Raffles’ rooms at the Albany were, as I have described elsewhere, more befitting of a minor poet than the gentleman and cricketer he was. We spent many a happy hour in those rooms—and many unhappy, though fewer of those, thankfully—and even now, I can see them in my mind’s eye as clearly as were I still in them.
They were gutted after Raffles was tried and found guilty in absentia. Searched from top to bottom, wall to wall, even beneath the floorboards by sacrilegious officers of the law who hoped to find further evidence against him and against me. The manager of the building must have been furious; always a fussy, persnickity little man, I don’t doubt he was more angered by the disruption to his building by the police than by A. J.’s criminality bringing it into disrepute. People would much sooner move into the former rooms of an infamous criminal than into rooms with stripped wallpaper and bared floorboards—especially at the Albany’s prices!
I thought about those rooms a great deal whilst I was in prison. On my darker days, and of them there were many, I would lie back on my cot, flea-ridden and hard, and close my eyes, imagining I was instead sprawled back on A.J.’s comfortable, worn sopha. I would imagine until my head ached with the effort of it; until I could feel the warmth of the crackling fire, hear the bustling of the street below, smell the Sullivan’s smoke and coffee which promised his presence; promised his hand on my shoulder and voice in my ear; promised that Raffles would be there beside me if only I kept my eyes shut tight.
The Albany is still there, of course, as are Raffles’ rooms. I don’t doubt that his sopha, his bookcases, his desk, his bed, all of the large furniture which was already present when he first moved in was all eventually set back in order once the police had got their hands into every crack and nook they wanted. It is only Raffles who is removed; Raffles and every trace of him.
I tried to envision it. Every time I was jolted back from my precious illusions to cold reality, lying on that damned cot in that damned gaol, I would force myself to imagine instead someone new in those rooms; try to convince myself that drinking the wolfsbane and ruby grape of pleasant memory would be far more damaging in the long term than accepting harsh reality as it was. Raffles was gone.
And so, I turned my imagination to evicting him. I tried to imagine his bookshelves no longer bearing Rossetti and Keats and Browning and Shakespeare and Verne but filled instead with books of science, mathematics, engineering, or dry legal tomes, the duller the better; or better yet, bereft of all but the most run-of-the-mill bulk-purchased books-for-show, a library of the wilfully yet shamefacedly illiterate, bought in wholesale to mislead one’s friends into believing one cares for higher things than horses and baccarat. I tried to imagine his Indian rugs replaced with dull mats; a blank wall where his Blessed Damozel once hung; the garden of The Strawberry Thief little more than yet another suburban lawn. Time and again I burned his rooms to ashes in my mind, burned him out of them to burn them from my memories. I wanted to set his inferno ablaze and in turn set myself free of him…
Adapting the Raffles stories: “The Chest of Silver” 1977
The ‘77 TV series is without hesitation the most faithful screen adaptation of the Raffles stories that exists. It kept close, even word-by-word, to the original short stories in many instances, while taking liberties and making changes in others. These changes were sometimes in order to make an Earls Court story fit into the Albany era, sometimes to expand a story too short to adapt to a 50 minute episode.
“The Chest of Silver”, the fifth episode in the series, is a very interesting one in the order. Most scenes follow the dialogue of the book closely, and the plot strays very little from the original from the start in Raffles’ room to his return and reveal. However, at this point, the series takes a turn and does what it does best – it takes what was an unresolved piece of the story, develops it, and brings it to a conclusion.
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In fine, this particular exploit entirely justified itself in my eyes, in spite of the superfluous (but invariable) secretiveness which I could seldom help resenting in my heart I never thought less of it than in the present instance; and my one mild reproach was on the subject of the phantom Crawshay.
“You let me think he was in the air again,” I said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me to find that you had never heard of him since the day of his escape through your window.”
“I never even thought of him, Bunny, until you came to see me the day before yesterday, and put him into my head with your first words. The whole point was to make you as genuinely anxious about the plate as you must have seemed all along the line.”
“Of course I see your point,” I rejoined; “but mine is that you labored it. You needn’t have written me a downright lie about the fellow.”
“Nor did I, Bunny.”
“Not about the 'prince of professors’ being 'in the offing’ when you left?”
“My dear Bunny, but so he was!” cried Raffles. “Time was when I was none too pure an amateur. But after this I take leave to consider myself a professor of the professors. And I should like to see one more capable of skippering their side!”
–
As his custom is, Hornung ends the story on rather unresolved feelings, leaving the reader to imagine for themselves the next beat in the conversation.
Below is the same scene in the TV episode, moved to later in the evening and to the club instead of continuing the conversation in Bunny’s rooms after Raffles’ reveal - giving Bunny some more time to reflect on recent events, after having already been upset over Raffles’ treatment of him and then forgiven him for it.
Writer Philip Mackie, however, decided to take it further. In the next scene we find Bunny sitting miserable on his bed, with the same whiskey decanter we saw nearly full earlier in the day now nearly empty. Raffles enters, and this time it is harder to brush off Bunny’s grievances.
The next day Raffles keeps his promise (in his own way…) by letting Bunny know at the last minute that Inspector Mackenzie is on his way, while all the stolen silver is in the cases Bunny just picked up at the station.
After a nervous Bunny trying to hide the silver and some tense moments of Raffles avoiding a cheerful Mackenzie to discover the real contents of his cricket bag, the episode ends with Bunny agreeing that Raffles indeed knows his rabbit best and should decide what to tell him and what to not.
If the conclusion is satisfactory or not can be debated, but at least Bunny has been given some more space to voice his opinions and feelings. And, perhaps even more, Raffles is given the chance to tell both Bunny and the audience that he does hold his “right-hand man” and “partner” in rather high regard. (The same thing can be said for “The Spoils of Sacrilege”, which works much in the same way, but with a perhaps even more interesting objective - but that I will have to get to another day.)
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(clips and screenshots colour restored by @the-prince-of-professors - please do not download and repost!)
ahh thank you for comparing the episode to the story! I so admire that they made space for Bunny’s side of things in the show. We don’t get Bunny as the writer and narrator, but he is Raffles’s tower of strength and his partner and his feelings matter just as much as Raffles and the rest of the plot!
(I think they inadvertently made me crave emotional honesty like this in other media i watch. It would be easier to be lazy about their emotional attachment and make them be mean and cutting the other down, which seems to be cool in tv nowadays? but instead they made them so soft and loving. No wonder this episode is so beloved. )
