The White Company

The creator of Sherlock Holmes took so much greater pride in a series of carefully researched historical novels that posterity has largely forgotten that he tossed his best-loved hero into Reichenbach Falls in order to head off the temptation to revive him. Now Akadine has paired Conan Doyle’s best-known medieval fantasy, which outsold A Tale of Two Cities, Kidnapped, and Ben-Hur, with the prequel—a story depicting the early years of stalwart bantam Sir Nigel Loring.

In his judicious introduction, George MacDonald Fraser, while acknowledging that both volumes are “juvenile blood-and-thunders” filled with hairbreadth escapes, impossibly noble heroes, a thoroughly unfashionable appetite for blood and thunder, and a rosy-eyed view of the Middle Ages whose Victorianism has dated as severely as its subject, notes their popularity with readers from Dwight Eisenhower to John Ford.