"These latest adventures of 'Raffles' and 'Bunny' are their most thrilling and exciting ones. The sentimental side of their story has never before been shown so dramatically and romantically, and the suggestion in this book of the final conclusion of their careers cannot but make these stories of the greatest interest to all readers." Boston Herald.

Hornung was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Hornung has created Raffles as an inverted representation of Sherlock Holmes. A J Raffles was a thief. He was a gentleman thief who lived in a good neighborhood in London and played cricket. Raffles' plots to steal are ingenious and of a higher quality than the "common thieves".Outof Paradise (excerpt)

If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can butback to our earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left bydiscretion in existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill somesmall part of an infinitely greater blank, across which you mayconceive me to have stretched my canvas for the first frank portraitof my friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint inevery wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it is noservice to his memory to glaze the fact; yet I have done so myselfbefore to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dweltunduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded evenas I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to methan any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations, andas an earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest wrongthat even Raffles ever did me.

I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as Istill would be to my friend, and yet remembering as I must those Idesof March when he led me blindfold into temptation and crime. That wasan ugly office, if you will. It was a moral bagatelle to thetreacherous trick he was to play me a few weeks later. The secondoffence, on the other hand, was to prove the less serious of the twoagainst society, and might in itself have been published to the worldyears ago. There have been private reasons for my reticence. Theaffair was not only too intimately mine, and too discreditable toRaffles. One other was involved in it, one dearer to me than...