Swashbucklers: men fencing with epees wearing puffy shirts. D’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Zorro. A genre that certainly has a cinematic past but before the movies there was the prose in books. The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure is a 475 page large paperback that I just read. Somehow I missed it when it came out from Pegasus Books in 2014. Editor Lawrence Ellsworth has been translating Dumas into English and is the expert on the genre.

Contents:

I used to love watching swashbuckling movies in my youth. The 1970s versions The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers with Michael York, Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, and Faye Dunaway have a flambloyant delivery. It did not hurt that George MacDonald Fraser wrote the screenplays. I did not know about Rafael Sabatini back then and wish I had been reading him alongside Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This is a great introduction to the genre. I have read some of the authors and heard of others. A few were totally new to me. I will warn people that much of the prose here has lots and lots of talk. It is not all crossing swords with villains.

The stories by H. Bedford-Jones, Harold Lamb, and Johnston McCulley were all originally in pulp magazines. The Harold Lamb story sticks out as different due to locale (early 17^th Century India) and the amount of action. The Johnston McCulley selection is an excerpt of “The Curse of Capistrano” that originally appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1919. In some ways the movie The Gay Blade of Zorro is closer the original novel with McCulley’s portrayal of Don Diego. “Captain Blood’s Dilemma” was published in Adventure though I am not sure if the book was out in the U.K. Is Captain Blood a pulp character?

There is mention of a successor volume The Even Bigger Book of Swashbuckling Adventures but alas it appears it is a ghost book. I got it from Hamilton Books for a grand total of $5.95. It originally retailed for $24.95. Order your copy now. En garde!