The Wrecker: R.L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

[poliphilo]

The Wrecker is all about money.  Its characters dodge in and out of the pillars of the global economy, making dodgy fortunes on the Chicago and New York stock exchanges, in the Edinburgh building trade and in various get rich quick schemes operating out of San Francisco. Bad debts are run up in Paris, drugs are smuggled across the China seas, old money sleeps in the English shires, a box of gold is gambled over on a South Pacific atoll- and it's ownership settled with clasp knives and revolvers. Men will do any low and atrocious thing for money- and their fellows will understand and excuse them.  The only two characters who are not primarily motivated by what Stevenson and Osbourne call "the dollar hunt" are a mousy little woman in love and a murderer. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Stevenson makes it seem as though he's writing fast-paced thrillers and adventure stories, but there's all sorts of subtlety going on just beneath the surface.