The book Mr. Justice Raffles was written by E.W. Hornung in 1909. He played the well-known cricketer and gentleman thief A. J. Raffles in it. It was the final installment in his four Raffles novels, which had originally started in 1899 with The Amateur Cracksman. In the UK, Smith, Elder & Co., London, and Scribner's, New York, published the book. The book was a full-length novel as opposed to the three former collections of short tales, and it included darker themes. In it, a weary Raffles becomes more and more pessimistic about British high society. He meets Dan Levy, a dishonest moneylender, who manages to seduce a lot of young men—mostly sons of the wealthy—by providing loans to them and then slapping them with exorbitant interest rates. Raffles decides to discipline Levy on his own. Raffles and his companion Bunny Manders sign up for service in the Second Boer War in 1899 when he is slain by the Boers, towards the conclusion of Hornung's second collection of short stories featuring Raffles, The Black Mask. This was supposed to be the patriotic conclusion to Hornung's tale of his hero.
E. W. Hornung, an English author and poet who lived from 7 June 1866 to 22 March 1921, is most remembered for creating the A. J. Raffles series of tales about a gentleman burglar in late 19th-century London. Hornung attended Uppingham School for his education before departing in December 1883 for Sydney, where he spent the next two years due to ill health. He used his time in Australia as a backdrop when he started writing, first short stories and then novels. He developed the characters of Raffles and Bunny Manders in 1898's "In the Chains of Crime," which was inspired by his friends Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover, as well as his brother-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. In 1899, the collection of Raffles's short stories was published as a book for sale. Two other collections of Raffles's short stories, as well as a poorly regarded novel, were thereafter published. Aside from his Raffles tales, Hornung was a prolific fiction author who produced a number of works starting in 1890 with A Bride from the Bush and ending in 1914 with The Crime Doctor. Hornung's fictional work came to a halt during the First World War.
