Raffles
The Amateur Cracksman
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Raffles
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Narrated by:
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David Rintoul
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By:
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E W Hornung
About this listen
By day, AJ Raffles is a debonair man-about-town and one of England's finest cricketers. By night - he's London’s most notorious thief! Classic crime to rival Sherlock Holmes.
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. But The Albany was also the address for one of the greatest fictional creations of late 19th-century crime writing, AJ Raffles.
The author, E.W. Hornung was not as well-known as his brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, yet in many ways, Hornung was a better writer 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.
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.
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, Raffles’s diamond-hard determination, his lightning ingenuity and profound knowledge of human nature are always on display, and though he could have been hanged for any one of these crimes, Raffles remains a man you wouldn’t mind sharing a cocktail or two with during a night out on the town.
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What listeners say about Raffles
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jayem68
- 02-04-19
Very Enjoyable
Enjoyable stories, well read, with great emphasis by David Rintoul. Listened to the whole thing in one sitting! Just wish the other books in the series were available with his narration.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mr. M. Hebblewhite
- 16-04-20
Extremely enjoyable
That was definitely well worth my time, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characters are very well developed and their adventures are interesting, in the aspect of historical scoundrels compared to today's scoundrels.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Knucklebones
- 05-10-15
Fine - except for no Chapter breaks!
Raffles the daring gentleman thief was a popular short story character in the early years of the 20th century and I was pleased that this audiobook includes all 8 stories from Hornung's first published collection of 1899: The Ides of March; A Costume Piece; Gentlemen and Players; Le Premier Pas; Wilful Murder; Nine Points of the Law; The Return Match; and The Gift of the Emperor.
David Rintoul has a fine voice and is a suitable narrator for these adventures of the upper class financially-challenged A J Raffles and his scared-but-willing associate Bunny Manders. The stories make for a diverting listen (though not in the class of Conan Doyle) with an attractive anti-hero, and vividly conjure up the elegant lost world of wealthy Late Victorian London. They are, though, very tame compared either to Holmes or to more modern fare. A dreadful fault on this recording is the lack of any pause whatsoever between the stories, which ruins the end of each story and destroys the concentration.
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2 people found this helpful