REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

   

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON – Kidnapped. First published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886, and as a novel in the same year.

   â€œThat is the house of Shaws!” she cried. “Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down.”

   
   Young David Balfour has left his home to go to Shaws where his uncle is to turn over the estate he has inherited. Most of you know the story. It is one of the most beloved classics, filmed numerous times since the silent era, adapted on radio, in comic books, and just about any media you can imagine.

   First published in a boy’s magazine Kidnapped turns out to be one of the most influential tales ever spun by one of the most popular writers of the 19th Century. Despite having first appeared in a boys’ magazine it is an important story that had wide ranging influence beyond its initial audience, the foundation of an entire genre of popular fiction.

   Young David Balfour travels to Shaw House where his scheming uncle plots to have him kidnapped and shipped off. On the ship he has been made cabin boy on, he meets and saves another passenger Alan Breck, a Scottish revolutionary fleeing Scotland after the rebellion.

   Though David is a Protestant loyalist and lowlander and Alan a Catholic traitor and Highlander the two form an alliance surviving ship wreck, a desperate journey, a colorful army of eccentrics, traitors, and soldiers, and eventually reclaim Shaws for David and save Alan from the hangman.

   Though Stevenson’s Treasure Island had set some of the tropes appearing in Kidnapped, it is in this novel that they all come together in the form that would be most often used in the coming century.

   In Kidnapped Stevenson’s avocation of the countryside creates an important character, the wilderness itself, that will come into play in countless imitations.

   The sound of an infinite number of rivers came up from all round. In this steady rain the springs of the mountain were broken up; every glen gushed water like a cistern; every stream was in high spate, and had filled and overflowed its channel. During our night tramps, it was solemn to hear the voice of them below in the valleys, now booming like thunder, now with an angry cry. I could well understand the story of the Water Kelpie, that demon of the streams, who is fabled to keep wailing and roaring at the ford until the coming of the doomed traveller. Alan I saw believed it, or half believed it; and when the cry of the river rose more than usually sharp, I was little surprised surprised (though, of course, I would still be shocked) to see him cross himself in the manner of the Catholics.

   
   Kidnapped is the model for a whole genre of British adventure stories that would dominate the thriller for much of the next century. Even Stevenson would revisit the basic form in novellas like “Pavilion on the Links”, The Black Arrow, and The Wrecker where John Buchan would take the form and run with it in his “shockers” that followed the model Stevenson set into the novel of international intrigue.

   With the popularity of Buchan’s The 39 Steps the model was established, and the British thriller was born variations on the theme of friendship, betrayal, duality, mystery, pursuit, and chase would dominate books by writers such as Dornford Yates, Geoffrey Household, Hammond Innes, Victor Canning, Gavin Lyall, and Mary Stewart.

   We came the by-way over the hill of Corstorphine; and when we got near to the place called Rest-and-be-Thankful, and looked down on Corstorphine bogs and over to the city and the castle on the hill, we both stopped, for we both knew without a word said we had come to the place where our ways parted.

   
   Stevenson knew a good thing when he saw it. Kidnapped is also influential in that it was popular enough it inspired a sequel, David Balfour, or Caltronia. I’m partial to the Scribner’s Illustrated edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth of both the original and the sequel though the later Frank Godwin illustrated edition is a delight as well.

   But it is the original, swords and pistols, intrigue and adventure, fogs and chases through the night that gives the book its magic, that and the complex relationship between its two heroes, two very different people whose friendship is forged in danger and pursuit that makes the book a classic and explains the magic that made it one of the most influential stories ever written.