Captain Gilson and I do occasionally re-read them. Stanley Weyman in particular." Works like The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas had established a market for popular historical fiction and it was a crowded field. Contemporary rivals included Baroness Orczy, A. E. W. Mason, John Buchan and Rafael Sabatini. The biographer Reginald Pound grouped Weyman with Arnold Bennett, Anthony Hope, Aldous Huxley, Dorothy L. Sayers and Somerset Maugham as Strand writers. He is now perhaps the least familiar of all these. His greatest success came before 1895 (Under the Red Robe, A Gentleman of France and The Red Cockade) and he stopped writing entirely between 1908 and 1919. His style and focus are more typical of Victorian writers, as are his faults. With odd exceptions such as Gil de Berault in Under the Red Robe, his characters are fairly uniform, his women caricatures, and his dialogue wooden to modern ears. Weyman's strength lies in historical detail, often in less familiar areas. The Long Night is based on the Duke of Savoy's attempt to storm Geneva in December 1602, an event still celebrated annually in a festival called L'Escalade. Weyman received an award from the city for his research. The financial security of early success allowed him to choose subjects of personal interest. Some had less general appeal, such as the 1832 Reform Bill (treated in Chippinge), post-1815 industrialisation (Starvecrow Farm) or the 1825 financial crisis (Ovington's Bank, reprinted in 2012 and 2015 on the back of a similar crisis in 2008). Weyman called his books "pleasant fables" and was aware of their modest literary value. Bibliography The House of the Wolf (1890) The King's Stratagem (1891) The New Rector (1891) The Story of Francis Cludde (1891) From the Memoirs of a Minister of France (1893) A Gentleman of France (1893) The Man in Black (1894) My Lady Rotha (1894) Under the Red Robe (1894, about Cardinal Richelieu and the Day of Dupes) A Little Wizard (1895) The Red Cockade (1895) The Snowball (1895) For the Cause (1897) Shrewsbury (1897, about Charles Talbot, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury) The Castle Inn (1898) When Love Calls (1899) Sophia (1900) Count Hannibal (1901) In Kings' Byways (1902, short stories) The Long Night (1903) The Abbess of Vlaye (1904) Starvecrow Farm (1905) Chippinge Borough (1906) Laid Up in Lavender (1907) (short stories) The Wild Geese (1908) The Great House (1919) Madam Constantia (1919) Ovington's Bank (1922,