![]() ![]() The battle for the English throne between Matilda and her cousin Stephen between 11 – 18 years of unrest “while God and his angels slept” – seemed bleak for fiction, until Ellis Peters (one of four pen names used by Edith Pargeter for her novels she also translated Czech literature) recognised that the pervasive uncertainty and unrest were the ideal background for mystery novels. (MC Scott bases her vivid accounts of battle and camp life on 20th-century soldiers’ reminiscences.) But one of the best examples comes from 1989, when a former civil servant introduced Falco, a chippy, sardonic, harassed investigator, whose adventures begin as Rome tries to recover from the year of the four emperors. There’s a huge market now in sword-and-sandal historical fiction drawing on the chaos of Roman politics and wars. The struggle for power, and the role of the legions, made great chunks of its history more or less a civil war. ![]()
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