic and very Victorian and Edwardian things about those stories.

But I think because it's a short story and you move on, it's less extreme and it's less difficult to read, I suppose. 

Caroline: Definitely. I had the same feeling because I think Hornung is trying to position Daniel Levy as this almost Moriarty- esque figure who sits at the centre of this web where he's trying to bankrupt all of these innocent young men by calling in their debts or whatever.

Katie: Yeah. All of these innocent, privileged young men who have spent on their inheritance on gambling! 

Caroline: Whereas actually, yeah, when you read the actual words of what he's done, you think, hang on. So they freely signed terms with this money lender and then they complain when the terms are applied to them. I don't really see that Mr. Levy has done anything apart from his job as he said he would. So yeah, I definitely found myself siding with him. And every time raffles and Bunny did some fresh outrage to him, I just thought, are these the heroes? Surely not. 

Katie: Yeah. And I guess one of the interesting things about the Raffles stories is, are they the heroes then?

They're not in so many ways, they're obviously bad people. And are we meant to think as readers that Dan Levy is worse? Because he's definitely not. Or are we meant to think, is there also some of the book that acknowledges what terrible people Bunny and Raffles were? I don't know. I think as a modern reader, that's very much in your mind, but an Edwardian probably wouldn't have read it like that, bringing their own prejudices of their time to it. It's interesting as a sort of historical artefact, I suppose, but I think definitely the Raffles short stories, age better and are more accessible for a modern reader. 

Caroline: I can only imagine that there was meant to be a kind of lovable, rogue aspect to Raffles particularly, that you were supposed to, you know, in the same way as, I don't know, like The Scarlet Pimpernel, although that's a more moral project, or the Pink Panther or something like that, you know, that whole lineage of thieves and malefactors who are actually the hero of the story.

I think that's probably what he was going for, but it's not just the antisemitism and the way it makes you feel about the money lender. It's also just the fact that the way Raffles treats Bunny a lot of the time kind of gets my hackles up because, in the previous episode did about Raffles, we talked to a fair bit about the sort of, should we call Homosocial relationship between Raffles and Bunny, but it feels very one sided sometimes and that made me a bit sad. 

Katie: Yes, I think Bunny is definitely just in love with Raffles, but whether Raffles is in love with Bunny is more complicated and I think he probably isn't, or if he is, he treats him very badly.

But it definitely feels that Bunny is very emotionally as well as socially and economically reliant on Raffles and that Raffles takes advantage of him, I guess. I do find the relationship between Bunny and Raffles really interesting and I think both in the stories and the novel, that was the thing I found most interesting.

Partly I think because it is so gay for the time the stories were written. It feels very hard to read it as anything other than Bunny being in love with Raffles. There are several times when he admits to being jealous of various other people who Raffles is close to. I mean, in this book we have Teddy, who is sort of a young man that Raffles is really fond of, and Bunny is really jealous of Teddy, but also throughout the whole sort of escapade of the novel Bunny is obviously, it really rattles him that they are doing all of this for Teddy.

I guess kneeling into spoilers here, but later on in the novel when it emerges that maybe Raffles isn't doing this all for Teddy, so much as he's doing it for Teddy's fiance, Camilla, then by me seems to mind less as though it's a much greater be portrayal for him, for Raffles to care very much for another man, that it is a Raffles to care for a woman, which I thought was very interesting.

I found Camilla Belsize a very interesting character and I think her dynamic with Raffles and Bunny's jealousy over that, but also his sort of perhaps respect for that, and interest in that, was a really interesting element to the book. She's quite an interesting character and sort of a relatively plucky woman for a book at this time.

I thought that was quite interesting. Interestingly, in The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, which I mentioned earlier, there is a female detective figure called Miss Belsize, and I don't know if this is a reference or it's just a coincidence, but I feel like it's not that common a name, so I thought that was kind of fun.

Caroline: Intriguing. Yes. I also found Mis Belsize very fascinating, and I wondered whether it was Hornung's half-hearted attempt to introduce a kind of Irene Adler figure. You know, the true match intellectually and personality wise of Raffles. And Bunny sort of says something to that effect later on, " you two are made for each other" because they're just as of heartless and as each other, or something like that. But yes, I also clocked that, that he was much more concerned when he thought that Raffles was expressing devotion to Teddy, and then when it's revealed that Teddy's engaged and here is the fiance and all the rest of it, he suddenly just calms down in a way that, I don't really know how else you can interpret that.

Katie: Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. 

Caroline: So the actual action of the novel felt to me, as you say, like someone who is used to writing short stories and suddenly has to write a whole novel and decides to approach it like they're going to write 12 short stories and then stitch them together because it is very much a kind of, and then and then and then situation there. It doesn't feel like there's much of a rise and fall much of an arc there. 

Katie: Yes. It's very episodic. And there were several moments, I think there was a point about two thirds way through where I thought, goodness, how are another 50 pages? Like I don't know what more there is to happen. It's surely about to wrap up any second now and then suddenly it doesn't and it moves on and more things happen.

Yeah, that is interesting. And I think that does reflect the fact that these are characters who are usually in short stories and that is sort of still the approach to writing this, even though it is a novel and the plot does follow on and it's got the same antagonist, but there is still that sort of like episodic quality to it.

Caroline: I think he tried to stretch himself a little bit in giving them a bit more range. You know, there's the whole section where they're in a boat, tried to move a body on the river, and there are various scuffles outside on the street, outside people's houses and little deceptions where they're trying to pass off money as one thing or the other.

I think he tried to inject a bit more diversity of action than you maybe find in the short stories, which I did appreciate in a way, I think if the cricket stuff had carried on all the way through, and I like cricket for the record, but I don't know, it's even in the short stories, it slightly begins to grate on me when we hear yet again how amazing AJ Raffles is a cricket. So I was pleased that that faded out a bit and then we got. A bit more actual crime doing going on. 

Katie: Yeah. And not just theft. Quite a lot of different crime occurring as well. 

Caroline: That's interesting from a morality point of view, because certainly not in all of the Raffles short stories, but there are definitely occasions where they do try and draw some lines.

Like Bunny particularly is like, you know, we steal but we don't kill. Whereas here there's, especially towards the end, they're just bopping people on the head all over the place. 

Katie: Yeah. There's quite a lot of violence and some of it's quite graphically violent. There's a lot of tension and there's sort of the moment, as you say, when they're moving a body and the body is still alive, but, and Raffles says to Bunny, "He's still alive. Don't worry." And I just kept thinking, is he? Is Raffles just lying? Because Raffles so often lies, he could be. And I think moments like that are really tense because you do have that point of, well, Bunny has some lines that he has drawn, but Raffles maybe doesn't have any lines. I feel like Raffles avoids murdering people by coincidence.

Not because he doesn't really want to. So I feel like there's, yeah, there is a real threat from Raffles and it is quite interesting seeing the tension between them of Bunny having some lines, but Raffles having none. But also the more Raffles keeps Bunny in the dark, how could Bunny keep Raffles to the lines that he has drawn? And also some of the things they do feel like they're so far over any line you might have that it seems silly that Bunny's drawing himself a line that is just at such a great distance. 

Caroline: Yes. Particularly the episode where they steal a piece of evidence from a solicitor's safe and then replace it with a forgery, which they do entirely on the strength of having been told that the original piece of evidence is a forgery. 

Katie: Which they obviously don't believe anyway.

Caroline: No. By stealing it, they're hoping to affect the outcome of a major trial. So it's a breaking and entering plus perjury, plus probably a load of other crimes I don't even know the names for. So yes, there's that. That definitely doesn't feel like, oh, just good clean fun. We just steal rich ladies diamonds.

They're already insured. It's not the same. 

Katie: I think the kidnapping and the sort of like violence of that sequence all feel so, so far away from Raffles crawling through ventilation shaft or whatever he does to steal someone's diamond. You know, that feels on a different level. 

Caroline: Definitely. Having said that, I think the sequence where Bunny drops in through the roof and sort of surprises Raffles partway through his forgery safe cracking thing, I think that might have been my favourite moment in the whole book, partly because it's a good action sequence. I like the descriptions of them running away over the roofs in London and so on. But also it just really crystallised that thing of Raffles not telling Bunny what's going on and what he's doing, and for once there's an actual consequence for him, which is that he didn't tell Bunny what he was doing, and so Bunny got worried and turned up and tried to help and nearly ruined the whole enterprise as a result.

Whereas if he just explained what was going on, that wouldn't have happened. 

Katie: I think that Raffles, not telling Bunny, Bunny showing up to save the day when actually he doesn't need to, but how was he supposed to know that? Like all of that stuff, I think, it works very well. 

Caroline: Yes. How did you feel about the London in this book, the backdrop?

Did you feel like it came through well or not so much? 

Katie: I guess so, maybe not that much in the fact that when you said that, I thought, did it? Rather than thinking immediately yes. I do read quite a lot of books setting in Victorian London though, so I do wonder if there is a bit of me that like, oh, it's just Victorian London,

I know that. Maybe I'm less sensitive to the setting of Victorian London. I like the stuff on the river. That feels very Dickensian to me and in general, there is a relatively Dickensian gritty version of London, even though it's obviously quite a lot later in the 19th century or indeed, well, I guess it's set in the 19th century and it was written in 20th, but yeah. I don't know. What do you think? 

Caroline: I agree. I thought it mostly felt fairly generic and similar to what you get in other novels of around the same time. The one thing that stuck out to me that I did quite like, and this is just I guess the twenties, thirties reader in me being obsessed with property.

I like the descriptions of Mr. Garland's country house in the city in Kensington. That he's got this sort of throwback country house. I think it's in Kensington, where he's still got a big garden and all of these greenhouses and so on. Even though property developers are demolishing and building flats all around him, and that eventually that's what's going to happen to this property too, and that he's kind of bankrupted himself for the sake of having this country house in the city.

So that was interesting to me. 

Katie: Yes. And later there's the empty house they go to for their kidnapping, which Raffles says something like, it's empty and it will stay empty because it's the wrong kind of house for how close it is to London now, or something like that. 

Caroline: That's right. Yes. 

Katie: Now that London is expanding, this house is no longer... the kind of house it is, is no longer in the right setting to be saleable, which I thought was a really interesting throwaway comment , how London is expanding and how that changes property, I suppose.

It's quite interesting. 

Caroline: And the way people want to live. Like people who want to live in very central London want to live in a, especially if they've got a lot of money, they want to live in, say, a service flat or something like that. They don't wanna live in a six bedroom house with a garden.

Just the expense and the hassle of it is too great. If you're going to live that way, you wanna live actually in the countryside. 

Katie: It's true. Yeah. Raffles with his sort of London flat, going to the club, he doesn't have a townhouse and he is not in a boarding house. That feels sort of late Victorian and quite 20th century in some ways.

Could be living that life in the 1920s as well as in the 1890s, 1880s I suppose this book is set in. Yeah. 

Caroline: Definitely. Living in the Albany and just ordering your meals up from, I guess, a kind of communal kitchen whenever you fancy versus making shift for yourself or running your own establishment.

At least in the short stories, I feel like it's portrayed as the ideal bachelor existence. 

Katie: Yeah. Yeah. 

Caroline: I don't know if it actually is, but then the way that Raffles lives is very, he's here then he is not here. You never know quite where he is. So I suppose that's mode of living suits him. But that was the one interesting or unique feature of the London in this book that stuck out to me that there's this Kensington mansion that is probably not long for this world because it's about to be sold off and swallowed up by flats.

But no otherwise, I didn't feel that it was particularly atmospheric. Even the cricket scenes are not, I don't know if you're a cricket person particularly... 

Katie: I know absolutely nothing about cricket at all. 

Caroline: There are better cricket scenes in Raffles, shall we say. I think the only vaguely good bits are when Teddy suddenly starts playing really well.

I don't think Wicketkeeper is a position that often gets much glory, shall we say, in fictional depictions of cricket. It's normally somebody cracking the bat around and scoring a century or whatever, but actually being a really good wicketkeeper is not often described. So I suppose that was interesting.

But otherwise, yeah, the cricket stuff is disappointingly vague and obviously the convenient rain that stops play is what it is. I feel like it probably never rains that conveniently in real life. 

Katie: No. 

Caroline: But then. Generally, this book is so far divorced from real life that you just can't really care about these things.

Would you agree? 

Katie: Yeah, and the Raffles short stories as well, like I don't think they're really meant to be realistic. The same with the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels, as with Raffles, sort of Raffles and Sherlock Holmes putting on like crazy disguises. 

Caroline: Oh, the disguises. 

Katie: And managing to puff themselves up as other people.

And you think, no, no way do I believe that. I think there's one point, I think it was in this book rather than in one of the short stories, where Raffles dresses up as a specific other person and is mistaken in the street for that other person just because of his makeup and like beard, whatever. And I thought, no, no, definitely not.

Yeah, so I think there's always stretching believability in these kind of stories from that kind of time, and I think that's part of the charm in some ways. Yeah, I think the sort of desire for complete realism is not really part of 19th and early 20th century literature tradition really, or certainly not in this sort of genre of books, I guess. 

Caroline: Yeah, the impenetrable disguises, that's a real sore spot for me. I don't know why. I'm willing to forgive a lot of other things in crime fiction. Probably things that are equally implausible, but for some reason disguises always annoyed me. No, I don't believe in them.

Katie: It always just feels so silly. I always find it really interesting though, because I think it also partly comes from a fear of the detective because there's all this stuff in Victorian culture about detectives walk among us, they're in disguise, anyone could be a detective. So I feel like all of this stuff, like outlandish disguises, sort of comes from a terror that could be a detective in disguise around the corner, which I find a really interesting historical moment. 

Caroline: And actually that reminds me that in this novel we do get one moment of somebody penetrating, one of Raffles, disguises. 

Katie: Yeah. 

Caroline: That whole incident , which I'm not entirely sure I totally understand, where at the beginning, Raffles goes to this spa resort and hangs out with Mr. and Mrs. Levy. And gets himself dressed up in a kind of German workman's outfit and steals her emeralds in an incredibly unsubtle way, i.e. he just waves a gun at them and demands to be given them. He doesn't have a more sophisticated plot than that and he thinks that, you know, he's gotten away with this because his German disguise is perfect and then later on Levy identifies him and says, I recognise your hands. I recognise your teeth. I know it was you. And I don't know that I remember that happening elsewhere in Raffles ever. It's always just taken as red that his disguises are so perfect. 

Katie: And I think in a way that's one of the frustrating things about this book, because the depiction of Mr. Levy is so unpleasant in so many ways and so antisemitic, but also he's clearly a clever man. Like the character is clearly very clever and there were moments where it almost feels like Hornung is trying to do something a bit more complicated and then he just doesn't, which definitely contributed to me like always being on Daniel's side because he is clever and he sort of deserves to win both on a moral grounds, and on intelligence.

It's quite nice to see someone see through Raffles and see him for who he is. Yeah, that's an interesting one. 

Caroline: I did like to imagine, at certain points, the same story, but written from Daniel's perspective. Here he is just trying to conduct his very successful business in a normal way, and then all of these annoying, posh young men keep turning up and trying to do things to him and how in the scope of his, you know, grand enterprises, he probably invests in property and does all these other things as well. These little flies keep popping up and he keeps trying to swat them and they keep coming back and it's very irritating. 

Katie: Yes, there's a really great book called Fagin the Thief, which is a Oliver Twist retelling from Fagin's perspective. I mean it is an Oliver Twist retelling, but it's also just about Fagin's life, which I think is really great and does a really good job of like flipping everything in Oliver Twist and taking down all the antisemitism in Oliver Twist and sort of deconstructing it. And that's really worth the read.

Caroline: That sounds interesting. Yeah. I think that's kind of where my mind was going. 

Katie: Yeah. What you need for this book too. 

Caroline: As you said, because we're not even seeing it from Raffles point of view. We're seeing it from Bunny's always with this lens of hero worship. And Raffles can do no wrong, and he's this extraordinary magician who's just God's gift to everything.

And then just trying to imagine what it'd be like from Levy's point of view is these privileged Toffs who can't manage their finances and who just constantly live beyond their means without thinking that they ever need to make any money. I give them my standard terms when they come to me for a loan, and then this is how they behave.

I think he's absolutely right to be irritated and outraged, and then at the end, he dies, which doesn't feel right at all. 

Katie: Yes. And someone else kills him, like a stranger, which very much feels like Hornung wanted Raffles to kill him, but decided that was a step too far and that people wouldn't forgive Raffles.

Caroline: That's what I thought too.

Katie: And so we had to have someone else show up and murder him, which, yeah, it's not very satisfying. Like I said, I wanted Daniel Levy to win and to at least be all right at the end and carry on. I think it definitely does feel like a way for them to vanquish the antagonist without them crossing that line as if they crossed so many other lines.

Caroline: Yeah, it would've honestly made a lot more sense in the end just to have Raffles and Bunny kill him rather than just introduce a walk on part for a stranger to do it off the page as it were. It does feel very tacked on and random, and definitely completed my sense that I had throughout the whole book, which is that it wasn't very much plotted in advance.

It did feel like Hornung just sat down and started writing without a clear idea of where he was going. 

Katie: I think it's interesting as well that the stranger who comes to kill Levy at the end is not English. I can't remember where they say he's from, but there definitely is that feeling throughout the stories and this of like, well, Raffles and Bunny are English gentlemen, so they wouldn't cross that line as if they're not doing terrible, terrible things. And that's sort of like, yeah, that weird late Victorian, Edwardian patriotism and sort of worship of the aristocracy and particularly the English aristocracy as sort of these great supreme figures, even though they're obviously terrible people, which is quite, yeah, interesting. And definitely captures like that particular viewpoint at that time.

Caroline: It is a good book actually for seeing those little class gradations up close because, yeah, absolutely, obviously we've got the Levy-Raffles stuff, but also I think Mr. Garland Sr is described as being, I think, the son of a very successful brewer.

That's how he's made all this money, because I think at one point Bunny's expresses surprise that he's ended up in financial Straits himself because he's saying, you know, isn't he, he's a successful businessman, isn't he? And Ralph's like, oh, no, no. He just inherited a successful business. He didn't do it himself.

Which is so many interesting little class digs going on there because he's inherited money from trade and he is not even good at it. We could respect a titan of industry, but here we've just got a kind of failed son of a titan of industry who has frittered all his money away on South African mine shares or something.

Katie: But also Raffles, loves and respects Teddy because Teddy is good a cricket, so he's an English gentleman and all of that sort of, yeah, I find just fascinating. 

Caroline: It's also arbitrary. I don't think Hornung is intentionally trying to expose this. I think he's just writing what he knows and what he sees.

But yeah, this is definitely something I remember because my family background is, my parents are from South Africa and immigrated here is as adults. So I'm not quite steeped in, I feel like I sort of learned Englishness secondhand. I sometimes feel that maybe what people who are born in it don't understand that.

When I went to university, there were definitely people who were aspirantly posh. Like they weren't actually posh, but they were trying to pass themselves off as, and I felt like they're never going to let you, that's not going to work. No matter what you wear, what you say, how you do things, how much money you have, you will never be it, the elusive it, for that type of person.

Katie: Yeah. And so much of 19th century literature is really concerned with class and social mobility and how things are changing and how people are shifting and who gets to be in and who gets to be out, who has the money, who had the power. And all of that stuff I find fascinating. That's one of the things I always love reading about in 19th-century literature. Even if a story isn't that exciting, like the historical interest in that kind of stuff, I always find just fascinating.

Caroline: Yes, definitely. So, although I think Mr. Justice Raffles didn't turn out to be the greatest work of fiction ever written, I do always ask my guests to rate our Green Penguins on a scale of one Green Penguin to five, what would you like to give Mr. Justice Raffles? 

Katie: Probably two, two and a half, I would say.

I'd probably given The Amateur Cracksman, the short stories, three and a half, four. I enjoyed them a lot more, but I do think it doesn't quite all hang together as a novel as we were saying. And I also think that in terms of rating it on like an enjoyment level, because the antisemitism is sort of so in your face throughout, that does make it a difficult read and that does make it a sort of like, oh, wincing-at-the-page read.

So I think it probably, yeah, would get a sort of two, two and a half probably from me, but it was a very historically interesting, and I definitely think having read now a novel and the short story collection, I would read the other Raffles short stories at some point. And I imagine as with the Sherlock Holmes stories, that I will get more outta the short stories as a whole than from the novel.

Caroline: That's definitely my recommendation as well. I think that some of the Raffles short stories are really fun, and I also really like the radio adaptations of them. I think they work really well in broadcast form because of the short story structure.

You get the whole narrative inside half an hour or whatever.

So I think they make compilation audio books and so on of them. So I think that's definitely a good way to consume them if people are interested. Thank you so much for suffering through this book with me, Katie. 

Katie: Not at all! It's been very interesting. 

Caroline: It's been a delight to talk to you about it.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

Many thanks to my guest, Katie Lumsden. Her first crime novel, The Christmas Tree Murders, comes out in November and you can find her talking about books right now on her YouTube channel, Books and Things. You can find a link to that, as well as everything we referenced today, in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/mrjusticeraffles. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

The next episode of Green Penguin Book Club will be keeping things in the family and covering The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, so if you're reading along with me, that's your next target.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.