In 1887, while he was attending Oxford, he published "Dead Man's Rock", a romance in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island", and later "The astonishing history of Troy Town" (1888), a comic novel set in a fictionalised version of his home town Fowey, and "The Splendid Spur" (1889). Quiller-Couch was well known for his story "The Rollcall of the Reef", based on the wreck of HMS "Primrose" during 1809 on the Cornish coast. He published during 1896 a series of critical articles, "Adventures in Criticism", and in 1898 he published a completion of Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, "St. Ives".