Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini was born in Italy to an English mother and an Italian father, both opera singers, and grew up multilingual. He said he chose English for his fiction because the best stories are written in it. He wrote for twenty-five years to modest sales before Scaramouche opened with a sentence that made him famous overnight, and Captain Blood confirmed it. The swashbucklers are far better made than their reputation suggests: the history is real, the politics are grasped, and the wit is his own rather than borrowed from Dumas. He lost his only son in a car accident and his stepson in a flying accident, and the late books carry that weight. Several of his novels became defining Hollywood films of the 1930s, which has obscured how good the prose was.