SOURCE: Hammond, J. R. “The Short Stories.” In A Robert Louis Stevenson Companion: A Guide to the Novels, Essays, and Short Stories, pp. 73, 79–83, 96–7. London: MacMillan, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Hammond analyzes “Markheim” as an allegory for the psychological duality of man.

Stevenson published four volumes of short stories during his lifetime: New Arabian Nights (1882), More New Arabian Nights (1885), The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887) and Island Nights Entertainments (1893). A final collection, Tales and Fantasies, was published posthumously in 1905.

He had graduated to writing short stories after a long apprenticeship of writing essays, literary criticism and book reviews. From the time of his earliest published story “A Lodging for the Night,” written when he was twenty-seven, to the closing years of his life he never lost his interest in the short story as an art form and continued to experiment in techniques of narration and the presentation...