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Daily · Classics

New Arabian Nights

Robert Louis Stevenson · short story collection, 1882·8 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second version8 hrs → 50 sec
  • A stranger hands out pastries until someone eats with him. The book opens with a young man forcing cream tarts on strangers in a Leicester Square oyster bar. He eats each rejected tart himself, and once only nine are left he crushes all nine into his mouth at once and hurls his empty purse into the street.
  • The Suicide Club's pitch is framed as a modern convenience. He explains it to Prince Florizel as the missing amenity of an age that already invented railways and telegraphs: forty pounds buys "Death's private door" for men "who have grown heartily sick of the performance" but lack the nerve to pull their own trigger.
  • A dealt card decides who dies and who kills, nightly. The President shuffles a pack and deals it around the smoking room: whoever draws the ace of spades is that night's victim, whoever draws the ace of clubs must kill him, and no member learns his role until his own card turns face up.
  • Florizel skips a trial and sentences the President to a duel. Instead of punishing the club's members, the Prince rules "the President must fall in duel" and assigns Colonel Geraldine's teenage brother as his travelling companion and executioner-in-waiting across the Continent.
  • Two rivals brawl over an unconscious woman mid-chase. In "The Pavilion on the Links," Northmour clubs the narrator's scalp with a revolver butt over the right to kiss Clara's fainted body, screaming "Coward!" while the men actually hunting them are still loose in the dark woods.
  • The book closes on a guitar, not a corpse. In the final story, "Providence and the Guitar," Léon's busking under a stranger's balcony patches up a painter's marriage in one evening, prompting his own verdict: it "resuscitated a Commissary, created an English tourist, and reconciled a man and wife."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that invented the modern conspiracy-thriller machinery, a secret society with rules, cards, and a president, decades before genre fiction made that a formula, and Stevenson wraps it in the mock-Orientalist framing device of the title itself.

A prince slumming incognito through London nightlife stumbles into a club that exists to arrange its members' suicides by playing cards, and Stevenson spins the premise into six interlocking tales of disguise, murder, and blind luck.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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