BBC has dramatised some of Hornung's Raffles stories for radio, first in the 1940s and again from 1985 to 1993 in the radio series Raffles. Nigel Havers narrated some of the stories on BBC radio in 1995. In 1977 Anthony Valentine played the thief, and Christopher Strauli his partner, in a Yorkshire Television series. A 2001 television film, Gentleman Thief, adapted the stories for a contemporary audience, with Havers playing the lead. Writing Style and technique Hornung's prose is widely admired for its lucid, simple style. Oliver Edwards, writing in The Times, considered that "not the least attractive part of the Raffles books is the simple, plain, unaffected language in which each one of them is written". The obituarist in the same newspaper agrees, and thinks Hornung had "a power of good and clear description and a talent for mystery and surprise". Colin Watson also considers the point, and observes that in Hornung's writing, "superfluous description has been avoided and account of action is to the point", while Doyle admired his "sudden use of the right adjective and the right phrase", something the writer and journalist Jeremy Lewis sees as a "flamboyant, Kiplingesque taste for the vivid". Critics have observed that Hornung's stories and novels are well-structured. George Orwell wrote that Hornung was "a very conscientious and on his level a very able writer. Anyone who cares for sheer efficiency must admire his work". Watson states that Hornung's "writing has pace. The stories, however ridiculous, carry the readers along briskly". According to Cox, "Hornung's work showed steady maturation" during his career, a point that Doyle also agreed with, although Edwards disagrees, and thinks The Crime Doctor to be one of Hornung's weaker books. Hornung's approach to characters differed from other contemporary authors. Cox notes that Hornung "frequently chose to write from the perspective of the criminal", and while many of Hornung's novels contained criminal activity as a major element of the plot, the critic for Contemporary Authors states that the works do not "belong to the crime-fiction genre". Hornung's works included elements from more general fiction, "such as false identities, disguises, and disowned heiresses". Major themes The academic Nick Rance identifies three categories of Raffles stories: "the rise of the New Woman", in which Raffles either escapes from romantic entanglements, or uses the infatuations of a woman in order to achieve his aims; "the rise of the plutocracy", in which