Swearingen identifies more than 350 projects the author embarked on in his short life, incorporating essays, novels, short stories and plays, and not counting his many letters. Borges wrote 1,000 pages of stories, more than 500 pages of poetry, a couple of dozen works of (often idiosyncratic) translation, 1,200 essays, hundreds of prologues as well as film and book reviews, capsule biographies, and more. In Borges’s published works alone there are more than one hundred references to Stevenson.

Among the most condensed of Stevenson’s writings are the fables. Stevenson was entranced by fables and a comment in a letter suggests he may have started writing his own as early as 1874. But this is by no means certain, and if true, would mean he worked on the fables on and off for two decades. Edmund Gosse, by contrast, claims he began them in Bournemouth in 1887, after completing the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson planned to publish a collection of his fables with Longman, but died before he could honour the contract. It is known that Fanny, Stevenson’s wife, did not like the fables – she considered them ‘aberrations’ – and her influence may have stalled their publication. In fact, though they are overlooked and undervalued, the fables are a rich and vital element of Stevenson’s literary legacy. Stevenson believed that just as tastes evolved, so must fables. And indeed there is something very modern about their unwillingness to yield to simplistic moralising. Serious, lyrical, nuanced, the fables ask deep questions about purpose and meaning. Some critics have described the fables as being like early examples of existentialist or Kafka-esque writing and it is no surprise that they appealed to Borges and Bioy. The aforementioned Borges story ‘The Circular Ruins’ may have been partly inspired by ‘The Song of the Morrow’, concerned as they both are with time, recurrence, doubling and multiplying, and circularity. Many of Borges’s stories read like fables – pared back, resonant, transcendent. Perhaps because of their combination of narrative momentum, engagement with greater meaning and lean and graceful writing, they are simply a joy to read.

One of the Stevenson fables that intrigued Borges was ‘Faith, Half-Faith and No Faith at All’. The eminent scholar R.H. Blyth (once tutor to Crown Prince, later Emperor, Akihito of Japan) offers an unusual interpretation. He equates Faith, the priest, with the man who believes (or professes to believe) in revealed religion. Half-Faith is the virtuous, perhaps sanctimonious, person who talks of qualities like beauty, goodness and truth. No Faith, says Blyth, ‘is the man who lives by Zen’. It is not accurate to describe either Stevenson or Borges as Buddhists, but here emerges another fascinating connection. Blyth and others have noted unwitting aspects of Buddhism in Stevenson’s writing – in these fables and in his works that reveal human nature as being more contradictory and more malleable than one might wish to believe. The connection between Borges and Buddhism is fascinating. ‘Time passing,’ wrote Borges, ’is a severing of selves, each one trapped in a past monad.’ He wrote a book on Buddhism and lectured on the subject.

Borges said, ‘There are two men whom I love personally, as if I had known them. If I had to draw up a list of friends, I would include not only my personal friends, my physical friends, but I would also include Stevenson and [fellow Scottish author] Andrew Lang. Although they might not approve of my stuff, I think they would like the idea of being liked for their work by a mere South American, divided from them in time and space.’ He often spoke of Stevenson as a ‘major writer’, no matter what his interlocutor thought.

An unenviable element all three authors share is that they have been, at times, somewhat misunderstood. Stevenson has been dismissed as a ‘mere’ children’s author or perceived as no more than a minor author. Borges and Bioy are sometimes considered to be the drily intellectual, detached or narrowly in-joking authors of works that are more interested in metaphysical complexities than in human beings. This, too, is an erroneous view.

Stevenson’s reputation has fluctuated (as Borges’s has, to a lesser extent).