E W Hornung

E. W. Hornung was an English novelist and short-story writer born in Middlesbrough in 1866. After attending Uppingham School, he spent several years in Australia, an experience that informed early novels and stories such as A Bride from the Bush and the Australian outlaw collection Stingaree. He later married Constance Doyle, the sister of Arthur Conan Doyle, and developed a literary career spanning adventure fiction, crime stories, novels and poetry. Hornung died in 1921.

Hornung is best remembered for A. J. Raffles, the fashionable cricketer and gentleman burglar whose crimes are narrated by his companion Bunny Manders. The principal collections—The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask and A Thief in the Night—use robberies, clubs, cricket, social pretension and encounters with Scotland Yard to illuminate late Victorian and Edwardian London. Mr. Justice Raffles extends the series into a full-length novel, while the earlier Australian fiction explores colonial settlement, cultural difference and frontier outlawry. Although Hornung generally wrote about his own age rather than reconstructing a distant past, his fiction now offers a revealing portrait of British class, masculinity, empire and criminality around the turn of the twentieth century.