Word: costain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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HIGH TOWERS (403 pp.)-Thomas B. Costain-Doubleday...
After nibbling at High Towers, a reader might well conclude that Author Costain, who is an old hand at whipping up best-selling bonbons about the past (The Black Rose; The Moneyman), no longer has his heart in his work. In this surprisingly sedate historical romance, little blood is spilled, the solitary battle is brief and tame, and not a single damsel is seduced...
Toward the end Author Costain tries to liven things up a bit. Félicité is dragged by her ankles, with her pretty thighs exposed, by her brutal nobleman husband whom she has been forced to marry, is beaten by him with a cudgel "not thicker than a man's thumb," and is kidnaped by Indians. This, presumably, is what readers of this kind of novel have been waiting for, but it is a long wait, and they are in for further dull stretches before virtue and justice at last prevail...
...weather fugitives all over the U.S. will soon be taking to passages like this. The prediction is safely made, since the authors of both these books, and their publishers, know what they are up to. Author Shellabarger's Captain from Castile sold over 1,250,000. Thomas B. Costain is the man "who gave you The Black Rose" (sales 1,344,000). Now each gives the Renaissance a lush and wordy going-over. The Moneyman, Book-of-the-Month Club special "midsummer" choice,* is 15th Century France. Prince of Foxes, Literary Guild choice for August, is 16th Century Italy...
...Author Costain lays on the local color thick-duels, tortures, trials, Valerie rising naked from her bath, and plenty of antique dressmaking chatter. As lavish with his color, Author Shellabarger is much the subtler hand with characters and story-though in this field "subtle" is strictly a comparative term. Prince of Foxes begins in Venice, with Andrea Orsini bowing low before the lovely Camilla degli Baglioni. Foxy Andrea can tell that Camilla is una illustrissima, but how is Camilla to know that Andrea, for all his fine clothes, is the son of a blacksmith? Prince of Foxes is laid...