Deacon Brodie, pillar of the Establishment turned arch-criminal, terrified late-18th-century Edinburgh. This book tells of the two Edinburghs - the respectable lawyers' capital and the lurid underworld of thieves and whores - in which Brodie led his dual existence, culminating in the armed theft of Scotland's revenues and Brodie's escape to Holland, whence he was brought back to be tried and executed. This extraordinary tale gave rise to the idea of Jekyll and Hyde in the fertile imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson almost a century later.