Raffles and Miss Blandish Summary

Raffles is a fictional character appearing in a series of magazine stories and novels. He is a so-called gentleman bandit; robbing others but for the most part avoiding serious or violent crimes while maintaining his own code of strict, if somewhat arbitrary, conduct. Although he is a criminal, Raffles is a gentleman and maintains standard that are simply not violated. The Raffles fiction was extremely popular and succeeded in capturing the public imagination at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Raffles stories place the criminal in the limelight and glamorize crime. The author, Hornung, goes to great lengths to establish Raffles as a moral man, including, Orwell notes, making him a cricketer who excels as a slow bowler. Of course, in the social structure of the Raffles fiction, crime did not pay and Raffles is eventually...