Mr. Justice Raffles

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Mr. Justice Raffles

First UK edition
Author	E.W. Hornung
Language	English
Series	A. J. Raffles
Genre	Crime fiction
Publisher	Smith, Elder & Co. (UK) Scribner's (US)
Publication date	1909
Publication place	United Kingdom
Preceded by	A Thief in the Night

Mr. Justice Raffles is a 1909 novel written by E.W. Hornung. It featured his popular character A. J. Raffles a well-known cricketer and gentleman thief. It was the fourth and last in his four Raffles books which had begun with The Amateur Cracksman in 1899.^[1] The novel was published in the UK by Smith, Elder & Co., London, and in the US by Scribner's, New York.^[2]

Unlike the three previous works, the book was a full-length novel and featured darker elements than the earlier collections of short stories. In it a jaded Raffles is growing increasingly cynical about British high society. He encounters Dan Levy, an unscrupulous moneylender, who manages to entrap a number of young men, mostly sons of the wealthy, by giving them loans and then charging huge amounts of interest. Raffles takes it upon himself to teach Levy a lesson.

At the end of Hornung's second Raffles short story collection The Black Mask, Raffles and his companion Bunny Manders volunteer for service in the Second Boer War in 1899 where he was killed at the hands of the Boers. Hornung had intended this as a patriotic finale to his hero's story. However there was great popular demand for the return of the character, and a number of generous publishing offers, and Hornung agreed to write another book.

In this he has been compared to Arthur Conan Doyle's decision to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after disposing of the character in "The Final Problem"; however, unlike Doyle's revelation that Holmes had actually survived the plunge over Reichenbach Falls, Hornung set Mr. Justice Raffles before the events of the Boer War. The comparison between the resurrections of Holmes and Raffles is made interesting by the fact that Doyle and Hornung were brothers-in-law. Indeed, prior to "officially" resurrecting Holmes, Doyle had used much the same technique with The Hound of the Baskervilles, his first post-Reichenbach Holmes story.

The title contains a more direct reference to Holmes, being a parody of "Mr. Justice Holmes" - that is, the American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose father served as the direct inspiration for the great detective's name.

Its reception was mixed, with some fans lamenting the loss of the carefree gentlemen thief of the early stories. It was the last Raffles work written by Hornung, although a number of continuations have been written by other authors in a mixture of parody and homage.