Morris and John have to keep Joseph alive (which is not unlikely - he is in good health). Joseph does not really care about the tontine, but Masterman wants it - and is willing to speed the demise of Joseph to do it. Masterman (John Mills) lives with his grandson Michael (Michael Caine), and Joseph with his two greedy nephews (Morris and John - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and his niece Julia (Nanette Newman). Masterman is home bound, and Joseph is a lively old bore who loves to talk and show off his preposterous knowledge of trivia (Ralph Richardson brings out the fact about the word 'whip' when riding with a man holding a 'whip'). It's an elaborate wager where a bunch of people put up a sum of money individually, and the last survivor gets the bulk of it. Stevenson is telling the story of Masterman and Joseph Finsbury, the last two survivors of a special type of insurance form called a 'tontine'. It was not his novel alone, but the first of three he wrote with his stepson Lloyd Osborne (to whom he told the story of 'Treasure Island' before he wrote it down).

It is Stevenson's spoof on mystery and detective fiction. Stevenson pulled the story plot to develop the characters instead. They concentrated their gifts on character developments on their central story figures (Holmes and Watson, Father Brown, Max Carrados), but the basic plot development is what pulls the story along for all of them. Yet with his interest in melodramatics he should have been a natural for writing mystery and detective stories, like his contemporaries Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton, and Ernest Brahmah. His best novels show the ambiguity of character. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote novels that studied character and its flaws: Long John Silver in 'Treasure Island', Aleck Breck Stewart in 'Kidnapped' and 'David Balfour', James and Henry Durie in 'The Master Of Ballentrae', Dr.

The wrong box stevenson