Raffles (Green Penguin Book Club 8)

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Books, Arts

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Darryl Jones joins Caroline to discuss the first collection of Raffles stories. No major plot spoilers until you hear Caroline say we are "entering the spoiler zone", at 10:30. After that, expect full spoilers. A full list of titles in the Penguin series can be found at penguinfirsteditions.com. The next book discussed in this series will be The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace. Join the Shedunnit Book Club for two extra Shedunnit episodes a month plus access to the monthly reading discussions and community: shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Books mentioned in this episode: — Raffles by E.W. Hornung — The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie — No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase — The Final Problem by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde — The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson — The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde — The Black Mask by E.W. Hornung — Fiction and the Reading Public by Q.D. Leavis — King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard Past Shedunnit Green Penguin episodes: — The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Green Penguin Book Club 1) — The Murder on the Links (Green Penguin Book Club 2) — The Thin Man (Green Penguin Book Club 3) — Mr Fortune, Please (Green Penguin Book Club 4) — The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Green Penguin Book Club 5) — The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Green Penguin Book Club 6) — The Missing Moneylender (Green Penguin Book Club 7) NB: Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell's is a UK bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/rafflestranscript Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.
0:08.8	And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within She Done It that documents my journey
0:14.5	of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series in order.
0:23.2	Our book today is Raffles by E.W. Hornet, Penguin 63.
0:28.1	This is the second time so far in this series that the book under consideration is a collection
0:33.0	of short stories rather than an entire novel. The previous occasion, of course,
0:39.0	being H.C. Bailey's Mr. Fortune Please, which we read back in August 2024. The Penguin edition of Raffles contains
0:44.9	eight short stories, six of which had been published between June and October 1898 in the
0:50.9	monthly Castles magazine. These, plus two news stories, were then collected the following
0:56.4	year in a book titled The Amateur Craxman. This is the volume that was then republished
1:01.2	by Penguin in July 1936, with the altered title of simply Raffles. If you've been listening
1:09.7	along with all of the Green Penguin episodes, you might have spotted something unusual here.
1:14.3	This is the first time that Penguin's Crime Strand had selected a book that came from the previous century.
1:20.8	The seven titles they had republished already were all from the 1920s and 1930s,
1:26.4	with the earliest being Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at
1:29.6	Stiles, which had first come out in 1920. Raffles, meanwhile, had been out in the world for 37 years
1:36.4	by the time the book joined the Penguin ranks. It certainly wouldn't be the last time that
1:41.6	19th century crime fiction appeared, but it's interesting
1:44.7	that this was the first older selection. It's a testament, I think, to the enduring popularity of
1:51.2	E.W. Hornung's eponymous creation. When this edition came out in 1936, just in the 1930s alone
1:58.6	there had already been two film adaptations, with a third still to come before the decade was over.
2:05.1	A.J. Raffles, Mayfair Clubman and Gentleman Thief, is by far the most famous creation of author E.W. Horning.
	...

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