Review: "The Amateur Cracksman" hits a little too close to Holmes

After hearing a chap by the name of "Raffles" mentioned offhandedly in every other P.G. Wodehouse book, I had to hunt him up to see what made him such a vital part of the era's popular literature. Wodehouse's generation grew up on Sherlock Holmes stories in in much the way kids from the 90s onward grew up on Harry Potter--no doubt the reason so many of his writerly peers turned to crime (fiction). But the Sherlock Holmes generation read Raffles, too, which was close enough. I imagine it could be likened to Harry Potter fans getting into Percy Jackson as a substitute after they've read the former series to death.

The other reason I picked up Raffles was that I'd heard the concept was "Holmes and Watson as criminals". Who hasn't been tantalized by all those delicious little hints within the Holmes canon that the Great Detective would have made an excellent criminal? (And, by the way, who says he wasn't? He's got plenty of spare time between mysteries, and more than enough lockpicks lying around the place.) So I psyched myself for "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton: The Series". And I guess that's exactly what I got: no more, no less.

"Bunny" Manders, accomplice to Raffles and part-time publisher of his criminal escapades, isn't a Watson double in the way that, say, Agatha Christie's Hastings is; Bunny's on the wrong side of the law, after all. He's as loyal to Raffles as Watson is to Holmes, but whereas Watson's reliability stemmed from soldierly courage and manly feeling and all those other things that made England great, Bunny is reliable for the opposite reason--he's a wimp. Sniveling, needy and quite the nervous case altogether, he's pained that his best friend is robbing jewels left and right but just can't bring himself to put his foot down and stop assisting him. Besides, they could use the money. (The major characterization difference is solidified in the first story: Bunny finds himself in the same situation as Watson in A Study in Scarlet--bankrupt, friendless and badly in need of someone to share the rent--but instead of maintaining the stiff upper lip as Watson did, he shows up at Raffles' flat with a gun, threatening to blow out his brains.)

The divergence of character is overridden by the similarity of the writing style. Bunny may not have Watson's decency, but when it comes down to dialogue his rapport with Raffles is simply and solely Watson's with Holmes, down to the last "said I".

Similarly, Raffles is nothing like Holmes in theory. He's a star cricket player, full of a psychopathic charm dating back to his schoolboy days (Bunny was his starstruck sidekick even then--think Steerforth's manipulation of the young David Copperfield, complete with a cutesy nickname), and his cleverness doesn't amount to inhuman genius. But in practice, Raffles is still Holmes. He discusses crime from the opposite moral angle, but he scarcely phrases a thing differently. His wit is enjoyable, but that's because it's often Holmes' wit.

The episodes contained in this book are shorter than the Holmes adventures, more like newspaper columns than magazine serials. This is something of a necessity, since one key aspect of Holmes doesn't hold up to a criminal translation: the mystery-solving. There can be no mystery when you're following the thieves at their work. To fill the gap, Hornung usually provides a quick crisis at the eleventh hour--a few guards to be outwitted, for instance--but it can't replace a Holmes investigation.

There are cracks in Hornung's largely effective aping of Doyle's style, moments when one catches a glimpse of a different, but talented, writer before he retreats into his pastiche again. He's capable of turns of phrase that Doyle would never have attempted: a man on the black market is equipped with "the shiftiest old eyes that ever flew from rim to rim of a pair of spectacles", and a scarred opponent of Raffles has "a treble-seamed, hand-sewn head". I could read an entire book written exactly like this, but sadly, Hornung didn't quite trust himself to write one.