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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1928 Paul Féval, fils' wrote a trilogy known as D'Artagnan and Cyrano Reconciled, continuing an earlier series that he wrote with M. Lassez, called The Years Between. The stories are set after Alexandre Dumas' Twenty Years After and show d'Artagnan and some of the rest of the musketeers in various adventures with Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. I've read and reviewed all the other parts of the story and now it is time to tackle the last one: The Wedding of Cyrano. It should be noted that this review will likely spoil some of the events of the earlier parts of the story, but no more than the title of this novel itself already does.
Emmuska Orczy is best known for the The Scarlet Pimpernel novels (and plays and films) that are set in the 18th century Britain and France. However, she wrote two novels depicting an ancestor of her famous hero set in the 1624 Netherlands, the first of which is called The Laughing Cavalier - named after the famous painting by Frans Hals (see the title image) that Orczy claims depicts the hero himself. The hero goes around under the pseudonym of Diogones and is part of a group of three mercenaries who call themselves the Philosophers.
Paul Féval, fils' wrote a trilogy known as D'Artagnan and Cyrano Reconciled. The story is set after Alexandre Dumas' Twenty Years After and spans the years between 1649 and 1655. I've previously reviewed the first part of the trilogy and was somewhat annoyed by the uneven plotting. The second part works much better, but takes a serious deviation of the Dumas' original story, introducing a plot with the Man in the Iron Mask much earlier than Dumas did and leading to a vastly different plot, cunningly mixed with actual historical details.
I've previously reviewed H. Bedford-Jones' pastiche of Alexandre Dumas' classic work. Interestingly enough, his other story featuring the classic hero, d'Artagnan, The King's Passport, is not in any way connected with the longer work and is not really a pastiche at all: rather than being set in 1630 and featuring the Dumas version of d'Artagnan (who was born at least a decade before his historical counterpart), the story is set ten years later, in 1640, when d'Artagnan has only recently arrived to Paris and is serving in the Guard.
The Brethren Prince by Ira David Smith might well be one of the definitive novels of piracy and privateering in the Caribbean. Following the life of James Ketcham, it shows us historically accurate life among the buccaneers of Hispaniola, in the famous pirate haven of Tortuga and in several other historical locations on the islands and on the mainland. The novel certainly has some drawbacks, but they are outweighed by the good parts.
Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac from 1897 is one of the definitive plays set in the 17th century. Inspired by the life of the actual historical poet and duellist, the play introduces us to the tragic figure of Cyrano who is in love with a woman but never dares to tell her about it. The play has been adapted to film, radio, TV etc. so many times that it is doubtful that anyone might have missed it, but this was the first time that I went to the play itself to enjoy the original text (or as original as I can without learning French).
The Blast that Tears the Skies is the third novel in J.D. Davies' The Journals of Matthew Quinton series. It is a historical naval fiction series set in the 17th century that has, until now, spent most of its time on land, dealing with the protagonist's family mysteries. The third part finally brings the family mystery to its conclusion and also describes one of the major naval battles of the era, the Battle of Lowestoft, where the Royal Navy have to forget their differences in order to beat the Dutch Navy.