Robert Louis Stevenson has always been a writer's writer. Contemporaries like Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry James were awed by his kaleidoscopic invention and the flawless "English" of his prose, while later authors like Somerset Maugham and Robertson Davies, drawn to the physical and psychological exotica of his subject, introduced him into their own writing-a quasi-postmodernist way of elevating their own status by alluding to his achievement and doffing their hats at the same time. Yet Stev ...