The Body Snatcher

Robert Louis Stevenson

Description

An uncanny thriller from the acclaimed author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Medical school students Fettes and Macfarlane are charged with the unenviable task of receiving and paying for the institution’s research cadavers. When Fettes recognizes the dead body of a woman he saw alive and well just the day before, he suspects murder. Macfarlane, however, insists that the authorities would never believe they had nothing to do with her death. Reluctantly, Fettes agrees to keep quiet, but soon regrets his decision when another familiar corpse turns up—and takes on a life of its own.
 
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 22 décembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781480490970
• Langue: English

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The Body Snatcher
Robert Louis Stevenson

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM



Robert Louis Stevenson
Although widely recognized as a writer of adventure fiction for boys, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) also wrote several classics of mystery, crime, and suspense fiction. The best known, of course, is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , but readers have enjoyed his other novels and short story collections that contain mysteries as well, including The Wrong Box , New Arabian Nights , The Body Snatcher , and The Wrecker .
Born in Edinburgh, the son of Margaret Isabella (Balfour) and Thomas Stevenson, an engineer, he was christened Robert Lewis Balfour but adopted his more familiar name at eighteen. Constantly ill, he received a spotty education. He discontinued his engineering studies at the University of Edinburgh due to lack of interest, and although he later passed his bar examinations, he never practiced law. Stevenson moved several times because of his lung disease, and was living in a French artists’ colony in 1876 when he fell in love with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a woman ten years his senior with three children from an unhappy marriage. Three years after their meeting, he followed her to California, where he suffered a traveling accident that would affect him for the rest of his life. They were married in 1880, returning to Europe to live in Scotland, Switzerland, and France. After returning to the United States for another year, the Stevensons sailed for the South Seas in 1888 and, two years later, settled in Samoa, where he would spend the rest of his life.
Stevenson wrote some of the most famous and popular books for boys in all literature, notably Treasure Island (1883), Prince Otto (1885), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow (1888), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889), as well as the still-beloved volume of poetry A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). He ventured into the mystery-crime field at every stage of his literary career, beginning with a collection of stories, New Arabian Nights (1882), which included such classic tales as “The Suicide Club” and “The Pavilion on the Links,” which were models of romantic roguery. Three years later he produced More New Arabian Nights in collaboration with his wife; one of the stories in this collection, “The Dynamiter,” is often reprinted.
In 1886 Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , a macabre allegory once described as the only crime story in which the solution is more terrifying than the problem. In this classic tale of a dual personality, Dr. Henry Jekyll, a brilliant doctor and chemist, is obsessed with the concept of one person possessing two separate and distinct personalities. Experimenting with drugs, he is able to prove his theory, committing the vilest acts of unremitting evil at night as “Mr. Hyde,” only to return to respectability as Dr. Jekyll the next day.
The Wrong Box (1889), which Stevenson wrote in collaboration with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, was originally titled A Game of Bluff . In this humorous crime story, two nephews watch over their aged uncle so that he can live long enough to inherit the fortune they expect to acquire when he passes on. When they discover a corpse they believe to be his, they attempt to prevent the revelation of his death by shipping the body from one place to another in a zany series of improbable stratagems. Lawyer-detective Michael Finsbury earnestly (and helplessly) tracks the decaying body.
Stevenson and Osbourne also collaborated on The Wrecker (1892), an adventure tale involving pirate treasure, opium smuggling, sabotage, murder, bankruptcy, and fraudulent insurance claims; the narrator is also the investigator.
Treasure Island and Kidnapped have elements of mystery; “The Body-Snatcher” (1895) is an eerie thriller; and The Merry Men and Other Fables (1887) contains a good murder story, “Markheim,” in which an antique dealer is brutally stabbed to death.
Films
Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll has been one of the screen’s most interesting characters, and his historical romances, for example, Treasure Island , Kidnapped , and The Black Arrow , have often been filmed.