I didn’t know that some critics consider Stevenson the father of the English short story. I can almost understand why from the stories in this collection. They each create an exciting sense of mystery and intrigue, although they do unfortunately then tend to peter out…
It was with a short story – A Lodging for the Night – published in 1877, that Stevenson made his fictional debut, aged 26. He gathered it and his other short stories into the 1882 collection New Arabian Nights which was very well received. The book is divided into two volumes:
Volume one
Seven stories published by London Magazine in serial format from June to October 1878, composed of two story groups, or cycles:
The Suicide Club – three linked tales about a gentleman’s club which ‘helps’ its members do away with themselves. The character of the bored, drawling Prince Florizel, given to disguises and mingling with London lowlife, and who resolves the situations set up in each story, reminded me of Oscar Wilde heroes, and also that Stevenson himself cultivated a reputation as a dandy. Then again, the langorous aristocrat was a stereotype of late-Victorian fiction. The prose is stately, with nicely balanced pairs of subordinate clauses.
During his residence in London, the accomplished Prince Florizel of Bohemia gained the affection of all classes by the seduction of his manner and by a well-considered generosity. He was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did.
(The Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts)
In the second set of four linked stories, The Rajah’s Diamond, a woman and her brother conspire to steal her husband’s famous jewel (Story of the Bandbox); by a series of coincidences a trainee priest finds the famous jewels and promptly abandons his studies to flee to Paris, in the company of the original jewel-owner’s desperado brother (Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders); a young bank assistant from Edinburgh is called to Paris where he gets involved in the machinations between the characters of the previous stories (Story of the House with the Green Blinds); and Prince Florizel, the hero of The Suicide Club, reappears and resolves the fate of the great jewel (The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective).
The stories are a cross between Oscar Wilde’s adventures among the upper classes and Conan Doyle’s crime yarns – but not as finished as either of them. The attitude is clever-young-man, cavalier. The prose is serviceable, sometimes stylish, without the sparkle or crispness of Treasure Island:
Not long after, the marriage of Francis Scrymgeour and Miss Vandeleur was celebrated in great privacy; and the Prince acted on that occasion as groom’s man. The two Vandeleurs surprised some rumour of what had happened to the diamond; and their vast diving operations on the River Seine are the wonder and amusement of the idle. It is true that through some miscalculation they have chosen the wrong branch of the river. As for the Prince, that sublime person, having now served his turn, may go, along with the Arabian Author, topsy-turvy into space.
Volume two
The second volume is a collection of four unconnected stories, previously published in magazines:
- The Pavilion on the Links (1880) told in nine mini-chapters. Arthur Conan Doyle described this as the best short story in the world. It certainly starts with great mystery and vivid description of its setting on the bleak Scottish coast, and with the mysterious figure of the wandering vagabond narrator. But, like the stories above, it gets less interesting as it goes along. All the mystery built up so well in the early sections disappears in a puff when we learn the mysterious men are just protecting a thieving old banker from the vengeful Italian carbonari he has cheated. I see Penguin published it as one of their mini-paperbacks. I wouldn’t be in any rush to read it.
- A Lodging for the Night (1877) His first published effort, not really a story at all, just an imagining of a vivid night in the life of the famous lowlife French medieval poet, Francois Villon.
- The Sire De Malétroits Door (1877)
- Providence and the Guitar (1878)
1001
The title is obviously an allusion to the Arab classic, One Thousand and One Nights, which was very popular around this time. John Payne’s translation from the Arabic in nine volumes began publishing in 1882, and Richard Burton’s translation was published in 1885. Stevenson uses the name because his stories are interlinked, as in the original; but also uses its fictionality to justify his cynical, rather throwaway attitude to the stories and the abrupt cuts between them.
The mystery-solving Prince Florizel
It’s interesting to see the way the langorous prince Florizel figure is used to tie together all seven of the stories in volume one, and to note the way the device nearly but not quite works; there’s something unsatisfactory; he kind of sorts out the mysteries raised so interestingly at the start of each story, but randomly as it were. There is no compelling logic to the tales themselves, which are mostly just sequences of accidents.
Did Prince Florizel influence Sherlock Holmes?
It’s interesting to speculate how much Arthur Conan Doyle was influenced by the recurring figure of Prince Florizel. Did he see the value in having a recurring character introducing or starring in mystery stories, but recognise that he needed some kind of mechanism or device to really justify his ubiquity? That the figure needed real tools to solve mysteries, not just Prince Florizel’s gentlemanly attitude? Did this train of thought help lead to the creation of the freelance detective who would solve each one of his numerous cases by forensic insights bordering on magic? Conan Doyle wrote the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study In Scarlet, just four years after New Arabian Nights was published.
Books & Boots 
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