If you walk down London’s Piccadilly, you come across an elegant Georgian building set back from the constant stream of traffic. This is The Albany, an imposing warren of “bachelor” apartments which has been home to a string of celebrities for over two centuries, from Lord Byron to Terence Stamp. The Royal Academy of Arts is next door, and the Queen’s supermarket, Fortnum & Mason’s is across the road. (And just out the back is the HQ of Beautiful Sounds, incidentally).
But The Albany was also the address for one of the greatest fictional creations of late 19th-century crime writing, AJ Raffles. The Raffles stories were fantastically popular, yet for some reason, EW Hornung’s creation never quite managed to knock Sherlock Holmes off the top spot, and there is not the steady trickle of pilgrims outside The Albany that you’ll find looking for Holmes and Watson down the road at the non-existent 221B Baker Street. Yet in many ways, Hornung was a better writer than Conan Doyle (who was actually his brother-in-law), and Raffles a cleverer star then even Sherlock himself. For Raffles operates on the wrong side of the law, yet remains a magnetic and sympathetic personality. In one of the stories in this new audio collection, he even sets out to commit murder – yet the listener’s loyalty never wavers. Like his sidekick Bunny, we are mesmerized by the sheer force of his personality, his audacity and his sheer intelligence. On the surface, Raffles is a gentleman cricketer straight out of the pages of “Boy’s Own” – yet from the very first story, “The Ides of March”, we discover that this is all a pretence: behind the mask is a bankrupt who commits a series of sensational crimes to finance his champagne and cigars lifestyle – and his flat in The Albany.
Raffles first appeared in “Cassell’s” Magazine in 1898, and his immediate popularity ensured that a collection, “The Amateur Cracksman”, followed hot on its heels. These eight stories are what you’ll find on this download – and a varied bunch they are. What separates Raffles from Holmes is that he’s more recognizably human and fallible – he doesn’t always lift the loot, and bad luck throws him a few curve balls. Whether the setting is an English country house or the Australian outback (where Hornung spent a couple of years in the 1880’s), Raffles’s diamond-hard determination, his lightning ingenuity and profound knowledge of human nature are always on display, with the ever-loyal Bunny trailing several miles behind. And though he could have been hanged for any one of these crimes, Raffles remains a man you wouldn’t mind sharing a cocktail with.
Listening wise: while these stories can each stand alone and independently, Hornung weaves a continuous narrative thread through them - so best download them all!
After “The Amateur Cracksman” came two more collections, a full-length novel and a successful stage play (much praised by PG Wodehouse in his novel “A Gentleman of Leisure”) – and who knows? If this audio selection proves successful, Beautiful Sounds may work its way through them. And in the process, we might just get The Albany back on the tourist trail!
