The Wrong Box

By Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne and Otto Penzler

Two brothers will do whatever it takes to hide a body and inherit a fortune in this laugh-out-loud crime caper

Elderly Joseph and Masterman Finsbury are the last survivors of a tontine established in their youth. Their nephews, Morris and John, have one simple goal: Keep Uncle Joseph alive longer than Uncle Masterman. If they succeed, the brothers will be set for life. If they fail, the fortune goes to cousin Michael—and poverty will be their fate.
 
When the siblings regain consciousness after a train wreck, they discover that Joseph—or a man dressed exactly like him—died in the crash. Not to worry; Morris has a plan. Instead of burying the body where anyone might dig it up, they’ll ship it around the world until Uncle Masterman dies. It seems foolproof, until the incorrect package arrives at the first destination and Morris and John have to find poor, dead Uncle Joseph before somebody opens the wrong box.
 
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Dec 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781497648722

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850, changing his second name to ‘Louis’ at the age of eighteen. He has always been loved and admired by countless readers and critics for ‘the excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures’ found in his classic stories and, without doubt, he created some of the most horribly unforgettable characters in literature and, above all, Mr. Edward Hyde.

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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. Among the films based on his mystery works, apart from the countless adaptations of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, are the following:

•   Trouble for Two. MGM, 1936. Robert Montgomery, Rosalind Russell, Louis Hayward, Reginald Owen. Directed by J. Walter Ruben. Based on The Suicide Club. The heir to the throne of a European kingdom, visiting London incognito, falls in with the morbid, death-seeking members of a gambling club.

•   The Body Snatcher. RKO, 1945. Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Bela Lugosi, Russell Wade. Directed by Robert Wise. Based on the famous novella. The head of a Scottish medical school is forced to hire grave robbers to supply him with corpses for dissection; the body snatchers soon turn to murder.

•   The Strange Door. Universal, 1951. Charles Laughton, Karloff, Sally Forrest, Richard Stapley, Paul Cavanagh. Directed by Joseph Pevney. From The Sire de Maletroit’s Door, which first appeared in the January 1878 issue of Temple Bar; it was collected in New Arabian Nights. In seventeenth-century France, a young man invades a castle—full of secret passageways, torture chambers, and crushing walls—ruled by a madman.

•   The Wrong Box. Columbia (British), 1966. John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Nanette Newman, Peter Sellers, the Temperance Seven. Directed by Bryan Forbes. From the 1899 novel. The conniving heirs of two elderly brothers, who stand to inherit a large trust fund, are befuddled by a mix-up in corpses in this black comedy.

—Otto Penzler

PREFACE

‘Nothing like a little judicious levity,’ says Michael Finsbury in the text: nor can any better excuse be found for the volume in the reader’s hand. The authors can but add that one of them is old enough to be ashamed of himself, and the other young enough to learn better.

R. L. S. & L. O.

CHAPTER I

In Which Morris Suspects

How very little does the amateur, dwelling at home at ease, comprehend the labours and perils of the author, and, when he smilingly skims the surface of a work of fiction, how little does he consider the hours of toil, consultation of authorities, researches in the Bodleian, correspondence with learned and illegible Germans—in one word, the vast scaffolding that was first built up and then knocked down, to while away an hour for him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with a biography of Tonti—birthplace, parentage, genius probably inherited from his mother, remarkable instance of precocity, etc—and a complete treatise on the system to which he bequeathed his name. The material is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I scorn to appear vainglorious. Tonti is dead, and I never saw anyone who even pretended to regret him; and, as for the tontine system, a word will suffice for all the purposes of this unvarnished narrative.

A number of sprightly youths (the more the merrier) put up a certain sum of money, which is then funded in a pool under trustees; coming on for a century later, the proceeds are fluttered for a moment in the face of the last survivor, who is probably deaf, so that he cannot even hear of his success—and who is certainly dying, so that he might just as well have lost. The peculiar poetry and even humour of the scheme is now apparent, since it is one by which nobody concerned can possibly profit; but its fine, sportsmanlike character endeared it to our grandparents.

When Joseph Finsbury and his brother Masterman were little lads in white-frilled trousers, their father—a well-to-do merchant in Cheapside—caused them to join a small but rich tontine of seven-and-thirty lives. A thousand pounds was the entrance fee; and Joseph Finsbury can remember to this day the visit to the lawyer’s, where the members of the tontine—all children like himself—were assembled together, and sat in turn in the big office chair, and signed their names with the assistance of a kind old gentleman in spectacles and Wellington boots. He remembers playing with the children afterwards on the lawn at the back of the lawyer’s house, and a battle-royal that he had with a brother tontiner who had kicked his shins. The sound of war called forth the lawyer from where he was dispensing cake and wine to the assembled parents in the office, and the combatants were separated, and Joseph’s spirit (for he was the smaller of the two) commended by the gentleman in the Wellington boots, who vowed he had been just such another at the same age. Joseph wondered to himself if he had worn at that time little Wellingtons and a little bald head, and when, in bed at night, he grew tired of telling himself stories of sea-fights, he used to dress himself up as the old gentleman, and entertain other little boys and girls with cake and wine.

In the year 1840 the thirty-seven were all alive; in 1850 their number had decreased by six; in 1856 and 1857 business was more lively, for the Crimea and the Mutiny carried off no less than nine. There remained in 1870 but five of the original members, and at the date of my story, including the two Finsburys, but three.

By this time Masterman was in his seventy-third year; he had long complained of the effects of age, had long since retired from business, and now lived in absolute seclusion under the roof of his son Michael, the well-known solicitor. Joseph, on the other hand, was still up and about, and still presented but a semi-venerable figure on the streets in which he loved to wander. This was the more to be deplored because Masterman had led (even to the least particular) a model British life. Industry, regularity, respectability, and a preference for the four per cents are understood to be the very foundations of a green old age. All these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless, perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many years had passed over his head before he would have travelled thirty miles to address an infant school. He was no student; his reading was confined to elementary textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even fly as high as cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume. His lectures were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they were addressed direct to ‘the great heart of the people’, and the heart of the people must certainly be sounder than its head, for his lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled ‘How to Live Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year’, created a sensation among the unemployed. ‘Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability’, gained him the respect of the shallow-minded. As for his celebrated essay on ‘Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the Masses’, read before the Working Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it was received with a ‘literal ovation’ by an unintelligent audience of both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next year elected honorary president of the institution, an office of less than no emolument—since the holder was expected to come down with a donation—but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.

While Joseph was thus building himself up a reputation among the more cultivated portion of the ignorant, his domestic life was suddenly overwhelmed by orphans. The death of his younger brother Jacob saddled him with the charge of two boys, Morris and John; and in the course of the same year his family was still further swelled by the addition of a little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility, advertised for a nurse, and purchased a second-hand perambulator. Morris and John he made more readily welcome; not so much because of the tie of consanguinity as because the leather business (in which he hastened to invest their fortune of thirty thousand pounds) had recently exhibited inexplicable symptoms of decline. A young but capable Scot was chosen as manager to the enterprise, and the cares of business never again afflicted Joseph Finsbury. Leaving his charges in the hands of the capable Scot (who was married), he began his extensive travels on the Continent and in Asia Minor.

With a polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the other, he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European languages. The first of these guides is hardly applicable to the purposes of the philosophic traveller, and even the second is designed more expressly for the tourist than for the expert in life. But he pressed interpreters into his service—whenever he could get their services for nothing—and by one means and another filled many notebooks with the results of his researches.

In these wanderings he spent several years, and only returned to England when the increasing age of his charges needed his attention. The two lads had been placed in a good but economical school, where they had received a sound commercial education; which was somewhat awkward, as the leather business was by no means in a state to court enquiry. In fact, when Joseph went over his accounts preparatory to surrendering his trust, he was dismayed to discover that his brother’s fortune had not increased by his stewardship; even by making over to his two wards every penny he had in the world, there would still be a deficit of seven thousand eight hundred pounds. When these facts were communicated to the two brothers in the presence of a lawyer, Morris Finsbury threatened his uncle with all the terrors of the law, and was only prevented from taking extreme steps by the advice of the professional man. ‘You cannot get blood from a stone,’ observed the lawyer.

And Morris saw the point and came to terms with his uncle. On the one side, Joseph gave up all that he possessed, and assigned to his nephew his contingent interest in the tontine, already quite a hopeful speculation. On the other, Morris agreed to harbour his uncle and Miss Hazeltine (who had come to grief with the rest), and to pay to each of them one pound a month as pocket-money. The allowance was amply sufficient for the old man; it scarce appears how Miss Hazeltine contrived to dress upon it; but she did, and, what is more, she never complained. She was, indeed, sincerely attached to her incompetent guardian. He had never been unkind; his age spoke for him loudly; there was something appealing in his whole-souled quest of knowledge and innocent delight in the smallest mark of admiration; and, though the lawyer had warned her she was being sacrificed, Julia had refused to add to the perplexities of Uncle Joseph.

In a large, dreary house in John Street, Bloomsbury, these four dwelt together; a family in appearance, in reality a financial association. Julia and Uncle Joseph were, of course, slaves; John, a gentle man with a taste for the banjo, the music-hall, the Gaiety bar, and the sporting papers, must have been anywhere a secondary figure; and the cares and delights of empire devolved entirely upon Morris. That these are inextricably intermixed is one of the commonplaces with which the bland essayist consoles the incompetent and the obscure, but in the case of Morris the bitter must have largely outweighed the sweet. He grudged no trouble to himself, he spared none to others; he called the servants in the morning, he served out the stores with his own hand, he took soundings of the sherry, he numbered the remainder biscuits; painful scenes took place over the weekly bills, and the cook was frequently impeached, and the tradespeople came and hectored with him in the back parlour upon a question of three farthings. The superficial might have deemed him a miser; in his own eyes he was simply a man who had been defrauded; the world owed him seven thousand eight hundred pounds, and he intended that the world should pay.

But it was in his dealings with Joseph that Morris’s character particularly shone. His uncle was a rather gambling stock in which he had invested heavily; and he spared no pains in nursing the security. The old man was seen monthly by a physician, whether he was well or ill. His diet, his raiment, his occasional outings, now to Brighton, now to Bournemouth, were doled out to him like pap to infants. In bad weather he must keep the house. In good weather, by half-past nine, he must be ready in the hall; Morris would see that he had gloves and that his shoes were sound; and the pair would start for the leather business arm in arm. The way there was probably dreary enough, for there was no pretence of friendly

Reviews for The Wrong Box

[havingfaith-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Robert Louis Stevenson is a household name, whose works include Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He only lived from 1850 to 1894 and this little number was published in 1889, so represents one of his final achievements delivered at the height of his powers. There’s a co-writer, Lloyd Osbourne, but he must have been reasonably good too because I can’t tell which passages are Stevenson’s and which are not. The story feels as if it was written by one mind, holding it in the hollow of a single hand with no hint of committee input.RLS is generally thought of as an author of dramatic adventures, but this is a departure because it’s a macabre comedy, a farce if you like. He must have been a serious man with a sarcastic sense of humour that was dying to tunnel its way out of the starched shirt. Excuse the quotation from memory, as the book is no longer to hand, but some of the lines are just as applicable today, things like “Julia often made acquaintances in Bournemouth… and would have greatly preferred more allowance and less uncle.” There’s also “an incident at the railway ticket office which bordered on brigandage”, which sounds familiar and still topical to me. Then, after a supposed murder, failure to declare the death followed by desecration of the corpse and forgery of its signature, “the legal profession can be so petty”. There’s also a massive double train wreck, metal and mutilation, where one of the shell-shocked survivors declares “I think there may have been some sort of accident.”Despite dozens of excellent moments, I marked it down from a four to a three star rating not because I didn’t think it was great stuff but because the language can be stilted, there are slow sections that could have been cut down to keep the action rolling, then it goes a bit wrong near the end and reads like a rush for the finish post. That aside, the core idea is terrific so I’m not underselling this.The tontine idea this is based on is such a wonderfully, exquisitely pointless venture that even though it originated in Italy, I can easily imagine the Victorian English seizing on it and making it their own. It’s brilliant of course, brilliant, but pointless. I think I need that in my life. In brief, imagine the parents of thirty children putting in a block of money for investment. The last surviving child after ninety or so years wins all of the capital and the interest, which has accumulated over the course of their long lifetime. Naturally, they will be as good as dead when they get it and too much of an invalid to enjoy spending anything, so the whole scheme becomes ridiculous, just a way to put wealth out of circulation for up to a century. It’s a good excuse for the author to show the size of the group depleting in different entertaining ways, but this wasn’t explored as well as it might have been.I can see themes in this book that have been re-used in popular culture, such as the body in the piano turning up again fifty years later in The Green Man (Alistair Sim) and I’d say it had some influence on Death of a Salesman and permeated into the roots of detective theatre.The people for whom a tontine contract is not ridiculous are the children/nephews/nieces of the last two survivors as it’s the grandchildren of the original funders who are the true beneficiaries, not the original children at all, there’s the rub, and they have every incentive to prod the oldies to a premature demise.The Wrong Box is black humour, it’s vicious, insulting, full of greed, cruel and utterly immoral, just like money itself. There can only be one winner in this story – and that’s the reader. I hope you like it as much as I did.