The sequel, Twenty Years After, links the aristocratic Fronde rebellion in France and the civil wars in Britain. Episodic and rambling – Dumas, famously, was paid by the line – it holds together and holds the attention thanks to character appeal and sheer rollicking force of storytelling. The struggle between Catholics and Protestants, and the national and international intrigue surrounding the French throne in the early 17th century, are the terrain for one of the most famous adventure stories ever written. Photograph: Rex Feature/Everett Collection / Rex Feature Rollicking storytelling … the 1948 screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Brother Cadfael fought in the Crusades before becoming a monk his experience of life and his knowledge of herbs, learned from Muslims in the Holy Land, make him a humane and relatively practical voice amid the superstition, able to see clearly through the crimes that the civil war brings to Shrewsbury Abbey. 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.

Novel american war