Johnson without the learning but with a finer wit. No one could say a neater thing, and his writings, good as they are, never adequately represented the powers of the man, nor the quickness of his brain". His obituarist in The Times described him as "a man of large and generous nature, a delightful companion and conversationalist". Much of Hornung's work fell out of favour as time passed; Rowland observed that "all of Hornung's other works have been forgotten, with the possible exception of Stingaree, but the cricketing Cracksman continues to enthral". The idea of a criminal as a positive character was one of Hornung's legacies, and Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism states that "critics have also interpreted Raffles as a prototype of the antihero in modern crime fiction". The academic Frank Wadleigh Chandler, describing Raffles's death, writes that "all his creator's attempts to portray him as a hero, rather than an anti-hero, deservedly fail." Valentine highlights one aspect of the stories was the mix of "devilry and daring" demonstrated by Raffles; in this respect he was a literary "forerunner of The Saint, James Bond and other insouciant types". The writer Colin Watson agrees, and called Hornung "a precursor of [Ian] Fleming". The character continued in book form: the writer Philip Atkey, under the pseudonym Barry Perowne, obtained permission from the Hornung estate to continue the Raffles stories, and seven more novels followed between 1933 and 1940, with Raffles transformed from a gentleman thief to a tough adventurer. Perowne continued the series in 1950, and 14 of his stories were published in the 1974 volume Raffles Revisited. Hornung's original stories have undergone a number of reprints, and when all the short stories were published in a single volume, Graham Greene considered it "a splendid idea". In 1975 Greene had written a play based on the Raffles stories, The Return of A. J. Raffles, which premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Denholm Elliott as Raffles. There were several Raffles films made during Hornung's lifetime, Further films followed in the years after his death, including Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman (1925), with House Peters Sr.; Raffles (1930), featuring Ronald Colman; The Return of Raffles (1933), with George Barraud; and Raffles (1939), starring David Niven; the last of these was a Samuel Goldwyn Productions remake of their own 1930 film, which the academic Victor E. Neuburg called the "most memorable portrayal" of the character. The