write the play by his enjoyment of the Raffles stories in his youth, and by a Royal Shakespeare Company production of the play Sherlock Holmes. Greene said that "Raffles and Bunny were, in a sense, the reverse side of the medal of Sherlock Holmes and Watson. That gave me the idea of doing a play on these two characters." In the same interview, Greene said of the play, "This is not an adventure of Raffles which Hornung wrote. Hornung finished by destroying Raffles—he was killed in the South African war. I've brought him back from the South African war, and this is an additional adventure, as it were. I've brought out what I consider the latent homosexuality in the characters of Bunny and Raffles. I've done it only slightly—I mean it's not by any means a homosexual play. Bunny had been imprisoned with Oscar Wilde for a quite different offence, and so I've introduced Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquis of Queensberry, and also the Prince of Wales, whom I've always found a very sympathetic character." Regarding the Prince of Wales, Greene said, "I have the feeling that there would never have been the war of 1914 if he had lived. I think recent documents—the correspondence with the Portuguese ambassador, wasn't it?—show him as much more taking a line in politics than one had realised before." Greene precedes the published version of the play with an author's note, which explains the story cannot of course be accepted as strictly true to history: I have in one respect seriously deviated from the truth – the Marquess of Queensberry met his end in January 1900 and I have extended his life into the late summer of that year.... On the other hand the gold box presented by the theatrical profession to the Prince of Wales is in no way fictitious.... And I am prepared to defend the truth of Raffles' return from South Africa alive. His chronicler, and his close companion, Bunny, wrote a moving account of Raffles' death and claimed to have been beside him when he was 'killed', but Bunny had every reason for falsifying history, to disguise the fact that, far from being in South Africa, he was, at the date of Spion Kop, incarcerated in Reading Gaol, where he had the good fortune to meet Oscar Wilde. Productions Denholm Mitchell Elliott starred as Raffles in the London premiere