E. W. Hornung

E. W. Hornung (1866–1921) was born in Middlesbrough and spent two years in Australia in his late teens for his health, an experience that shaped much of his early fiction. In 1893 he married Constance Doyle, sister of Arthur Conan Doyle, and in 1898 created A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief of The Amateur Cracksman and its sequels — a deliberate inversion of his brother-in-law's Sherlock Holmes, with Raffles's accomplice Bunny Manders standing in for Watson. His only son was killed in action in 1915; Hornung served as a YMCA canteen volunteer near the front and wrote of the experience in Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front (1919). He died at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France, of bronchitis contracted during the war years.