Customer Reviews

Raffles Holmes & Company

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The book is frivolous fun. It's serious, but it's not meant to be serious. Frivolous.

John Kendrick Bangs was one of the leading American humorists of the first decade of the twentieth century. Occasionally, he'd turn his pen toward satirizing Sherlock Holmes, the great consulting detective. And in 1906 he wrote a novel, R. Holmes & Co., about the adventures of Raffles Holmes, son of Sherlock and grandson of A.J. Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman.

Raffles? you say. Raffles was the creation of E.W. Hornung, brother-in-law to Holmes' creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Where Holmes was a detective, Raffles was a thief and always one step ahead of the law. Bangs decided to put the two characters together and see what came of it. The result was Raffles Holmes, who had a touch of his father's thirst for justice and his grandfather's thirst for larcenous danger. And it's downright funny.

Don't expect this novel to fit seamlessly with the Sherlock Holmes canon, because it doesn't. And it absolutely doesn't fit with Raffles. It doesn't fit well -at all- with Raffles. It fits tolerably well with Holmes, surprisingly. I would juggle the dates given in the second chapter (which is the "secret origin" chapter, how Raffles Holmes came to be), moving it from the early 1880s after Holmes met Watson to the late 1870s, when Holmes was in private practice and may have shared a few adventures with Reginald Musgrave. (No, this isn't one of those adventures, and Watson doesn't appear in the narrative.) The trickier question is where it all fits for Raffles. Raffles simply isn't old enough to be Raffles Holmes' grandfather. Hence, Raffles Holmes must actually be Raffles' nephew, that his mother is not (as Raffles Holmes believes) Raffles' daughter but his heretofore unknown sister, posing as Raffles' daughter for similar reasons as the Stapledons posed as brother and sister in Doyle's great novel, "The Hound of the Baskervilles," to pull off a scam. Raffles Holmes, for whatever reason, doesn't know this, but this fits better for Holmes and Raffles.

I won't call this a great novel. It's a -fun- novel. A goofy novel, and one deserving of greater recognition from both fans of the Great Detective and the Amateur Cracksman.