Release date is 2026-04-06

Jeroen Hellingman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net/ for Project Gutenberg

"Lord Lister No. 0045: Het gestolen dienstmeisje" by Matull and Blankensee is a pulp crime-adventure serial written in the early 20th century. The tale follows gentleman–master thief John Raffles (Lord Lister) and his aide Charly Brand as they mete out flamboyant, vigilante-style justice in London while running rings around Inspector Baxter. Center stage is Raffles’s bid to save a mistreated orphaned maid, exposing cruelty and hypocrisy among the respectable.

The opening of the story shows Raffles joking about the bounty on his head, then strolling to the Tower where he witnesses Irish Guards captain McGovern savagely caning his men; Raffles provokes the bully, snatches his drill-cane, and vows a lesson. Spotting the captain’s wretched young servant, Anna Marie, he later engineers a prank by swapping the doctor’s soothing salve for a blistering one and, posing as a colleague, ensures both the captain and his shrill wife feel the burn. Determined to rescue the girl, Raffles breaks into the captain’s house at night, falls down a stairwell, is bound with a clothesline, and narrowly avoids being shot—until Anna Marie opens the door and Charly rushes in to cut him free. They escape with the “stolen” maid, leaving the police and press to swarm the scene while the captain boasts of having knocked out two of Raffles’s teeth. Back at Raffles’s villa, Anna Marie reveals she is a weaver’s orphan hounded by a predatory orphanage head and that sealed papers about her father are kept at the institution. Raffles immediately bluffs his way into the orphanage as a Scotland Yard man, seizes the packet, and hauls the terrified “weesvader” to a nearby station to extract a confession—setting the stage for the caper ahead. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Amsterdam: Roman- Boek- en Kunsthandel, 1910