Miscellanea

Resources • Sightings • Our Readers Recommend

Resources

The Last of the Great Swashbucklers: A Bio-Bibliography of Rafael Sabatini by Jesse F. Knight and Stephen Darley.

Ruth Heredia has gathered together a First Lines of Sabatini's works.

Ruth has also compiled a list of Titles and Dedications of those Sabatini works with extended titles and dedications.

An ambitious listing of British and Irish authors with links has been compiled and maintained by Mitsuharu Matsuoka.

Sightings

Although he was famous in his own time, mentions of Sabatini these days seem to be few and far between. Did you know...

On Murder, She Wrote, a character used the name Rafaela Sabatini as a psuedonym and the name for a character in a romance novel.

The novel Bullet for a Star, by Stuart Kaminsky, takes place in Hollywood in the 1940s. Errol Flynn is being blackmailed just before the release of The Sea Hawk. He is urged by the private detective on the scene (and protagonist) to check into a hotel. The identity he uses is Rafael Sabatini.

Sabatini is mentioned in the recent novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas.

In A Rock and A Hard Place by Peter David (Book 10 of the Star Trek:The Next Generation series of tie-in novels), Will Riker is reading Captain Blood.

Monty Python's Flying Circus: Episode 25 "Spam" from June 25, 1970. The opening sketch is "The Black Eagle" and shows the opening credits of a swashbuckler. Following the credits down it reads: "Based on the novel The Blue Eagle by Raphael Sabatini".

In the Jason Robards film "A Thousand Clowns." Robards' character adopts his nephew and allows him to try out numerous names but must choose one for good when he turns 14 (I think). One of the names he tries on for a while is "Dr Raphael Sabatini."

If you have any more "sightings" of Sabatini in fiction I can include on this list, please let me know. (Thanks to Susan Moseley, Gus Russo and Faatima Qureshi for contributions!)

Our Readers Recommend...

Other authors Sabatini fans might find interesting include:

• Stanley Weyman was one of the few writers Sabatini admired of his contemporaries.
• Emilio Salgari predated Sabatini and might have influenced him, although there is no evidence that he did. He is much more "escapist" in tone.
• Jeffery Farnol was a contemporary of Sabatini and wrote in the same genre using a similar, florid style.
• Alexandre Dumas, his classics are classics for a reason. His short stories, however, fall short.
• Josef Conrad
• Edmond Rostand's best known work is the sublime Cyrano de Bergerac.This site is in French.
• There is little on the web about Mary Johnston, but most of the references mention To Have and To Hold.
• Baroness Orczy is, of course, best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel. She was a good friend of Sabatini.
• If you have grown up without an acquaintance with Robert Louis Stevenson, now is a good time to check him out.
• Victor Hugo wrote several brilliant historical novels, including 93 and The Man Who Laughs.
• David Graeme
• Anthony Hope
• Friedrich Schiller
• Saki
• Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Polish writer whose best known work is probably Quo Vadis.
• Of course, one current master of the genre is Bernard Cornwell, best known for his Sharpe series, he has written introductions to several of the Sabatini Norton reprints.
• George MacDonald Fraser wrote introductions to The Common Reader reprints of Sabatini Works
• Mika Waltari is a Finish writer whose works include The Roman
• John Buchan
• Dornford Yates
• Alistair MacLean
• C.S.Foresterworks are not quite in the same vein as Sabatini, but still Hornblower is a excellent sea adventure with enough conflict to keep you interested.
• A. E. W. Mason lived from 1865 to 1948, so many of his works are in the public domain. Nine of them are available online for free from Project Gutenberg.