AJ Raffles was a Victorian gentleman leading a double life, having to conceal his real nature for fear of scandal.

The stories were told by Bunny Manders, formerly Raffles' fag at school and now his colleague in crime. Bunny, of course, is deeply infatuated with Raffles, his Byronic anti-hero and wish-fulfilment alter ego. Even by the standards of Holmes and Watson, this is a very close relationship.

When Raffles had to disappear, he went undercover using the name Mr Maturin. The significance of this may not be immediately apparent, but Charles Maturin was an Irish writer from the second generation of Gothic novelists, whose most famous work was Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). He was also an ancestor of Oscar Wilde, and when Wilde was released from jail, he travelled to exile in France under the cover-name of Melmoth. In other words, Hornung was - in the quietest way imaginable - very deliberately identifying his creation with the most notoriously disgraced figure in English society. There is really no room here for coincidence.

To me, this last point is quite extraordinary. The hint is so subtle that it's almost impossible to know who was supposed to pick it up. (Presumably not Hornung's wife.)

In any event, I'm convinced that you're convinced. And I don't even need to quote Raffles' rather fine epigram: 'I used to have rather a heavy moustache, but I lost it the day after I lost my innocence.' If you are looking for quotes, however, here's a charming little vignette from the original stories; Raffles has been abducted, but just in time Bunny manages to find him:

This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on our left, his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head, his toes barely touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap passing through smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every inch of him secured on the same principle, stood, or rather hung, all that was left of Raffles, for at the first glance I believed him dead. A black ruler gagged him, the ends lashed behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to bronze in the gaslight...

I think you'd have to put an Age Check on a website that illustrated this.

Anyway, my point is that there's none of that stuff here. David Fletcher (a pseudonym of Dulan Barber, who also wrote under the name Owen Brookes) simply destroys the charm and the subversion of the original and adds nothing worth having. Every decision he makes is damaging, most crucial of all being his introduction of an omniscient narrator to replace the adulatory tone of Bunny.

My advice? Seek out the original stories - still widely available - and try to find a copy of the TV series (let me know if you succeed), but avoid this stuff altogether.