The subject of this little book is a particular fictional genre, and four writers who practised it. The genre is quest narrative, sometimes known as ‘quest romance’, and the authors – all male, and three of them personal friends – were Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Strongly contrasted personalities, all four were travelled people who, in a characteristically Victorian way, combined marked practical aptitude with a countervailing tendency towards mysticism. Valuing self-discipline, all none the less experienced occasional fits of restlessness, even of inner blackness or turmoil. All were memorably exposed to cultures outside Europe, where they picked up local knowledge that coloured their fiction. Products of the mid-Victorian age, they inherited the cultural assurance of their time. Yet in each of them these standard convictions coexisted with an inveterate curiosity about, and respect for, other cultures, which seems at odds with their acquiescence in the status quo.

Other, sometimes paradoxical, qualities connect these writers. Each was an uxorious and devoted husband who cherished the company of his male friends. Introspective, they were also intensely clubbable. Indeed, three of them belonged to exactly the same London club: the Savile, then situated in Piccadilly. It was on the premises of the Savile that Haggard and Kipling first met, introduced to one another by the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang, himself a writer and theorist of quest romance, who had proposed each of them for membership. It was as fellow members of the Savile that both received felicitations on his early work from Stevenson, a corresponding member resident in Samoa. Though Stevenson was to die before meeting either man in the flesh, the feeling of kinship did not die with him. The bond between these writers was as much personal as it was literary, reinforcing a shared sensation of regarding the world through much the same eyes.

Arguably, the genre which these authors perfected was the vehicle for this common vision. Quest narrative was the product of a number of factors that came together in the late 1880s.