Piano Tuner Book

[Read as part of a Collected Works of Stevenson.]
The Merry Men feels more like a good idea for a novel than it is a finished novella. As it stands, this three-chapter story of shipwrecks, madness and mystery seems to do everything by halves.
The story runs roughly like this: young man leaves his university to visit his uncle and beloved female cousin (and wife hopeful...I guess this was before genetics put the halt to marrying first cousins) at their home by the sea. His visit is not purely social: he has deduced -- he believes -- the location of a long-lost sunken treasure. He is hardly there when he notices a great deal of new(ish) finery and a clear change in the behaviour of his almost jarringly pious uncle. In no time, he finds that 1) his uncle's gone nuts, having something to do with a shipwreck in their bay and the burial of a man, and 2) someone else is about, also looking for the sunken treasure. Things spiral slightly out of control and there is death on the agenda for someone.
Somewhere in here is a mighty, mighty story but Stevenson cuts it all too short. It ends up too long and complicated to survive as a tidy short story, but not long enough to do justice to all the elements he's introduced. The Merry Men (the titular men being a nickname for some particularly robust waves that sound like men at drunken revelry) fits nicely tonewise between major Stevenson works like Jekyll & Hyde and Treasure Island: not quite a ghost story, somewhere near the neighbourhood of the House of Usher, with some bits of his love of things nautical thrown in for good measure. It almost seems like he wrote this drunk, or woke up from a particularly vivid dream and scrawled it in a frenzy before falling back to sleep, and never went back to make sure all the plot points worked out in a satisfying manner. Instead, it just leaves this reader unsatisfied, a little mystified and strangely wanting more.