E. W. Hornung owes his place in the history of crime and mystery fiction to his popular scoundrel, the gentleman-burglar A. J. Raffles. Although the twenty-five Raffles stories and one novel constitute a very small portion of Hornung's canon, the Raffles character endures as one of the most successful fictional creations of British crime fiction.

Apart from his popular stories about sports, the bulk of Hornung's work explores the clash between legality and justice in both the frontier culture of Australia and within the more sophisticated European society of the time. Over the course of his career, Hornung's work showed steady maturation; initially, he wrote simple, entertaining adventure stories for magazines. By the end of his writing life, he was grappling with complex moral issues and exploring the psychology of guilt and the role of science in the study of evil. He frequently chose to write from the...