(2 of 2)
A Stitch in Time. Readers may find the Victorian plots and solutions sensational and sometimes clumsy compared with the tooled precision of today's murder mystery. But they will also find a far higher standard of prose, and richer characterizations—as well as enough gory retribution to convince them of the folly of a fiendish career. "I set myself against it in toto," Thomas (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) De Quincey had said, in his famous essays on murder early in Victoria's day. "For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time."
* They still sell well. Both novels are available together in a Modern Library Giant, and separately in Everyman's Library. * Whose Kidnapped, Weir of Hermiston, The Master of Ballantrae, Travels with a Donkey and three short stories, plus a first-rate essay on Stevenson by V. S. Pritchett, have just been reissued in Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3-95).