The Black Arrow

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses is an adventure novel by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It first appeared as a serial in 1883 in Young Folks and was published in book form in 1888.

The novel is set during the Wars of the Roses, in a part of England where the fighting between the houses of Lancaster and York divides neighbours as well as noblemen. Richard Shelton is a young man whose guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley, stands to gain from keeping him dependent, and when the outlaws of the forest begin sending black arrows to mark the men they intend to kill, Richard has reason to look closely at the deaths around him. Stevenson wrote the book for boys and drew on the chronicles of the period alongside the outlaw stories of the border country, so the novel has a knight's education, a pursuit through the woods and a siege as well as a claim to an inheritance.

Stevenson had already published Treasure Island and would go on to write Kidnapped, and this book belongs to the same years of his work when he was writing adventure fiction at speed for a serial readership.