Word: costains
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SILVER CHALICE (533pp.)-Thomas B. Costain-Doubleday...
Novelist Thomas Costain has taught history to more people outside the classroom than any professional historian has ever taught inside. His swashbuckling sagas, The Black Rose and The Moneyman, not only gave readers a bowing acquaintance with the courts of Kublai Khan and medieval France, but made Costain himself the contemporary king of historical romance. To the fans who have bought nearly 5,000,000 copies of his eight books, King Costain can do no wrong, but the sad truth about his latest novel, The Silver Chalice, is that it rarely swashes and regularly buckles...
Cloak & dagger romance and bustles-and-bows nostalgia both have their merits-and faithful droves of customers. It is a lucky author who can straddle the two fields without coming a cropper. In Author Thomas Bertram Costain's case, a firm hand with historical fiction (The Black Rose, The Moneyman) has been no guarantee of success with the gentler, slower-moving Gay Nineties period piece...
...Hundred Kings (for the background of which 65-year-old Author Costain rummaged through the attic of his own Canadian youth) jogs along on the track of a mild mystery: Who are Hero Ludar Prentice's father & mother? In 1890, Ludar, age 6, arrives alone in Balfour, Canada from England, wearing a sign on his back: "This is Ludar Prentice. He has no money. He is going to his father Vivien Prentice at Balfour, Ontario, Canada. Be kind to him." Since Ludar's father, himself a new arrival from England, has just committed suicide, and since Ludar...
Ludar's growing up is the old story of the sensitive, struggling youngster who wants to be a writer. He falls into first-love and writes his first novel. To fill up the picture, Author Costain offers such familiar turn-of-the-century sideshows as a feud between the sons of Balfour's leading family, the sight of the first car on the town's streets, a runaway cutter, balls, belles and sleighbells. None of these trappings quite disguises the fact that Hero Ludar is as dim as a 50-year-old memory and that...