The Wrong Box

Lloyd Osbourne

A farcical comic caper from the author of Treasure Island!

The Finsbury family has long had a Tontinea scheme in which a group puts money into a 'pot' which then is scooped by the last survivor after everyone else dies a macabre winner takes all scheme. Now there are only two aged uncles between Morris and John Finsbury and their fortune. A railway accident appears to dispose of one, and then the farce begins.

The Wrong Box was the first of three novels that Stevenson co-wrote with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Osbourne wrote the first draft of the novel late in 1887 (then called The Finsbury Tontine), Stevenson revised it in 1888 (then called A Game of BluffThe Wrong Box. A film adaptation, also titled The Wrong Box, was released in 1966, starring Michael Caine and a musical in 2002.

"I have got R.L. Stevenson's the Wrong Box and laughed over it dementedly when I read it. That man has only one lung but he makes you laugh with all your whole inside" Rudyard Kipling

"a farce that slips down the throat with the nicety of an oyster," V.S. Pritchett

"perhaps the most superb extravaganza in the language." E.F. Benson