Robert Louis Stevenson - Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

The last classic I read before flying off was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, chosen solely for its brevity. From the first page I was hooked. It ticks all my boxes: a mystery, Victorian era sci fi, multi-perspective narrative, and the epistolary literary device. Robert Louis Stevenson was a fabulous genre writer, kind of like Arthur Conan Doyle.

After reading Jekyll & Hyde, I had to return the book to the library so I didn't read the other short stories in the collection. But as luck would have it, someone left a copy of RLS' Kidnapped on the free book shelf!

Kidnapped follows David Balfour, an ordinary boy of 16, as he gets cheated of his liberty by slave traders who caught him and put him on a boat. But before the boat reached its destination he bumped into one Alan Breck Stewart - a good guy - and started following him around getting into various forms of trouble.

I gave up reading Kidnapped shortly after this because it seemed a series of improbable developments. At that time I had no clue who or what Alan Breck Stewart was. After visiting the West Highland Museum today I learnt he was a real-life Jacobite soldier who really did get implicated in a murder. Alan Breck was innocent, of course, but he was naturally suspected since he was known as a hothead. He then became a sort of Scottish rogue-type character in novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott.