The Suicide Club

Tonight, mystery classics.

Stars Laurence Olivier in The Suicide Club.

He died after a war.

Was it murder and suicide? Or murder and accidental death?

So I'm sure you'll listen as intently as I shall.

It's that famous chilling classic by Robert Louis Stevenson, now transcribed...

The Suicide Club, starring Laurence Olivier.

This is the story of a frightening adventure.

Then you're indeed most fortunate.

40 pounds each is the initiation fee of the Suicide Club.

The Suicide Club? What the devil is that?

The Suicide Club is death's private door.

It's the ultimate convenience in our modern world.

It exists for unfortunates like us, those to whom the painful agony of corrosive poison is distasteful, for those whose courage fails them when the cold muzzle chills the forehead, for those whose fear of drowning is greater than their compulsion to die.

For these sensitive misfits, the Suicide Club arranges every detail.

If you are truly tired of life, I will introduce you tonight to a meeting, and I can assure you that within the week you will be relieved of the burden of living.

And that is exactly what we are unpacking today.

Welcome to our deep dive into Robert Louis Stevenson's 1878 masterpiece, The Suicide Club.

It's an incredible piece of work.

It really is.

It really is a phenomenal text to dig into, not just for the plot but because of the immense psychological weight behind it.

Yeah.

I mean, Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary Argentine writer, he actually considered The Suicide Club to be the absolute finest story Robert Louis Stevenson ever wrote.

Wait, really? Better than Treasure Island or Jekyll and Hyde?

Partly extravagant and partly very specious, they are the result of a very happy idea, that of placing a series of adventures which are pure adventures in the setting of contemporary English life, and relating them in the placidly ingenuous tone of Scheherazade.

this device is carried to perfection in the dynamiter where the manner takes on more of a kind of high-flown serenity in proportion as the incidents are more steep in this line the suicide club is mr stephenson's greatest success and the first two pages of it not to mention others live in the memory for reasons which i am conscious of not being able to represent as sufficient i find something ineffaceably impressive something really haunting in the incident of prince florizel and colonel geraldine who one evening in march are driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an oyster bar in the immediate neighborhood of leicester square and there have occasion to observe the entrance of a young man followed by a couple of commissionaires each of whom carries a large dish of cream tarts under a cover a young man who pressed these confections on every one's acceptance with exaggerated courtesy There is no effort at a picture here, but the imagination makes one of the lighted interior, the London sleet outside, the company that we guess, given the locality, and the strange politeness of the young man, leading on to circumstances stranger still.

This is what may be called putting one in the mood for a story.

but Mr. Stevenson's most brilliant stroke of that kind is the opening episode of Treasure Island, the arrival of the brown old seaman with the sabre cut at the Admiral Benbow, and the advent, not long after, of the blind sailor with a green shade over his eyes who comes tapping down the road in quest of him with his stick.