the very organised thief with murder mod

#THE VERY ORGANISED THIEF WITH MURDER MOD FULL#
#THE VERY ORGANISED THIEF WITH MURDER MOD CODE#

It is a game full of forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune, and its rules are so defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business. more elegant) than an innings of a hundred runs: cricket is also one of the very few games in which the amateur can excel the professional. In the eyes of any true cricket-lover it is possible for an innings of ten runs to be ‘better’ ( i. Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England - it is nowhere so popular as football, for instance - but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value ‘form’ or ‘style’ more highly than success. This allows not only of endless analogies between his cunning as a slow bowler and his cunning as a burglar, but also helps to define the exact nature of his crime. Raffles, of course, is good at all games, but it is peculiarly fitting that his chosen game should be cricket. Even Charles Peace in his clergyman's dog-collar, seems somewhat less of a hypocrite than Raffles in his Zingari blazer. A West End club man who is really a burglar! That is almost a story in itself, is it not? But how if it were a plumber or a greengrocer who was really a burglar? Would there be anything inherently dramatic in that? No although the theme of the ‘double life’, of respectability covering crime, is still there.

#THE VERY ORGANISED THIEF WITH MURDER MOD CODE#

And the moral code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his situation to be an especially ironical one. They think of themselves not as sinners but as renegades, or simply as outcasts. Neither Raffles nor Bunny appears to feel at all strongly that stealing is wrong in itself, though Raffles does once justify himself by the casual remark that ‘the distribution of property is all wrong anyway’. His remorse, when he feels any, is almost purely social he has disgraced ‘the old school’, he has lost his right to enter ‘decent society’, he has forfeited his amateur status and become a cad.

Raffles is presented to us and this is rubbed home in countless scraps of dialogue and casual remarks - not as an honest man who has gone astray, but as a public-school man who has gone astray. However, the truly dramatic thing, about Raffles, the thing that makes him a sort of byword even to this day (only a few weeks ago, in a burglary case, a magistrate referred to the prisoner as ‘a Raffles in real life’), is the fact that he is a gentleman. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work. Hornung was a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies.Īt this date, the charm of Raffles is partly in the period atmosphere and partly in the technical excellence of the stories. No Orchids is the 1939 version of glamorized crime, Raffles the 1900 version. For sociological purposes they can be compared. Any such choice is necessarily arbitrary - I might equally well have chosen Arsène Lupin for instance - but at any rate No Orchids and the Raffles books (1) have the common quality of being crime stories which play the limelight on the criminal rather than the policeman. Just for that reason he and his exploits make a suitable background against which to examine a more modern crime story such as No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Very few people would need telling that he played cricket for England, had bachelor chambers in the Albany and burgled the Mayfair houses which he also entered as a guest. Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, is still one of the best-known characters in English fiction.

The very organised thief with murder mod