Review: Zorro by Isabel Allende

I've always been a fan of swashbucklers and historical adventure, but I have to admit that my enthusiasm is targeted more to the 17th century than the early 19th - and thus all the various retellings and other stories of Zorro don't attract my attention so much. But when I browsed the sale of used books at the local library and found Isabel Allende's Zorro available for a single euro, I decided to give it a try. And although it was not the best historical adventure book I've read, it was still worth a read.

Review: The Battle of All the Ages by J.D. Davies

J.D. Davies has really found his style with his Matthew Quinton series. The fourth part that I reviewed late last year was the first one that pulled me in, but I still pointed out that the stories seem to be staying on land far more than at sea. However, the fifth book in the series fixes all that!

The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

My wife found me this gem: a thick collection of swashbuckling tales from several masters of the field - many of them unknown to me until now. You can find all of the big names here, from Alexandre Dumas and Baroness Orczy to Rafael Sabatini, but also some less well known names such as Stanley J. Feyman and Anthony Hope. Pirates, swordsmen, nobles - you can find it all here. It is pretty impossible to review an entire collection of stories from so many authors: a lot depends on the quality of the individual stories and they are still all of them unique and would deserve a separate paragraph of their own. I don't have time such a deep review, unfortunately, but I will try to give you my overall impression.

Review: Under the Red Robe by Stanley J. Weyman

Stanley J. Weyman is one of the big authors of swashbucklers from the decades between Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini. But, unlike the mentioned masters, his name is more or less forgotten these days. Nevertheless, he was a prolific author and known for the accuracy of historical details in his adventure stories. Under the Red Robe is set in the late 1630, at a time when Cardinal Richelieu's growing power was suddenly challenged in the plot that came to be known as the Day of the Dupes.

Review: Death of a Musketeer by Sarah D'Almeida

I've read quite a few pastiches based on Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, so I have some tolerance to the fact that they rarely meet the quality of the original. Death of a Musketeer, however, is a risky venture from the start: instead of continuing the story or covering the "lost years", the author sets out to rewrite the original, claiming that Dumas altered the story and she has found new evidence of what actually happened to the four heroes. The result is mediocre at best and changes the characters beyond recognition and likeability.

Review: The Lion of Midnight by J.D. Davies

I've been reading the historical fiction series by J.D. Davies over the past year and a half and you can find my previous reviews from this blog. The reason I've taken such a long time to get to the fourth installment is that while I've liked them well enough, they have not really pulled me in... until now. In the fourth novel in the series, J.D. Davies has hit on the right mix of action and intrigue and pushed aside, at least for now, the less interesting Quinton family secrets plotline that weighed down the earlier novels.

Review: Adventures of Monsieur de La Donaree the Musketeer by Ted Anthony Roberts

The readers of this blog know that I always appreciate a good adventure tale, especially if it can be described as a swashbuckler. It is a disappointingly scarcely populated genre these days, but one does tend to find a novel or two every now and then. This time, my attention was drawn to T.A. Robert's Adventures of Monsieur de La Donaree the Musketeer. The author mentions grand-masters like Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini and Sir Walter Scott in his bio, so taking a look at his work is something that one simply must do.

Review: Shōgun by James Clavell

James Clavell's Shōgun is a classic - there's no going around that. I first read the Finnish translation when I was a teen, so it was high time to go back to it and read it in the original language. It is said that Shōgun has inspired many to cross-cultural learning and to study the Japanese culture and history - and it may be partially responsible even for the ninja/samurai/katana enthusiasm that seems to make Europeans forget about their own wonderful history of musketeers and rapiers. And, when you read Clavell's novel, you will understand why.

Review: Beneath the Skin by Jonathan Maberry

It has been a while since I last reviewed a werewolf book. It is not for lack of trying, however. I've began reading many novels and short stories, but I rarely finish them. Partly because they offer nothing new or they are just written in a style I don't care for. However, Jonathan Maberry's - the author of the latest The Wolfman novelisation - Beneath the Skin intrigued me almost from the very first page onwards. Here, we have a noir style character: a private detective taking on dull jobs to get along. But he also has a big secret: he's a werewolf, part of an ancient race of Benandanti whose task it is to fight evil.

Review: The First Sir Percy by Baroness Orczy

It's been a while since I reviewed Emmuska Orczy's The Laughing Cavalier. The First Sir Percy is a sequel that picks up the events very soon after the end of the first volume. Set in March, 1624, it explores the events that surrounded the Spanish invasion of that year, although this serves mostly as a setting and most of the action is based on a single location.

Review: The First Musketeer (2014)

The First Musketeer is a 6-part mini web series created in 2014 with the help of an Indiegogo funding campaign. It is a prequel story to Dumas' The Three Musketeers and introduces Athos and Porthos as somewhat younger men when they engage in their first shared adventure.

The story begins with an innkeeper who hires two guardsmen to toss out an unwanted drunk visitor, a young man who turns out to be Athos. The guardsmen and Athos soon become friends and have time to meet with another familiar hero, Porthos, before they are all drawn into an adventure.

The actors are surprisingly good for such a low budget series. There are some bouts of overacting and somewhat ill-paced or stiff dialogue, but these issues do not get in the way of the fun. The costumes are a mix of fantasy and 17th century, but more tasteful than the leather outfits we saw in BBC's The Musketeers. The swordfights are more about dramatic, backlit postures than realistic bloody conflicts, but they are entertaining to watch. The indoor sets are sometimes clumsy, especially when we are supposed to believe that some of the scenes are taking place in the Louvre, but this is compensated by the outdoor scenes that are filmed in actual southern France locations.

The episodes are short, ten minute chapters, which makes the whole series about 60 minutes in length. There's not much room for story, especially as the writers spend most of the first two to three episodes introducing the characters. But there are swordfights and lighthearted humour enough to keep you entertained for the entire length of the "season" and the end leaves the door open for season two. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be happening - a pity, since the cast and crew show promise and a second season would surely have improved from the first.

For a Dumas fan, this series is a must watch, especially since it is freely available on Youtube.

The Memoirs of the Count De Rochefort by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras

Comte de Rochefort is one of the most memorable secondary characters in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. But Dumas did not make up the character himself. He got it from an earlier novel written by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras in 1678 (translated into English in 1696). In Dumas' handling, Comte de Rochefort was a cunning antagonist and later a friend to titular character d'Artagnan, as well as a loyal servant to Cardinal Richelieu. Because of my enthusiasm with the 17th century, I was more than eager to read fiction both set in the era and written during it.

Review: The Brethren by Robert Merle

When an author comes with the praise of being the Alexandre Dumas of the 20th century, a sworn fan of Alexandre Dumas is pretty much forced to pick up a book and start reading. Robert Merle is a French author and his Fortunes of France series tells the story of a Huguenot family from around 1550 to 1660. The first three parts have been translated in to English and the first of them is The Brethren.

Review: Comic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - with a title like that, you know perfectly well what you are going to get. Especially if you have, like me, read Seth Grahame-Smith's previous Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and know his knack with mixing horror themes with older, historical or fictional, stories in which you'd never have expected to encounter zombies or vampires. However, instead of reading the original novel, I'm taking a look at the comic book adaptation by Tony Lee and illustrated by Cliff Richards.

Review: Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

Captain Blood is probably a character known to many through the numerous film adaptations. Errol Flynn's ever-grinning face is the way I knew him for decades before I finally picked up the original novel by Rafael Sabatini and delved into the actual story. And, as always, it proved deeper and more interesting than any of the adaptations.

My Top Five Reads of 2016

Another year gone and another pile of books read. In fact, I find that I read about 80 books last year, a good portion of them graphic novels, to be sure, amounting to c. 19500 pages. Picking the five best reads from this pile is not easy. Actually it would be, if I was willing to fill the entire list with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. But since that would make for a dull list, I will only give one spot of the five to that, most excellent of novel series.

Review: Rise of the Werewolf by Mike Tufo

It's been a while since I succumbed to the lure of werewolf stories, mainly because finding good ones is such a challenge. But when I saw a plethora of good reviews for Rise of the Werewolf (Lycan Fallout #1), I had to take a look. The author promised that although the novel stars the same protagonist as his earlier zombie novels, reading them would not be necessary to enjoy this werewolf storyline. To a degree, he was correct.

Honorary Award for My Co-Authored Werewolf Story: Musta Susi

I'm happy to announce that a short story, Musta Susi (Black Wolf), co-authored by me and my wife, Ulla Susimetsä, received an honorary award yesterday evening. Combining our shared love for historical fiction and my passion for werewolf stories (my wife's written a couple of those before this as well, so she's not completely passionless), we wrote a story set in the 1640's, in the pirate-infested waters of the Caribbean and the New World colony of Sweden on the Delaware river.

Review: An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Often called a cult-classic, [i]An American Werewolf in London[/i] was released in 1981 during a kind of a peak in werewolf films. It was praised for its special effects, which, I'm afraid, haven't really survived the test of time. I've watched it at least twice before and have not been very impressed by it - I've written before that I'm not really into the simple blood-hungry monster angle when it comes to werewolves - but decided to give it another go in order to write this review.

Review: Hakkapeliitat I-III by Artturi Leinonen

Artturi Leinonen's Hakkapeliitat series (originally released as three novels) relates the adventures of a group of (Finnish) cavalry (whom the author refers to as dragoons) serving under the rule of the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus during the 30 Years War. Written in 1932-1934, the storytelling style is old-fashioned: there's no strong overall plot and the story tends to get lost on tangents every now and then. Still, it is a fun read, overall, and deserving of a lot more attention than it has received in the recent years.