"Those books sound wonderful, Don."

They really are, Little Hawk. Sabatini's characters were so finely drawn, even his swashbuckling pirates, that you felt like you would know them if you met them. And they all had believable motivations.

Peter Blood, for example, wasn't just a bloodthirsty pirate. He had been in the wars as a soldier and seaman, and had retired to a quiet live as a doctor. One day, he treated an injured man who was brought to his door. Then he was arrested for aiding a traitor (learning that the man he had treated was a rebel against James II), tried, and condemned to be transported to Jamaica, where he would be a slave for the rest of his life. On occasion, he was able to ply his skills as a physician there, but conditions were so bad that he and a group of other slaves took advantage of a Spanish attack on Jamaica, managed through sneaky tactics to commandeer a Spanish warship, and sailed away, free to sail the Spanish Main. After many adventures, the regime in England changes, and the infamous Captain Blood sails home as a hero.

It's a helluva good read, and in the late Thirties, it was Errol Flynn's big breakthrough movie, earning him the position of king of the swashbucklers. Plenty of broadsides fired, many sword fights, and an underlying romance, but all set against a background of true historical events. For example, the judge who condemned Blood to be transported was a real person, as were a number of the other characters in the book.

And most of Sabatini's historical novels have the same sweep and accuracy of detail, although I must say that some of them are better than others. He also did a non-fiction work, The Life of Cesare Borgia, which was fascinating. It seems Borgia and his sister Lucretia were not just bloodthirsty demons murdering people right, left, and center, although Cesare was suspected of doing a bit of that (his enemies had the habit of dying conveniently, but no one was able to actually implicate Cesare). Italy was a bickering collection of city-states and the not-yet-country was constantly being plundered by Spain, France, Austria, and others. Borgia wanted to unite the city-states into a cohesive country in its own right. And he wasn't too fastidious about how he went about it.

And Lucretia never poisoned anyone. Most of what one hears about her is pure fiction. She was considered a great beauty, was married to Alfonso d'Este, Prince of Ferrarra, was a good and faithful wife, and was a patron of the arts. The whole Borgia family got a really bad press from the Secretary of Venice. The Venetians were scared spitless of the Borgias and slandered them at every opportunity.

Which is not to say that Cesare, and his father, Giovanni Borgia (Pope Alexander VI) were Boy Scouts. Niccolo Machiavelli admired Borgia's cleverness and ruthlessness and modeled his political treatise, The Prince after Cesare Borgia.

But then, this is wandering far afield from good opening lines. Sorry. . . .

Don Firth