The Game of Kings
"I would give you my heart in a blackberry pie, and a knife to cut it with" Dorothy Dunnett
When I am asked to list, say, ten of my favourite novels. I invariably cheat and say Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, thus getting six long, long novels onto the list as one.
I first read them in the late eighties, more than twenty years after the first in the series, The Game of Kings, was published in 1961.
The cover led me to believe it was a throwaway historical romance. There was nothing to suggest that instead it would become an obsession. That I would read all six novels through several times - I am due another-rereading soon, I think. One of those times I read them out loud to my husband, who came to share my obsession. In the early internet days I discovered online discussion groups devoted to the series, and even subscribed for a while to Whispering Gallery, the magazine for the Dorothy Dunnett Society.
When I was first really ill with a lupus flare, just before I was diagnosed, I could do very little. I couldn’t bear to listen to music or to watch television - any noise was overwhelming. And I couldn’t bear to read books which were new to me. So I comfort read.
I read a string a Georgette Heyer’s Regency Romances - especially my favourite, Cotillion.
And I read my way through the thousands of pages of the Lymond Chronicles.
Twice.
These days, I hesitate to recommend the novels, although for years I was evangelical about them. But I have discovered that not everyone likes long novels, and even fewer people like long series of long novels.
Just in case you might want to dip your toes in the water, though, I will say that The Game of Kings works well as a stand-alone novel.
Another reason these novels often fail to ensnare new readers, is that Dunnett’s language can be a little overpowering. For me, it was never a problem, because I was instantly caught up in the story - and enchanted by Francis Crawford of Lymond, master of purple prose and so much more.
The novels are peopled with a mixture of fictional characters and real historical people - from Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth 1st, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, Suleiman the Magnificent, Ivan the Terrible, Mary Tudor… Too many to mention them all.
Dunnett is renowned for the accuracy of her historical research, so that aspect of the novels is fascinating.
However, the real joy is the story.
Francis Crawford, or Lymond, is the archetypal hero - or antihero, perhaps. At the outset we see him sneak back into Scotland, where he is seen as a traitor, break into his family’s castle where he terrorises his mother (who is not the slightest bit alarmed), and flirts with his sister-in-law who is in equal parts attracted and repelled.
He is a kind of Renaissance man, with so many talents ranging from the arts to matters of spycraft and warfare.
Arrogant because he really is that good. A tortured soul. The kind who embodies that never explain, never apologise approach to life. A good man, in spite of all the terrible things he does. A romantic hero in both senses.
In fact, he is kind of a sixteenth century James Bond, adventuring around sixteenth century Europe. There are even scenes which are clearly sixteen century versions of car chases.
It’s a romance with a capital R - not a story with a main focus on romantic relationships. Not boy meets girl, so much as boy meets a lot of girls and maybe a boy or too. But Romance in the older sense of a narrative which is full of adventure and mystery, featuring a hero who has many challenges to overcome.
So Lymond’s story has it all - a dysfunctional family background which is full of secrets and lies. A narrative filled with intrigue and politics, treason and patriotism. There is friendship and betrayal, plotting and manipulation. And yes, there is more than one story of romantic attachment.
The third and the fourth novels in the series, The Disorderly Knights and Pawn in Frankincense, tell the story of a an extraordinary game of cat and mouse between Lymond and my favourite ever fictional villain, culminating in a game of chess where a child’s life is at stake.
So yes, it’s over the top, melodramatic, and completely addictive as a story.
Dunnett tortures her characters, especially Lymond, to beyond breaking point - and we readers love it.
She is also completely brilliant at misdirection and holding back - making us wait to find out exactly what’s going on.
I remember when I was almost at the end of Checkmate, the final novel in the series, I was so upset by what happened that I literally flung the book across the room. It was three days before I picked it up and read the last pages.
As a person who cannot keep a secret I find this inspiring. For instance, when I buy a surprise for my husband Ryan for birthday or Christmas, I too soon start to ask him, “Don’t you want to know what it is?” Even when I am writing my own crime novels, too often I set up a secret and then spill it in the next line, the next paragraph, or at the latest the next chapter. This is always something I have to fix in editing.
And this is why I am planning to reread. I think there is so much about crafting brilliant stories I could learn from going back to these novels now.
Not the prose style! My own style is quite spare and understated - and I like it that way.
But character - I really don’t think there’s a writer I could learn more from. Her characters have depth and complexity and nuance - hence she created my favourite hero and my favourite villain.
And her skill in storytelling is also just magnificent.
OK, so I might be a little biased.
I’ve included a long section here from the very beginning of The Game of Kings. It introduces the main character and gives a hint of the scope of the story - which is chock full of intrigue and politics and actual history. Perhaps you might like to give it a try?
Extract From The Game of Kings
Opening Gambit: Threat to a Castle
‘Lymond is back.’
It was known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.
‘Lymond is in Scotland.’
It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. ‘I hear the Lord Culter’s young brother is back.’ Only sometimes a woman’s voice would say it with a different note, and then laugh a little.
Lymond’s own men had known he was coming. Waiting for him in Edinburgh they wondered briefly, without concern, how he proposed to penetrate a walled city to reach them.
When the Sea-Catte came in, Mungo Tennant, citizen and smuggler of Edinburgh, knew nothing of these things or of its passenger. He made his regular private adjustment from douce gentility to illegal trading; and soon a boatload of taxless weapons, bales of velvet and Bordeaux wine was being rowed on a warm August night over the Nor’ Loch which guarded the north flank of Edinburgh, and toward the double cellar beneath Mungo’s house.
Among the reeds of the Nor’ Loch, where the snipe and the woodcock lay close and the baillies’ swans raised their grey necks, a man quietly stripped to silk shirt and hose and stood listening, before sliding softly into the water. Across four hundred feet of black lake, friezelike on their ridge, towered the houses of Edinburgh. Tonight the Castle on its pinnacle was fully lit, laying constellations on the water; for within, the Governor of Scotland the Earl of Arran was listening to report after report of the gathering English army about to invade him.
Below the Castle, the house of the Queen Mother also showed lights. The late King’s French widow, Mary of Guise, was sleepless too over the feared attack, for the redheaded baby Queen for whom Arran governed was her daughter. And England’s purpose was to force a betrothal between the child Queen Mary and the boy King Edward, aged nine, and to abduct the four-year-old fiancée if chance offered. The burned thatch, the ruined stonework, the blackened face of Holyrood Palace showed where already, in other years, invading armies from England had made their point, but not their capture.
Few civic cares troubled Mungo Tennant, awaiting his cargo, except that the ceaseless renewal of war against England made a watch at the gates much too stringent; and the total defeat by England thirty-four years since at Flodden had caused high walls to be flung around Edinburgh which were damnably inopportune for a smuggler. And for Crawford of Lymond, now parting the flat waters of the Nor’ Loch like an oriflamme in the wake of the boat. For where a smuggler’s load could pierce a city’s defences, so could an outlawed rebel, whose life would be forfeit if caught.
Ahead, the boat scraped on mud and was lifted silently shoreward. The rowers unloaded. Burdened feet trod on grass, crossed a garden, encompassed an obstacle, and were silent within the underground shaft leading to the cellar below the cellar in Mungo’s house. The swimmer, collared with duckweed, grounded, shook himself, and unseen followed gently into, and out of the same house. Crawford of Lymond was in Edinburgh.
Once there, it was simple. In a small room in the High Street he changed fast into sober, smothering clothes and was fed two months’ news, in voracious detail, by those serving him. ‘… And so the Governor’s expecting the English in three weeks and is fair flittering about like a hen with its throat cut … You’re gey wet,’ said the spokesman.
‘I,’ said Lymond, in the voice unmistakably his which honeyed his most lethal thoughts, ‘I am a narwhal looking for my virgin. I have sucked up the sea like Charybdis and failing other entertainment will spew it three times daily, for a fee. Tell me again, precisely, what you have just said about Mungo Tennant.’
They told him, and received their orders, and then he left, pausing on the threshold to pin the dark cloak about his chin. ‘Shy,’ said Lymond with simplicity, ‘as a dogtooth violet.’ And he was gone."
Ann
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Bonus Links
NPR, All the writers you love probably love Dorothy Dunnett
"They're the kind of books that are truly reckless with your emotions," says bestselling young adult fantasy author Cassandra Clare. Dunnett, she adds, crafts characters who are dense and ultimately lovable, and then uses that reader investment as a blade: "Every time you think she can't hurt them — and you — more, she does it again. It really taught me that finely wrought emotional pain can be an exquisite joy for readers, even if they claim it hurts!"
Thanks for this. Sounds like it would be a great Christmas present for my old Mum. And I could sneak a read too! Finding it a little tricky to track down to buy.