There is always this idea of the split personality.

He was later to intensify and refine his ideas on identity, as we shall see.

As noted, Borges and Bioy were excellent anthologists, especially with regard to tales of crime and the fantastic. Their anthology sometimes known in English as Extraordinary Tales, for example, is itself extraordinary, bringing together compelling narratives from diverse cultures in a book that raises tantalising metaphysical and literary questions – and does so in a highly readable manner. One of the stories included is ‘Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All’, also featured in this anthology. In a brief but telling Preliminary Note, Borges and Bioy wrote:

One of the many pleasures which literature has to offer is that of the narrative . . . The essence of narrative is to be found, we venture to think, in the present pieces; the rest is episodic illustration, psychological analysis, fortunate or inopportune verbal adornment.

The latter phrase could have been written by Stevenson, whose lively essay ’A Gossip on Romance’, included in this volume, was well known to both Argentine authors. Bioy and Borges were contemptuous of narratives that did not have a meaningful story to tell. All three authors engaged with the fantastic to explore aspects of reality. In ‘Some Gentlemen in Fiction’, Stevenson conceded – in a manner some considered virtually blasphemous – that characters are ‘only strings of words and parts of books’. To which Borges later responded: ‘Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote may be reduced to it. The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.’ This is a good example of Borges taking an idea from Stevenson and developing it in such a way that we read Stevenson with renewed insight. For Borges, the act of reading can encourage readers to interrogate the relationship between reality and imagination, between possibility and experience.

In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, a rich and layered essay that constituted a response to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’, Stevenson wrote:

Life is monstrous [one of Borges’s favourite adjectives], infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.

I think it likely that this quotation influenced the thinking of writer Mary Burchard Orvis, who stated:

All good fiction has form, no matter how modern or surrealistic. Indeed, the particular value of fiction over raw experience is that it imposes a pattern or a meaning upon life. Life is frustrating, chaotic, illogical, fantastic, and more often than not, apparently meaningless; full of useless suffering, pain, tragedy . . . yet man . . . craves order . . . If he turns to fiction, he wants some sort of organisation, meaning and pattern.

Whether fiction imposes meaning or reveals it is an enormous question (one worthy of a book in itself). Stevenson and Borges attempt to negotiate an apparently meaningless universe by use of creativity (writing, dreaming, reading, interpreting), by contemplating the means through which an ethical compass might be calibrated, by asking and attempting to answer the great questions of being, identity, causality, creation and infinity. The essays and narratives in this anthology bear witness to these aspirations. In ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Stevenson compares a work of art with geometry, an analogy that also surfaces in a number of Borges’s writings. Many of Borges’s stories centre on powerful, complex ideas brought to life – ideas which are deepened and developed through action and dynamism rather than static characterisation, and which bear an uneasy, stubborn and disquieting relationship to the real world. The same can be said for the best of Stevenson’s work, including ‘The Suicide Club’, ‘The Bottle Imp’, and the fables.

That ‘The Suicide Club’ – three interconnected detective-fiction stories that create a larger narrative – would greatly appeal to the duo who wrote detective stories together and loved the genre is natural.