Where Blaise Spies on the Rebels

The King's Cavalier by Samuel Shellabarger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This 1950 historical fiction novel is one of the best things I've read in in the last year. Set in 1500s France, it tells a story of spies, international intrigue, romance, and sword fighting in the best tradition of The Three Musketeers and The Princess Bride. (No ROUS's, but pretty much everything else.) It was fun all the way through, tightly plotted and action-filled, but it was also very well written, with fantastic prose. Nothing missing here. All five stars, easy.

Blaise Lalliere is a soldier from a minor noble family. He's not considered all that clever, but when his family sides with their liege, the Duke of Bourbon, against the king, he doesn't go along with it. When he defends de Surcy, one of the king's counselors, from the conspirators, he is enlisted to help with covert actions by him and the king's mother, and it is on this mission that he and others discover that he does have a flair for intrigue, that there's more to him than the simple soldier. A good part of the book has him escorting an English woman to Geneva for the regent, keeping an eye on her. The king is interested in her, but she is also a suspected spy. The rest of the book is set up by that start, with new and trickier dilemmas for the main characters; he and Anne Russell are intelligent, noble, and honorable, and both are conflicted by various allegiances that make every action fraught with danger one way or another.

If an action novel this engaging and exciting had been written 200 years ago by Scott or Dumas, I would have read it long ago, along with a million others, and it would probably be a classic with its own Wikipedia page. If it had been written last year, I'd be hearing about it on TikTok. But until I happened on a book by this author in a used book store, I'd never heard of it or him. 1950 is an awkward place for genre fiction like this--both too new and too old to come to our attention except by accident.

Look this one up. I loved it.

View all my reviews