was Deputy Examiner in the Public Works Department, and he served 15 years in the department. But as his career as a popular novelist took off, he eventually received a furlough from his civil service job in India and returned to England. Novels Levett-Yeats set his boisterous novels in wildly different locales, and his novels struck a chord with an English audience enamoured of historical romance. The genre was so popular that it was known as the 'cloak and sword school.' The Lord Protector, for instance, set in the days of the English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, describes the hunting down of an ardent Royalist. A Galahad of the Creeks was set during the Burmese wars. The Chevalier d'Auriac concerned Henry of Navarre. Other tales were set in swashbuckling Europe. Orrain: A Romance, published by Methuen in London and by Longmans in the United States, told a tale of King Henry II of France and his wife Catherine de' Medici. The Chevalier d'Auriac was serialized in Longman's Magazine in 1897. Levett's best-known book was The Honour of Savelli, a tale of treachery and intrigue set during the era of the Borgias in medieval Italy. The work, noted a review in the magazine Book Reviews, captured Levett's strong suit: his storytelling ability. "The freedom and dash of his recital, and the general ability shown in the handling of his characters and in the quality of his style are his strongest credentials," noted the review. Critique The Honour of Savelli even made Levett-Yeats' friend from Lahore's Punjab Club, Rudyard Kipling, sit up and take notice. "When I knew him in the Punjab Club in the old days," Kipling wrote to a friend about Levett-Yeats, "he was full of notions about a mutiny tale and he may have something up his sleeve that would be worth getting at." Levett-Yeats had a flair for story, but the critics were not always impressed by his writing style. "He has romance and pretty turn for dramatic episodes," said The New York Tribune about his book The Heart of Denise and Other Tales. "The Indian tales show that while Mr. Yeats is far below Mr. Kipling in the treatment of the material to be found among the natives, he is at any rate clever and readable. His vignettes of landscape are drawn with special grace." Style Levett's novels were the equivalent of today's action movies: full of