Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Pikes, Muskets and Flouncy Shirts => Topic started by: warrenpeace on 05 July 2011, 06:45:25 PM
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Stumbled on some swashbuckling inspiration by accident. My brother had the 4th book of author William Dietrich's series on the character Ethan Gage. The first book, Napoleon's Pyrimids, is set in 1798. The other books are The Dakota Cypher, The Rosetta Key, and The Barbary Pirates. The hero is a sort of Indiana Jones type, with a little dash of Harry Flashman. He has a knack for uncovering lost knowledge, and he gets mixed up with Napoleon and a sort of illuminati like "Egyptian Rite," who act as the main villains. It isn't going to be mistaken for great literature, but it is almost on par with the Sharpe series as a French Revolutionary & Napoleonic era adventure. It's sort of Sharpe/Flashman meets Pulp:
http://williamdietrich.com/books-by-william-dietrich/
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Sounds good.
I've read a couple of books where the publisher's blurb has promised 'the next Flashman' and they've turned out to be disappointing in the extreme!
So if you think this series is a worthy contender, I might well give it a go :)
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I would not say that this series is on a par with Flashman, and it's not quite on a par with Sharpe either. Hardly anybody can equal the humor of George MacDonald Fraser, and there is quite a bit more psychological drama in the works of Bernard Cornwell. However, it's quite a bit better than the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft. It's more of a modern style thriller, with a fair amount of humor thrown in.
As with so much modern fiction, the action is pretty fast paced, as if the writers are all writing for the movie script rather than writing for literary quality. But it's pretty fun stuff. I'm planning to get the other three books and read them. The lead character is pretty plucky and resourceful, and can definately fight, much like Sharpe. But he also has moments in which he is running, and is pretty scared, and he is not too honorable, much like Flashman. But he is probably more like Indiana Jones than either of those characters.