thumb|1904 [[Collier's illustration by J. C. Leyendecker]]
A. J. Raffles is a British fictional character – a cricketer and gentleman thief – created by E. W. Hornung. Between 1898 and 1909, Hornung wrote a series of 26 short stories, two plays, and a novel about Raffles and his fictional chronicler, Harry "Bunny" Manders.
The first story, "The Ides of March", appeared in the June 1898 edition of Cassell's Magazine. and continued with The Black Mask (1901). The last collection, A Thief in the Night (1904) and the novel Mr. Justice Raffles (1909) tell of adventures previously withheld. The novel was poorly received, and no further stories were published.
Hornung dedicated the first collection of stories, The Amateur Cracksman, to his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, intending Raffles as a "form of flattery." In contrast to Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson, Raffles and Bunny are "something dark, morally uncertain, yet convincingly, reassuringly English."