[1][2][3] He is the companion of A. J. Raffles, a cricketer and gentleman thief, who makes a living robbing the rich in late Victorian British High Society.

[5] According to Richard Lancelyn Green, prototypes of Raffles and Bunny appeared in Hornung's short story "After the Fact", which was published in Chambers's Journal in January 1896.

cried Deedes, not unkindly; a moment later he was shaking my hand and smiling on my confusion...We were twenty-eight and twenty-four now, instead of eighteen and fourteen; yet, as we walked, only one of us was a man, and I was once more his fag.

[7] There was a considerable age gap between them and Bunny had been Raffles's fag (i.e. a younger pupil required to act as a personal servant to a senior one).

[7] Ten years after they were at school together, during which time Bunny inherits a considerable amount of money, the two reunite at Raffles's apartment in the Albany to play baccarat with others.

Together the two launch a series of daring robberies on London society, until they are eventually exposed in "The Gift of the Emperor" and arrested on board a passenger liner.

Raffles leaps overboard and is presumed drowned, while Bunny is returned to England to serve a term of eighteen months in prison.

Bunny writes, "Incredible as it may appear to the moralists, I had sustained no external hallmark by my term of imprisonment, and I am vain enough to believe that the evil which I did had not a separate existence in my face.

My straw-colored moustache, grown in the flat after a protracted holiday, again preserved the most disappointing dimensions, and was still invisible in certain lights without wax.

For example, in "Gentlemen and Players", Bunny states that it was a pleasure for him "to accompany Raffles to all his [cricket] matches, to watch every ball he bowled, or played, or fielded, and to sit chatting with him in the pavilion when he was doing none of these three things".

[13] Bunny struggles as a journalist however, commenting, "It was no easy matter to keep your end up as a raw freelance of letters; for my part, I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

Hornung's creation of Bunny was influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle's character Dr. Watson, the first-person narrator of most of the Sherlock Holmes stories, although there are significant differences between them.

William Vivian Butler writes that this eliminates any need for readers "to battle with [their] conscience: Bunny, the narrator of the stories, obligingly takes that chore clean off [their] shoulders".