‘Lymond is back.” So begins The Game of Kings, the first book in my greatest literary love affair: Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. I first discovered them while mooching around an empty classroom as a bored 16-year-old. There, among the dry textbooks and histories, was a tattered, much-thumbed book with a garish cover depicting a man and woman locked in passionate embrace. Intrigued, I picked it up. From the opening line, I was hooked.
Nearly 30 years later, nothing has changed. These are the books I reread through each pregnancy, the books I turn to for comfort whenever things get bad. I have owned four different sets, replacing each copy as they fall apart. Lines from all of them pop into my head at odd moments. They are the first thing (apart from my children) that I would save in a house fire, and the novels I would take to a desert island exile.
National Public Radio in the US once called Dunnett the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground: “Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.” Her influence can be seen everywhere from Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint series and Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels to KJ Whittaker’s False Lights.
What’s the magic? For a start, that first gaudy cover did Dunnett’s six-book saga about a 16th-century Scottish soldier of fortune a huge disservice. Yes, there is melodrama and high romance but the Lymond Chronicles are far more than a standard romp with sex and swords.
The story grips from the start: we are first introduced to Francis Crawford of Lymond as the disreputable youngest son of a wealthy and well-liked Borders family. The Game of Kings opens with his return to Scotland after years of exile, an unexpected homecoming that promptly sets off all manner of betrayals, both political and personal. Yet this high-handed, witty and dissolute adventurer is not quite what he seems; a large part of the series’ enjoyment comes in the gap between the general perception of Lymond as a treacherous villain, and the conflicting clues sprinkled throughout for readers to enjoy.
Not that Dunnett makes it easy. In addition to being a mistress of misdirection, she makes no concessions to potential ignorance, sprinkling her text with snatches of French, Spanish and Latin, obscure period references and classical allusions. Forget school: it was Dunnett who taught me about Richard Chancellor’s early trade mission to Moscow and the Knights Hospitaller and their time in Malta, and Dunnett who introduced me to the larger-than-life exploits of Piero and Leone Strozzi, the turbulent mutability of Ivan the Terrible and the machinations of John Dee.
There are complex and complicated female characters, too: the pragmatic Kate Sommerville and her forthright, hugely likable daughter Philippa; the magnificently malevolent, Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, niece to one King and later grandmother to another – and Lymond’s enigmatic mother Sybilla, the one person more adept than her son at presenting an image to the world.
Yet ultimately these books stand or fall with their leading man – and what a creation he is. Ruthless, sharp-tongued, capable of acts both subtle and shocking, Francis Crawford is arguably the perfect romantic hero, an intoxicating blend of Dorothy Sayers’s charming Peter Wimsey and Alexandre Dumas’s tormented Athos who at one point notes sardonically: “I have no pretty faults, only sometimes a purpose.”
Over the course of six books he is traitor and mercenary, seducer and spy, confidante of tricksy rulers and a target for powerful men and women, most of whom spend their time trying to murder him, some more extravagantly than others. Driven by private despair, Francis ultimately finds himself forced into a reckoning with the kind of person he has become and the very different person he could be.
It all makes for melodrama of the most magnificent kind, filled with some of fiction’s most memorable set pieces, including a pulsating duel by the altar of Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral, a desperate dash through the Northumbrian countryside to unmask a traitor, and a brutal chess game in the court of King Sulemein the Magnificent in which the pieces are human beings and the price for being taken is death. Small wonder then that the creators of Poldark have optioned the rights and a television series is planned.
They would be wise to tread carefully, however. The Lymond Chronicles might be full-blooded adventures and feature a hefty body count (Dunnett rivals George RR Martin in her willingness to kill off characters) but they are not the rollicking bodice-rippers that that old dustjacket implied. Indeed, as Phillipa notes of their hero: “Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.” It is that lack of sentiment that transforms these novels from entertainment to obsession. While publishers can now claim Lymond is back, for some of us he never went away.
• The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett are republished by Michael Joseph.
