More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter

Three impoverished gentlemen with nothing but time to waste gather at a London tobacco shop called the Bohemian Cigar Divan, where they smoke, argue, and read the newspaper. A strange advertisement catches their eye: a reward offered for a mysterious man with magnificent moustaches and a sealskin coat. Boredom and greed send them scattering across the city in separate pursuit, each man stumbling into increasingly absurd adventures involving con artists, mysterious women, and the peculiar inhabitants of Victorian London's underbelly. Written in collaboration with his wife Fanny Vandegrift, this 1885 collection showcases Stevenson at his most playful and picaresque, far from the psychological darkness of Jekyll and Hyde or the romantic adventure of Treasure Island. The frame narrative structure echoes the Arabian Nights tradition, with each man's tale growing more outlandish than the last. The result is a comic masterpiece of misadventure and mistaken identity, sharp about London's oddballs and the folly of men who mistake their own desperation for destiny. For readers who wish Stevenson had written more comedy and fewer moral dilemmas.