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.

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Where the Author Wowed Me

Lord Vanity by Samuel Shellabarger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I bought this on kind of a fluke, and then I loved it. Start to finish. 5 stars.

Published in 1953, it falls in a dead spot historically for me. This isn't a book I would ever have read 40 years ago, or even looked at twice. As a child of the 60s, and becoming a reader in the 70s, I would choose new kids' books (like Charlie and the Chocolate factory) or new science fiction or fantasy (when I found out about those), and sometimes the odd book from another genre, like The Outsiders or something. Except for novels in school, I very rarely read books older than the early 60s. They didn't appeal. The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are exceptions, and I can't think of any others from childhood that broke through. And though I read in school, with *some* interest, Hemingway and Steinbeck and some other early 20th century stuff, I didn't like them enough to read for fun. (Still don't, actually.) And I honestly had no idea there would be any books from 1900-1950 that I would like. They were, to my mind, the ratty old books of another generation sitting on the shelves, all dusty and dry, meant to be passed over.

I wasn't surprised when I found I liked 19th century stuff, like Scott and Dumas and Austen, because I had no prejudice against those books. But I didn't think I'd ever want to read stuff from my parents' or older relatives' era. It's only lately that I've developed an interest in books from that time, an interest in hunting for things that I would like that I have never learned about before, or books I simply tuned out because they weren't for me.

All that is to say that I had no idea that this author existed, and I wouldn't care except that this was a really good book in a genre I really enjoy, an author that I should have been reading all my life. Many of the other titles sound great, and I don't want to count my chickens, but I suspect I'm gonna like a least a few of them.

Some spoilers: The story starts in Venice in the 1700s, with a talented young man trying to make his way in the world with just his wits and his talent. He is a musician and a writer and an actor, but he is also nobody special. His talents bring him to the attention of people who do matter, and he is sent off on a chaotic career. He falls in love with a dancer, a young unaffected woman that the reader is pretty much guaranteed to also fall in love with. He has setbacks--a time on the galleys as a convict, sent there on trumped-up charges--but he is redeemed and travels to England where he is recognized by his noble father, but his hopes for a future with the beautiful young dancer are destroyed by his father's wishes and his fear of falling once more into oblivion. He is a dandy; he is a soldier in Canada; he is a spy. He is an actor, and plays all his parts well.

And all of this is written about with tremendous skill. The love story is touching. The social life in Bath and then Paris, the dances and salons and card sharps and merciless lords and scheming ladies, is compelling. The battle scenes, telling the story of England's defeat of France at Quebec, is amazing, riveting. And the intrigue of Richard spying for England in Paris is very well done, almost too clever for me to follow. I loved the pacing and the layers and on-again-off-again love story. Terrific prose. Very satisfying ending.

It was such a great surprise to learn about this book, this author, this prejudice I had without even realizing it. A lot of new reading is possible that I didn't know about.

Highly recommended. I see other of his books have higher scores than this, and I have great hopes.

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