regshoe

I felt like my writing did not go brilliantly this year, so it's gratifying to go to my AO3 stats page and see that that's not entirely the case. I published twelve fics in 2024, and my total posted wordcount is 43,882—lower than the last few years, but really not that bad, especially considering the ~25k draft also finished but not posted.

And my total posted works count has passed 100. In fact it's currently 103 and was never (or at least never showed as) exactly 100, because number 100 was my Yuletide assignment and I then posted another two Yuletide fics which were all revealed as mine at the same time, but never mind, it's something to be pleased with! Here are the last few fics running up to that total, which I didn't share here at the time:

( A few fics )

At the end of the year I also wrote a ficlet for one of my occasional Raffles Christmas cards, which I've just posted on AO3 now:

A Ham Common Christmas (420 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Characters: Bunny Manders, A. J. Raffles
Additional Tags: Christmas, Fluff
Summary:

Raffles and Bunny receive an unexpected present.

:)

A farewell to Mr Justice Raffles and to the Rest Hut, with many thanks to wolfiesulkingintheirtent and the-prince-of-professors for the really interesting and good discussions! I think I understand this book in particular much better after going through it in such detail, and the whole Rest Hut has been a very fun, valuable and enjoyable fannish project. And, most importantly, it's resulted in your lovely ideas about Raffles/Bunny pyjama-swapping fluff. <3

...and then, of course, I couldn't resist the punny Imre reference...

Thy Soul With Mine (839 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Characters: Bunny Manders, A. J. Raffles
Additional Tags: Story: Mr Justice Raffles (Raffles), Post-Canon, Sharing Clothes
Summary:

An epilogue.

I had several very different ideas for possible fic set during the Ham Common era, so I—after finding an uncannily well-fitting folk song title—decided to try combining them all together. This was the result...

Lovely on the Water (6630 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Characters: Bunny Manders, A. J. Raffles
Additional Tags: Ham Common (Raffles), Angst, Foreshadowing
Summary:

'I’ve often thought that more use might be made of a boat... than there ever has been yet.'

At Ham Common, Raffles suggests a new sort of burglary—but things don't go entirely according to plan.

D. K. Broster and E. W. Hornung have a lot in common: both authors of romantic adventure stories writing around the early twentieth century, both got their start publishing short stories and poetry in magazines before writing novels and story collections, both provide lots of fuel for slash fanfiction—and, of course, they're both my faves. So, having done some meta looking at the details of language in the prose of both authors, I thought I'd continue the series with a comparison between them.

This post uses the texts of the Raffles books (The Amateur Cracksman, The Black Mask, A Thief in the Night and Mr Justice Raffles) by E. W. Hornung and The Flight of the Heron by D. K. Broster.


( Stats, etc. )

My current longer WIP is far too happy, so have this little bit of angst!

At the Pension Cowley (1680 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Characters: A. J. Raffles, Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: POV Outsider
Summary:

April 1896. An English boarding-house owner at Genoa receives an unexpected visitor.

Having looked at the use of different names in The Flight of the Heron, I was inspired by some recent discussions on the Crime and Cricket Discord to try doing something similar for the Raffles stories.

( My dear rabbit... )

I've spent a pleasant day making lentil soup and bread rolls (this week's soup batch is a particularly good one, I think), thinking about and doing research for my Yuletide fic (which is now over 1,000 words, wahey!) and filling in a gap in my E. W. Hornung read-through.

Under Two Skies (1892) is Hornung's second published book and first collection of short stories. I initially skipped it on my read-through because I couldn't find a copy—thanks very much to theseatheseatheopensea for locating one :) Anyway, you'll never guess which two countries the title refers to! The seven stories, set some in England and some in a characteristically lovingly described Australia, are generally about complicated, emotionally tangled and thwarted love-affairs and other relationships, with lots of jilting, broken faith and otherwise questionable conduct and a mixture of happy, unhappy and ambiguous endings.

I generally enjoyed them, although I thought some of the judgements of characters on the part of the author were a little unfairly harsh (yes, that was a shabby way to treat someone she was in love with; no, what he decides to do with himself afterwards isn't actually her fault... kind of thing). Overall the collection was good fun, for all that many of the stories are not especially happy: Hornung, newly successful, is playing with language and stories and it's as much of a delight as it always is. There are some brilliant twisty, elliptical descriptive passages and turns of phrase (I say this in every Hornung review, but it's always true!), and Hornung's talent for implying, rather than stating outright, the emotional significance of an ending is used very well.

The most interesting thing in the collection, from a fandom point of view, is the description of the character Edward Nettleship, a cricketer who we meet playing for Oxford at Lord's, in the story 'Nettleship's Score'. Raffles fans, does this sound a little familiar?:

His jet-black hair was a sheer anachronism in its length and curliness, and would have been considered extremely bad form in anybody but Nettleship. Also, his pale face was vexatiously deprived of the moustache which might at least have modernised him; but then his features were notably of a classic cast. ... They were now, it was remarked, a trifle sharp and angular. ... His eyes were blue, and keen, and searching; his smile had of late taken a cynical curl...

He spends the rest of the story acting in a somewhat nefarious and highly devious, if not actually criminal, way. It is all in the service of obtaining parental permission to marry the girl he loves, and there's no hint of a Bunny character or relationship, so the similarity is somewhat superficial. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to see this turn up, six years before The Amateur Cracksman!

I've always thought that A Thief in the Night (1905) is the best of the Raffles books, and so I was looking forward to revisiting it on the Hornung read-through. It did not disappoint! This is the third collection of short stories about Raffles, and includes some of the most vividly written and memorable: the excitement of 'The Chest of Silver', the gentle nostalgia of 'The Field of Philippi' and the triumphant Bunny-saves-the-day of 'A Trap To Catch a Cracksman' are some of the best moments in the Raffles canon. These stories show Hornung at the top of his form, and they sparkle like the diamonds in a stolen tiara. :)

I think this book is particularly impressive in that it doesn't form a neat, chronological part of the same story the way the first two books do: instead the stories are scattered throughout a canon continuity that was already established, and (with a few slips, which I've discussed elsewhere) they quite successfully fit in, without feeling jarringly different in mood from the earlier stories they're placed around and between.

As ever, these stories feature plenty of the lovely poetic turns of phrase that Hornung-as-Bunny seems to be particularly good at, and I think they have especially many of the heartbreaking relationship moments between Bunny and Raffles. I don't feel as actively fannish about the Raffles stories as I used to (I think I've only got room for one 'mostly about this one relationship' canon at a time, and it's Flight of the Heron now :P), but they're as much worth being fannish about, and enthusiastically shipping, as ever.

Having been quite prolific all through the 1890s and early 1900s, Hornung seems to have taken a bit of a break from writing after this book: apart from compilations and adaptations of his earlier work, he published nothing more for another four years. I think this is therefore a good place for me to take a break from the read-through for a while. I'm going to concentrate on the D. K. Broster read-through instead, and come back for the remaining seven Hornungs anon...

I have banned myself from having any more feelings about The Flight of the Heron until next week due to important RL stuff that I need to actually concentrate on, so this post will have to be about some other books.

16. Can't believe more people haven't read.

For the most part, I understand that my obscure faves are generally obscure for a reason—I may be disappointed that more people haven't read or don't like stuff like The Longest Journey, but I'm not surprised. And then there's the difference between popularity in the world at large, popularity amongst people who read a lot of books and popularity in fannish spaces. So this is a difficult question to answer!

However: all that said, the Raffles stories absolutely deserve to have as much of a cultural presence as the Sherlock Holmes ones, and a bigger fandom! They've got everything you could want: the sort of compelling characters who are very easy indeed to fall in fannish love with, tightly-written and exciting adventure plots that could easily be as iconic in popular culture as Holmes solving mysteries is, ~~~the OTP~~~, a really beautiful writing style and, perhaps most importantly in terms of fandom, a loose canon (as it were) structure that's easy to fill in and extrapolate from with fic and headcanons.

Read these stories!

(Also, Hornung's other books are very good and virtually unheard of beyond a few especially keen Raffles fans, but none of the ones I've read so far have been quite as good or anything like as iconic as the Raffles stories, so that's understandable.)

I managed to time things so I could get to this one for the Ides of March :D It's always good to revisit old favourites—this is my fourth time reading the Raffles stories and they're just as enjoyable as the first time round.

In case you've somehow managed to remain in ignorance of the Raffles stories until now... The Amateur Cracksman (1899) is a set of interconnected short stories, the first of four books, following a young man only ever referred to by the nickname Bunny, who finds himself in desperate financial circumstances and turns for help to his old school friend A. J. Raffles. Raffles can indeed find the money he needs... by robbing a jewellery shop. Raffles and Bunny become partners in crime, and the stories follow their adventures across a series of variously successful burglaries, while evading pursuit by the canny Inspector Mackenzie of Scotland Yard. The stories are great fun, but they have the sort of darker side that you might expect from a relationship founded on crime and deception, and reveal occasional serious thematic depths. They are also, at least by the standards of the 1890s, extremely gay. You should read them!

I've already said quite a bit about Raffles elsewhere, so for this series I want to concentrate on how these stories fit into the context of E. W. Hornung's work up to this point.

So it's obvious that some of the major themes and trappings of the Raffles stories are things we've seen before: crime, cricket, Australia, professional writing, public school backstories, etc. have all made appearances in the earlier works. But these are treated rather differently here, and crime in particular is far more complex and morally ambiguous than it has been. The Unbidden Guest and The Rogue's March explore how basically good, sympathetic people could be driven to criminal acts out of desperation, but both their major criminals are firmly redeemed and back on the side of the angels by the end. And Irralie's Bushranger flirts with the idea that there could be a sort of romantic fascination in crime—but, having done so, it swerves back to the view of the criminal as a straightforward, unsympathetic villain.

The Amateur Cracksman, however, takes neither the 'narrow road' nor the 'broad, broad road' when it comes to crime and criminals. Raffles is a deeply flawed character who lies all the time to everyone including himself, repeatedly keeps information about his plans from Bunny despite apparently appreciating both the practical difficulties and the emotional hurt this causes, and, er, keeps stealing other people's things. But he's also charming, gracious, genuinely kind and cares deeply about Bunny. Bunny is clearly desperately in love with Raffles and can be forgiven a little partiality, but he's not entirely irrational to like Raffles as much as he does. And Raffles is not purely mercenary about his crimes: he cares about art ('for art's sake'!) and obviously steals partly for, as it were, the love of the game. The association of unrepentant crime, not just with a complicatedly sympathetic character, but with type and symbol of proper British gentlemanly virtue—what more so than cricket, after all?—is a very interesting feature of these stories, and certainly far more so than anything in Hornung's earlier works.

There are some more trivial differences, like the structure and shape of the stories. The episodic structure of the book, partway between a novel and a typical collection of unrelated short stories, allows for the development of long-term story arcs and character development in relatively little page-space, something which I think becomes more important and is better taken advantage of in the later Raffles stories, but which is certainly present here.

One last very noticeable feature. The gay subtext of the Raffles stories is infamous and has been discussed at some length elsewhere, but something that's struck me reading through Hornung's works up to this point is how suddenly it appears. Apart from 'After the Fact', the proto-Raffles story in Some Persons Unknown, and a few other places where you could read something into it if you really wanted to, there isn't much in the way of overtly queer themes in Hornung's earlier work. It's as if the thing springs into being fully formed with the Raffles stories, and I do have to wonder what was going on there. Finally successful enough to ditch the conventional het romances and write what he really wanted to? Unconscious influence of some of Raffles's real-life models? Or just trying something new? In any case, it's certainly noticeable that The Amateur Cracksman is the first of Hornung's long-form works not to feature a prominent central heterosexual romance.

I'm going to put the Hornung read-through on hiatus for a while now, as I have too many other books I want to get to, but it's been great fun so far and I look forward to continuing eventually.