Word: sabatini
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...Sabatini's talents as a stylist lie well to the south of, say, Sir Walter Scott's. He is a Monte Pythonesque coiner of clichés: rubies have a fearless tendency to "glow like live coals," and Frenchmen sputter expletives like "Name of a name!" and "By example!" Yet in the next sentence Sabatini can turn a flashing phrase (a eunuch's hands are two "bunches of fat fingers...
...Words a Day. No hint of such a source comes to light in the little that is known of Sabatini's reclusive life. The son of an Italian operatic tenor and an English soprano, he was raised in Oporto, Portugal, where his father found work as a singing teacher. The boy went off to school in Switzerland and at 17 got a job as a clerk in London. One day in 1901, rising 26 and bored with answering foreign mail for a rubber company, he dashed off a short story in English and sent it to a magazine. Within...
...researching his stories, Sabatini said later, he read survey texts, then studied primary sources and leafed through the dramatists and letter writers of the era to pick up "the living reality of the past." Thereafter he wrote about 2,000 words...
Well-muscled and of medium height, with reddish hair and flashing hazel eyes, Sabatini had the look of an outdoorsman. He married twice (in both cases Englishwomen) and had two chil dren. As the money rolled in, he bought an old mill on a famous salmon stream, the river Wye that coils its way between Wales and England; and there, more English now than the English, he played the country gentleman. "It leaves me cold," he told an interviewer in the early 1920s, "that men should write better novels than mine. But I hate a man who can kill more...
Whatever his inspiration, Sabatini wrote his masterpiece (and bestselling title) in 1920. Everything came together in Scaramouche; the strongest moments in his other novels barely equal the weakest scenes in this book. The hero is a witty young lawyer whose best friend is skewered by an aristocratic swordsman on the eve of the French Revolution. The hero vows to hound the aristo to destruction-only to find the absolute powers of the monarchy arrayed against...