A-Z 2021 K - Plain Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling, 1884-1888)

We may as well start today with addressing the elephant in the room.  Rudyard Kipling was absolutely a believer that British colonialism was fundamentally a good thing.  He doesn't write of it as a uniform good, but in many ways this is because he sees that humans are flawed.  He isn't supporting colonialism out of a nationalistic notion of Empire, but rather, he sees it as an almost sacred duty of good European folks (though especially the English-speaking ones) to bring civilization and Christianity to other parts of the world, whether they already had perfectly good civilizations and religions or not.

We will not, however, be addressing any elephants in today's book, as despite their appearance on the cover of my copy, there are no elephants as significant parts of the narrative in any of Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills.  Sorry, Hathi, I didn't read the book you're in quite yet.

Plain Tales was Kipling's first widely-published work, so what we see here is a very young writer (these stories are from when the author was between 19-23 years old), working as a journalist in British India, turning his pen to (generally comic) fiction in order to fill a few columns in the newspaper he worked for.  This, then, indicates the initial audience as well; he was writing for English folks in and around Lahore.

Perhaps due to that audience, Kipling has a particular focus on English characters; few stories have "native" protagonists, and many have only white characters at all.  There are recurring characters at times, references to earlier stories abound, and it's very clear that the readership were following along from episode to episode.

The subject matter varies widely.  There are a number of short romantic comedies and tragedies alike, tales of pranks gone horribly wrong or spectacularly right, several stories told in a remarkable vernacular about the goings-on of a military regiment...  In short, a cross-section of what life in and around Simla during the mid-1880s was like, at least if you were an Englishman.  The mental imagery created in some of these tales is amazing, particularly in the case of the military regiment's offerings, one of which includes a ghost horse with a skeleton and a pair of timpanis on its back galloping toward a whole battalion.  It makes sense in context.

Kipling's narrator is a sort of self-insertion, usually standing to one side of the stories and simply observing what happens through his journalist's eye; while several times he is drawn into the narrative, this is rarely done in a way that gives him any great agency within the story.  Rather, this device is used to allow him to act as a sort of straight man for the other characters' foolishness (in one case, having to race on a horse in a dust storm to try and stop an unfortunate aftermath to a friend's proposal to the wrong sister; the obvious mistake having been to propose to someone you can't clearly see in a dust storm).

It's hard at times to tell if some of the things Kipling says about India and its people are actually his views or if they are intended as satire.  He clearly feels strongly for the country and its culture, but at the same time, he has an outsider's view, and especially feels that Western culture has some degree of primacy that should be brought in to sort of... improve on what's already there.

It's worth noting that the text that Penguin has used, at least in the edition I have (which is not identical to the one currently in print), is from the third compiled printing of these stories, which was partially adjusted by Kipling due to its nature as a book intended for the "Home" market, back in the British Isles.  This has required some adjusting of text here and there, largely to make things that would have been obvious to his readers in Lahore more clear for readers in London.  The endnotes provided do a good job of making it clear where this has happened, however, and much of the content that one looks at slightly askance now was there all along.  It's not a surprise that this is coming from the same author who would, ten years later, write "The White Man's Burden".

One last thing that I really have to wonder about, and do want to bring up, is the way of referring to race here.  For some reason, the Indian peoples are referred to as "blacks" if their race is mentioned at all, as if they're the same as Africans.  I really don't know for sure what to make of that; in a couple of places it's been described as looking similar to a "Spanish complexion", perhaps indicating that any darker complexion would be considered 'black' in this case.  This would line up with one of the knights in the Arthurian legends, Morien, a half-Moorish knight described as "black of face and limb", despite by all indications being someone who would have something akin to a middle-eastern or, indeed, Indian complexion.  This is one of those places where being American may be to my detriment in this case, as my specific cultural background gives a likewise-specific idea of what 'black' means that may not line up with literature that comes from a British background, particularly that from other centuries.

It's ultimately impossible to separate Kipling from the colonial views and mindset, in any case.  He's a product of his time and culture, and his writings show that.  While the racism on display isn't as hateful as, say, that of H.P. Lovecraft, it's still a clear through-line of sorts in the stories where Indian people appear.  This isn't to say that the English get away without some solid jabs, but the overall form of Kipling's work still celebrates imperialism.  It's simply impossible to escape from that in many of his works, and this early fiction puts it front and center.

A-Z 2021 I: The Cheapest Nights (Yusuf Idris, 1954-1978)

I think I've mentioned the idea of a curate's egg before.  I have to say, at least from my perspective, Egyptian writer Yusuf Idris's short fiction definitely falls into that category.  I loved the writing style, the way that he captures the world that his characters live in, the descriptions that make places I don't know if I would ever go come alive in my mind.

And yet, I can't really bring myself to say that I enjoyed my time reading The Cheapest Nights.

So, what's the problem here?  There's a lot to unpack in this short volume.  First, it's worth noting that collection this is not the same as Idris's identically-titled first collection, أرخص ليالى, which I don't believe has ever been released in English in its original form.  This collection does, however, include six of the stories from that earlier one, along with nine from his later collections.

There's a throughline here, of people trying to find their ways out of poverty and dealing with the societal problems that prevent that escape.  Sexuality is almost omnipresent, but it's dealt with in a very matter-of-fact way, never graphic.  The title story, for example, deals with a man who made the mistake of drinking black tea in the evening being unable to sleep, wandering his village that has too many youth, but unable to find anything to fill the time with that doesn't cost the money he doesn't have due to having six children, so he goes home, wakes his wife, and they pursue the least expensive entertainment available... nine months later, he now has seven children, and still wonders where all the youth running around in town are coming from.

Everything is that simple, matter-of-fact, straight-forward.  A man who can't hold a job discovers that he can sell his blood at the hospital, allowing him to make ends meet for a time, only to be told eventually that he's sold too much and has anemia, and to come back when he's stronger.  A landowner attempting to charge tolls to get into a marketplace on his land is stymied by the merchants' refusal to go around to the one entrance he wants them to traverse, and instead make their own way through the fence where it's more convenient for them.  An old tradition in a slowly-failing rural farming region regarding offers of hospitality to a wedding party traveling down the road goes awry when one particularly large example of such a party decides to take everyone up on their offers.  The word selection is surgical in its precision, leaving no doubt as to what's going on.

That said, I can't say that the stories on display here are even remotely pleasant for the most part.  Especially when Idris is trying to point out a particular social ill, there are rarely anything like positive conclusions (of the fifteen stories, I would only argue that three have particularly happy endings), and more often than not, the protagonists are left in worse states than they began the stories with.

I think the most frustrating thing, though, is that the two longest stories in the collection are driven largely by sexual assault.  The first of these, "The Dregs of the City," starts out looking like it's going to be about a judge looking for his missing wristwatch, and indeed that's the top-level narrative, but much more of the story is about the judge taking advantage of a married cleaning woman whom he has hired and pushing her into eventually becoming a prostitute; the second, "The Shame," is about how an entire village decides that an innocent girl has had sex with one of the young men in town, and virtually frog-marches her to have the one "trustworthy" woman in the village inspect her, a test that apparently involves several women holding her down while she's stripped, with the potential result of a failed "inspection" directly stated to be an honor killing.

And... I mean, this isn't pleasant stuff to read about.  We've got a guy taking advantage of a woman who lives in abject poverty and can't effectively say 'no', and a whole village working as a mob to rob a girl of her innocence, despite her (truthful) pleas that nothing happened.  Elsewhere, we have religious leaders giving in to sinful behaviors, anonymous murders of physically-and-mentally-disabled people, and bureaucratic red tape hindering even those who are trying to do something resembling good work within the system.  Frankly, it's not surprising that Idris wound up jailed for the political views in some of his writings, given how much of a focus his writing places on the realities of poverty in Egypt.  It's very well-written, very powerful stuff, of a kind with Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or John Steinbeck.

But powerful doesn't mean pleasant.  And like I said before, I can't say I enjoyed reading this.

Doesn't mean it doesn't belong on my shelf, though.  Or that I would pass up reading more of Idris's writings.

The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories (H.G. Wells, 1894-1915)

A man spontaneously has his visual perception relocated to a site on the opposite side of the planet, but none of his other senses are affected. 

There are four books that are sort of considered the 'core' H.G. Wells works: the novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, and the novella The Time Machine.  This collection, The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories, includes precisely zero of those, but I think it might be more interesting exactly because of that.

An object from deep space crashes into Neptune, ignites into a small star, and plunges through the inner solar system on its way to the Sun, causing global disasters and devastation.

What's on display here is a sort of a cross-section of the range of fiction writing that Wells produced, showing just how far beyond his well-known science fiction works he actually went.  The stories aren't designed to have a lengthy or high-stakes plot, for the most part; the general construction of most seems to be that Wells came up with an idea that seemed impossible, then went through the thought of how to make that seem reasonable, and explores it and the ramifications.

A successful politician is haunted by a magical door that he passed through once as a young boy, then passes by every time he encountered it again, despite a desire to return to the mysterious garden beyond the portal.

The most stunning thing about this collection may be the specific variety selected.  We get examples of what seems to be almost pre-figuring many later sub-genres within science fiction, showing just how much the genre as a whole owes to him.  While space travel and the parts of sci-fi that are associated with that are quite outside of what's on display here (the two stories featuring Martians in any context leave them quite contentedly on Mars), we get stories that work with hard science, stories that attempt to prefigure future technology, stories that imagine a culture and investigate how it might interact with others.

A man under the influence of anaesthesia for a surgical procedure, convinced he is going to die while under the knife, experiences Cosmic Zoom.

It's clear that Wells is anything but uninformed, as well.  Perhaps that's not surprising; I have a 1930s  biology textbook that was primarily written by him, in fact the second such textbook that he wrote during his life, which perhaps shows just how studied the man was.  The science at work always feels believable, within Newtonian physics models, and even a story that completely misses the mark on how powered heavier-than-air flight is going to work manages to be a fun read, building up to a giant mechanical bird crashing into and destroying the Royal College of Science in London.

A mountaineer stumbles upon a hidden village of people born for generations without eyes, and learns quickly that the old adage 'In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king' is inaccurate in every possible way.

None of the stories outstay their welcome; each establishes its situation quickly, then progresses through exploring it until the logical endpoint, at which point the story ends.  In cases where further elaboration might be possible, as with a story involving a drug that speeds the taker's body and mind up to a speed one thousand times that of everything around them, future implications are alluded to but left to the reader's imagination, rather than Wells trying to create an encyclopedic examination of the possible effects.

A trip up the Amazon River leads to the verified discovery of a species of oversized, intensely venomous ants with abnormally high intelligence, which are engaging in an actively genocidal invasion of human settlements within the rainforest, and seem to be on the verge of successfully figuring out boats.

This collection honestly has a bit of everything in it.  There are several stories that seem to prefigure themes that H.P. Lovecraft would eventually deal with, alongside rather chilling, entirely-mundane-in-setting crime fiction.  There are visions of the future on display, but the longest story is about a particularly clever Neanderthal in the stone age.  For the most part, Wells always writes with a certain academic voice to his writing, which establishes The story that concludes the book is a rather humorous little tale of an author crossing paths with a devil who was cast out of Hell for abandoning his post at the wrong time, and has no science-fiction content to it at all, but all the same, it's a delightful yarn.  And that's really what one has to look for in a collection like this; a wide range of topics and genres, ending on a somewhat silly note, seems just the way to allow readers to discover how much more than 'just' a science-fiction writer H.G. Wells actually was.

Thankfully, Penguin Classics has 17 books by Wells, both fiction and nonfiction in nature, so I expect I'll be well-served in exploring his other works later on.

Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.

The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame, 1895) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 1/3)

I'm sure everyone's seen or read something that makes use of the idyllic, semi-generic rural childhood setting.  You know the one, where everyone lives in either big manor houses or small cottages, and the children run around willy-nilly and get into all kinds of mischief and live in a half-fantasy world where their imaginations get them into all sorts of wild adventures with no real risk involved, and just across that hedge over there is a farmer's field and there's a little village down the way and the grown-ups are all serious and lack proper senses of humor because they just don't understand what's really important in life the way that the children do.

So, what happens if we take that setting, drop a few children into it to have the requisite low-stakes adventures, but then write it with an adult sensibility and sense of diction?

Well, we get some of Kenneth Grahame's works, for one.

Grahame got his start as a writer with pieces written for newspapers in the late Victorian era, a combination of short stories and meditations on life and the simple joys that one can find.  These were mostly collected in a volume called Pagan Papers, which is not at hand for me to read but I may be seeing if I can track it down later.  One particular one of these meditations, "The Olympians," focused on the difference between the priorities of the adults who raised him after his mother died, and those of he and his siblings who were in their care.  After one of his editors asked him to write more like that, he put out several of the 17 stories that made up The Golden Age, though most of the book was original at the time of its publication.  A sequel, Dream Days, followed; I'll be writing about that later.

So, what is it that we're actually looking at, here?  In large part, it's a very grounded set of tales about five siblings growing up in the English countryside and the little games they play with one another.  It's never fully laid-out, but I got the sense when reading that the oldest of the group was maybe nine or ten years old.  There's a sort of timeless sense about it all; the narrator (who seems positioned as a self-insert of the author, without any name ever given) seems to be the third of the five.  The stories seem to take place across about a year and a half of time, shifting lazily from season to season.  Some feature the narrator alone, others some or all of the group, but there's always a touch of ethereal quality to the events, as if the imaginations are layered atop reality in a way that makes them have a slight ability to actually be interacted with.

The central theme, though, is the disconnect between the children and adults.  Grahame's narrator is very in tune with nature, and knows that the most important parts of his world are the ones that he directly interacts with, whether that's the wind, guiding him through the countryside in the first story, or the small rivers that lead to several adventures directly into fantasy; sneaking under a fence in one case leads to a quiet Downton Abbey-like garden, which must clearly belong to a sleeping princess (who is, of course, on hand), while temporarily stealing a farmer's boat in order to play at Jason and the Argonauts leads to the discovery of a young Medea of sorts in the garden of another nearby manor.

There's a sense to the whole piece that Grahame is lamenting the loss of innocence that comes with growing up.  The children as a group get up to all kinds of mischief, but there are also moments where the reality of the world somewhat gets the best of them; one story features their governess leaving, and the children don't seem to quite understand why they feel so sad about it, and the final story deals with the looming departure to boarding school of the oldest of the siblings, with a conclusion that implies that the change from child to 'Olympian' adult comes with that separation from the childhood setting.

Not all adults fit into this 'Olympian' mode, however.  One chapter, which starts as a meditation on the old Roman roadways that still cross the British countryside, features a discussion between the narrator and an artist who seems clearly like-minded, regarding a fantastic 'perfect' city that's where all the spare suitors in fairy tales and minor knights in Arthurian legends end up after the stories; in another case, the 'sleeping beauty' garden's princess has already been 'awoken' by a suitor, but both of them are more than willing to play along with the young boy's surety that he's walked into a fairy tale.  Another time, it goes the opposite way; the children getting into mischief in the night convinces the new tutor that the house is haunted and sends him fleeing the next morning, to sell his story to a supernatural-themed tabloid.

It's clear from reading this that Grahame felt that there's something important in a child's experience of the world, and the sensibility that comes from a more innocent view of the world and what's really important.  Fairyland lies behind every hedge, around every corner, if one simply knows where to look.  The fact that this book was a particular favorite of both Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the latter case, it was the only book, aside from the Bible, that he kept on his private yacht) perhaps speaks to something of the personalities of both leaders.  There's a lot to be said for keeping a bit of that sense of whimsy and wonder; every adult who comes across in a positive way over the course of this book is someone who retains some aspect of that, whether that's playing along with a child's fantasy or simply letting kids be kids.  And really, that seems to be the core message at work here: there's something special about a child's view of the world, and more of us might do well to let a bit of that view in.

The Longing (Studio Seufz, 2020) - 5/? (Literary Interlude #1)

EDIT: After some thought, it struck me that the 'Let's Play' format really wasn't something that I was finding to be terribly interesting to follow through with, and what little readership I have wasn't particularly interested, either.  I'm leaving this post up because it's at least on literary topics, but I won't be keeping that format any longer.  When I'm done with The Longing, I'll do a wrap-up post instead.

Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (E.W. Hornung, 1899)

 

There's an old saying, 'Don't judge a book by its cover.'  That seems a reasonable way to look at things, right?  Don't assume that what you see on the outside is an indication of what's inside.  Some part of me, deep down, wonders if this is why the classic Penguin Books cover is so plain.  There's a promise that comes with that cover, that what you find within its pages is going to be worth your time, even with a bare minimum of indication from the front as to what's inside.

That was what drove me to pick this up, initially.  I saw the telltale 'Vintage Penguin' spine on the shelf at St. Vincent de Paul, on a book title and author I hadn't heard of, and reached up to take it in hand, give it a closer look, and see what I had found.  I had initially thought it was an actual vintage edition, though this quickly changed once I had it in hand; I probably should have known better, as the actual vintage Penguins often have spines that appear upside-down to a modern English-language sensibility (not to mention that the actual vintage edition of this particular book was a green cover Penguin).  In any case, my interest was further piqued by the short paragraph on the back cover telling me it's tales of a gentleman thief, and the book's dedication reading "TO A.C.D. THIS FORM OF FLATTERY".  Needless to say, that set of initials in a work of late-Victorian-era crime fiction gets my attention, so I was happy to see what Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman had to offer me.

One of the things I really enjoy about classic books being published by Penguin is that they usually include some amount of context for the reader, whether in the form of an appendix full of notes to help with cultural things that may not be clear to modern audiences (in this case, the most obvious case where I needed this was when reference to "fagging" showed up very quickly in the first story, due to the title character and the Watson-style narrator having been at school together), or an introduction that gives a sense of the context in which the work was introduced or simply a bit of a bio of the author.  In this particular book, that introduction was somewhat mind-blowing simply in the way that it gives a bit of background not only on Hornung, but even on Arthur Conan Doyle; Hornung was married to Doyle's sister, and was apparently spurred to write these stories, upon suggesting the gentleman-thief idea, at Doyle's insistence.  Indeed, this seems to be one of the first examples, if not the first, of the the gentleman-thief trope in fiction.  But it goes further; at the end of this book, the titular Raffles purposefully goes over the railing of a ship, many miles from shore, and it's not entirely clear if he has survived (this intended as a way to end the series of stories, similarly to Sherlock Holmes going over Reichenbach Falls).  Due to the popularity of the stories, Hornung was convinced to come back and write more, revealing that Raffles had indeed escaped intact; Doyle himself later made use of this same device in bringing Holmes back in later years.

There's a common view that, because of the relationship between Doyle and Hornung and the nature of these stories focusing on the criminal rather than the sleuth, these are somehow an "inversion" of Holmes.  That seems a bit of a misinterpretation of what is at work here; an inversion of Sherlock Holmes must, by necessity, be a character in the shape of Dr. James Moriarty, the sort of character who wields the same powers as Holmes but uses them for criminal gain and the material enrichment of themselves, rather than enjoying simply solving the puzzle for the greater good, as Holmes himself does.  This does not describe A.J. Raffles, at all.

So, what is it that this thin paperback actually contains, then?  Unlike most instances of the gentleman-thief archetype, A.J. Raffles is in it for profit, not for the fun of it.  While the character clearly enjoys the game, as it were, and claims he's but an amateur, he engages in his cracksmanship as much for a way of making his living as for the challenge and rush of the crime itself.  He has no apparent job outside of simply living the appearance of a proper upper-class gentleman; all of his income seems to come from either gambling (he's introduced at the end of a poor night of Baccarat for the narrator, Harry "Bunny" Manders) or his heists.  This book, the first of an eventual four dealing with Raffles and Bunny, contains nine stories, each detailing a criminal escapade.  Most of these are, as could be expected of a gentleman-thief, heists, though not all successful.  The stories are perhaps less stand-alone than might be expected of a collection like this, where most of them were previously printed in magazines; there are numerous callbacks to prior stories as you go through, with one of the stories even being a direct sequel to an earlier one.

Raffles isn't exactly a likeable character.  Admittedly, we're seeing him through Bunny's eyes, and Bunny has known him long enough that many of Raffles's less endearing traits are coming across in his view as 'Oh, that's just what he's like.'  There's a repeated plot beat of Raffles assuming that some machination of his or another as part of the heist they're involved in is just going to be obvious to Bunny, then getting huffy about it when Bunny doesn't understand what he's supposed to have done.  This comes across as rather less charming than "Elementary, my dear Watson" does; one would expect that when a heist requires two people working to pull it off, both people should necessarily be on the same page.

That said, I did enjoy the stories here, and definitely want to get my hands on the other three books.  Hornung was clearly having some fun with the concept, and did his research; apparently, some of the tactics that Raffles makes use of (particularly his way of getting through windows) actually saw a rise in their usage by real-life burglars after the stories were published.  Many of the characters and storylines also based largely on real people and events; a recurring police-detective character, Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, is directly inspired by Melville Macnaghten.  I do find myself wondering where the further books might go, however; unlike the case of Holmes, where his return would be a surprise but wouldn't likely have any significant dangers for the sleuth, Raffles goes over the railing because Mackenzie has caught him in the act and has warrants based on two other heists as well, so his return from the apparently-dead wouldn't be a case where he could keep his old identity.  That in itself suggests that the further books might have some interesting twists; if A.J. Raffles can't be A.J. Raffles, what can he do to maintain the 'gentleman' side of gentleman thief?