By Robert Louis Stevenson

tradesman began copying the keys of his customer’s homes, before breaking in and stealing from them. Brodie was eventually caught and hung for his crime in 1788, in front of a crowd of 40,000 people at the city’s Tolbooth.

For Stevenson, a man who was raised with a piece of Brodie’s hand-crafted furniture in his nursery, this story of a man with two personalities was irresistible. The author, who was said to have been fascinated by Edinburgh’s dark underbelly, began to frequent local brothels, taverns and gambling dens as a young man, just as Brodie had done before him. 