I looked this up in the dictionary, but its dry Biblical referent didn't quite explain Jerott's fury or disgust. At one point, Lymond's friend Jerott, incandescent with rage, hurls the word 'catamite' at him. The hours I spent attempting to decipher some of Dunnett's more oblique passages opened me to the possibilities of romantic storytelling (in the capital-R literary movement sense as well as the good old-fashioned true love sense). We see him through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints over the course of the six dense, continent- and decade-spanning novels. The Lymond Chronicles follow the minor Scottish nobleman Francis Crawford of Lymond, a dark star whose gravitational charisma pulls in everyone around him: friends, lovers, enemies (and some who are all three at one time). I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground: Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.

Years later, I would discover how many other writers, across varied genres, shared this foundational influence.

The title was The Game of Kings, its author was Dorothy Dunnett, and reading it was going to change my life. When I was sixteen, the shelf which held authors A through D divulged a small, yellowing paperback with a splashily romantic cover: a long-limbed blond man in Renaissance dress, gripping both a woman and a rapier. The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Game of Kings Author Dorothy Dunnett

Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett