The Amateur Cracksman

A. J. Raffles is a famous amateur cricketer, welcome in every London club and country house, and secretly a thief of jewels, who steals for the thrill and to keep up the life of a gentleman. His old school friend Bunny Manders, ruined by debt, becomes his reluctant partner and tells their adventures in eight stories, from a midnight raid on a Bond Street jeweller to a theft aboard a ship carrying an emperor's gift, each ending with Raffles a step ahead of the police.

E. W. Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, published the stories in 1899 as a kind of mirror image of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, with the criminal as hero. Kristin Hughes reads all eight alone, in about five and a half hours.