Ernest William Hornung was an English novelist and poet, widely recognized for creating the gentleman thief A. J. Raffles. Born in 1866, Hornung was educated at Uppingham School, but poor health prompted him to travel to Sydney, Australia, in 1883. His two-year stay in Australia profoundly influenced his early literary career, providing the background for his initial short stories and his debut novel, A Bride from the Bush (1890).\n\nIn 1898, Hornung published "In the Chains of Crime," introducing A. J. Raffles and his companion Bunny Manders. These characters were inspired partly by Hornung's friends Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, as well as the Sherlock Holmes stories written by his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle. Beyond the popular Raffles series, Hornung was a prolific writer whose work explored diverse themes, including class, guilt, scientific and medical developments, and the societal role of women. Australia and cricket, a personal passion, also served as recurring motifs throughout his fiction.\n\nThe outbreak of the First World War halted Hornung's fiction writing. Following the death of his son, Oscar, at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, Hornung joined the YMCA to support war efforts in England and France. During and immediately after the war, he published poetry and a memoir, Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front. The physical toll of his wartime service worsened his fragile health, and he died of influenza in the south of France in 1921 at the age of 54.
