The Black Mask

Two years after The Amateur Cracksman made him a sensation, A. J. Raffles came back. At the close of the first book the gentleman thief had vanished into the sea, presumed drowned, leaving his devoted accomplice Bunny Manders to face the law. The Black Mask opens in the wreckage of that ending — Raffles missing, Bunny released from prison and living ruined in a shabby attic — until a telegram and an advertisement draw Bunny into the service of a sickly old invalid who proves to be Raffles himself, not dead at all but hiding in plain sight behind a mask.

From that reunion the eight linked stories build a single, deepening arc. A theft staged against the pageantry of the Diamond Jubilee; an Italian vendetta that turns deadly; a string of darker capers in which the pair are hunted men with no respectable cover left — and at last the South African war, which moves Raffles, the outlaw who robbed his country's best houses, to enlist and seek on the veldt a redemption he could never find in Mayfair.

Published in 1901 — and issued in America as Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman — Hornung's second collection is markedly grimmer than his first. The bright wit of the early stories has darkened into something closer to tragedy, and the inversion of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson that delighted readers now carries a real weight of loyalty, exile, and loss. Doyle, his brother-in-law, had warned him not to make the criminal a hero; here Hornung asks what such a life finally costs the men who lead it.

Narrated, as ever, by the worshipping Bunny — through whose devoted eyes we are half-recruited into Raffles's own cause — The Black Mask is the pivotal volume of the Raffles saga, the book in which the founding gentleman thief moves from charming sport toward a soldier's death, and the criminal the public refused to give up is at last allowed to redeem himself.