Irralie's Bushranger introduced the character Stingaree, an Oxford-educated, Australian gentleman thief, in a novel that "casts doubt on conventional responses" to a positive criminal character, according to Hornung's biographer, Stephen Knight. Introducing Raffles: 1898–1914 In 1898 Hornung's mother died, aged 72 and he dedicated his next book, a series of short stories titled Some Persons Unknown, to her memory. Later that year Hornung and his wife visited Italy for six months, staying in Posillipo; his account of the location appeared in an article of the May 1899 edition of The Cornhill Magazine. The Hornungs returned to London in early 1899, to a house in Pitt Street, West Kensington, where they lived for the next six years. The fictional character Stingaree proved to be a prototype of a character Hornung used in a series of six short stories published in 1898 in Cassell's Magazine, A. J. Raffles. The character was modelled on George Cecil Ives, a Cambridge-educated criminologist and talented cricketer who, like Raffles, was a resident of the Albany, a gentlemen's only residence in Mayfair. The first tale of the series "In the Chains of Crime" was published in June that year, titled "The Ides of March". The stories were collected into one volume—with two additional tales—under the name The Amateur Cracksman, which was published the following year. Hornung used a narrative form similar to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, with Raffles and his partner-in-crime (and former school fag) Bunny Manders being the criminal counterparts to Holmes and Dr. Watson—although Rowland writes that Raffles and Manders "were also fictionalized versions of Wilde and Bosie" (Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas).—and he dedicated the stories to his brother-in-law: "To A.C.D. This form of flattery". Doyle had warned against writing the stories, and reflected in his memoirs that "there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal the hero". The book was a popular and financial success, although some critics also echoed Doyle's fears. The reviewer in The Spectator wrote that "stern moralists" would consider the book's premise "as a new, ingenious, artistic, but most reprehensible application of the crude principles involved in the old-fashioned hero-worship of Jack Sheppard and Dick Turpin". The