The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes by Graeme Davis

Author:Graeme Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

* Of little account.

† A nickname for the city of Birmingham, and people or things from there. The city’s fame for manufacturing cheap metal buttons and trinkets led to the term’s adoption for cheap, showy, or counterfeit items.

GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS AND THE RETURN MATCH

by E. W. Hornung

1899

Ernest William Hornung was Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. Like Doyle, he was a prolific author, and like Doyle, he is mainly remembered for one character—the cricketer and gentleman thief A. J. Raffles—whose adventures have been adapted for stage and screen down the years and continued in print by other writers. Raffles has been portrayed by John Barrymore (1917), David Niven (1939), and Nigel Havers (2001), among others; British author Graham Greene wrote a play in 1974 that speculated about the nature of the relationship between Raffles and his nervous sidekick, Bunny Manders; and he has appeared in a number of pastiches, sometimes as an opponent of Holmes.

As a gentleman thief who commits crimes for sport, Raffles is the direct ancestor of later antiheroes such as Leslie Charteris’s Simon “The Saint” Templar, The Pink Panther’s Sir Charles “The Phantom” Lytton—also played by David Niven in the first movie, twenty-four years after his turn as Raffles on the silver screen—Thomas Crown, and, most recently, Neal Caffrey in the 2009–2014 TV series White Collar.

Raffles has been extensively pastiched, crossing swords with Holmes on numerous non-canonical occasions. As early as 1906, American humorist John Kendrick Bangs wrote R. Holmes & Co., whose hero, Raffles Holmes, is the offspring of the great detective with the cracksman’s daughter.

“Gentlemen and Players”—presented here with its sequel “The Return Match”—goes to the heart of Raffles’s character. Cricketers of the time were divided into two classes: the “Gentlemen” who played for sport, and the “Players,” usually of a lower social status, who played for pay. Raffles regards crime in exactly the same light, and when he gets word that a gang of “pros” plans a jewel robbery, he decides to thwart their scheme and take the jewels for himself. “The Return Match” sees the leader of the gang, recently escaped from one of England’s most secure prisons, returning to collect what he believes he is owed.

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