The Lymond Series
A complete bibliography of Dorothy Dunnett's novels is listed at the end of end of this article. She achieved her initial claim for international attention in 1961 at the age of thirty-eight when her first novel, The Game of Kings was published. Surprisingly, the publisher was by Putnam's in the US; it didn't appear in Britain until the next year. In an interview by Jennie Calder who is editor of The Scottish Book Collector she tells us that she started her writing career when "I ran out of historical novels that I liked reading in the early 1960s . . . my husband said 'Why don't you write your own.' I evolved the scheme of writing a series of books set in the sixteenth century when a lot of exciting things were happening all over Europe, following the life of a single man through a period of fifteen or twenty years. The framework of the series, which turned out to be six novels, allowed me to look at the fine details of people's lives. By making Francis Crawford of Lymond, a Scot and soldier of fortune, I had an excuse to take him all over the place, to France, Turkey and Russia. Each book is fairly satisfying and complete in itself but there are always little tag ends which are not explained. . ." Dozens of these little mysteries that result in what she describes as 'tag ends' crop up throughout her stories and even those mysteries which are explained don't become clear until the very last few pages. Thus, there is overwhelming sense of suspense throughout.

The Game of Kings quickly established her as a popular and critically-successful author of historical fiction. This is somewhat surprising to me because her writing in addition to being cryptic is heavily laden with French, Spanish and Latin phrases. In addition, her Lymond novels are quite long -- at least five hundred pages and the final volume of the series, Checkmate, has over 700 pages. I find these novels hard to read after the concise straight forward prose of Tranter's novels. Nevertheless, Dunnett's stories are thoroughly fascinating and one is compelled to 'hang in there' to the very end.

Even though they are long, the Lymond novels don't reveal all the historical events that were recorded at the time. For example, the time period described in the 542 pages of The Game of Kings is 1547-8; it is but a brief episode of 44 pages in Tranter's Rough Wooing which runs to only 384 pages in total. The principal focus of those 44 pages is on the enormous religious crisis that Scotland was then experiencing, a crisis which resulted from the Protestant doctrines that were being infiltrated into Catholic Scotland, the burning at the stake of one of the disseminators of these doctrines, George Wishart, for heresy, and the subsequent assassination of the principal bulwark against Protestantism, Archbishop David Beaton in his palace at St Andrews. However, those 44 pages of Rough Wooing do not neglect the concomitant physical invasions of the English forces from the south by land and by sea. Interestingly, Dunnett does describe military invasions but makes little or no mention of the religious crisis. But even in the military arena Tranter is more informative describing the crucial battle of Pinkie in great detail where as Dunnett only mentions the outcome (another Scot loss).

Cecilia Holland, in her review of Dunnett's Race of Scorpions for the Washington Post Book World (1989), looked back at The Game of Kings as "a masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of the 16th-century feudal Scotland that is its ultimate hero." Analyzing the character of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Holland described him as "a charming rogue of an outlaw with a bitter, biting wit."Holland also noted Dunnett's witty prose, eye for detail and the wealth of historical detail included in her work. Although failing to mention the religious crisis might diminish that scholarship to a degree, its inclusion might have overburdened the story. After all, are most Americans all that much interested in Scottish history?

The second title of the Lymond Saga is Queen's Play. Note that all the titles of the series are taken from some aspect of the game of chess. Here the scene shifts from Scotland to France where the young Mary Queen of Scots has been evacuated to become the affianced of the Dauphin Francis, son of Henri II and his queen, Catherine de Médicis. Francis Crawford has been hired by the Queen Mother of Scotland, Mary of Guise, to be her independent source of information while she visits her native land. Lymond is well known in France and has many sources as well as enemies. The main focus is on the intrigue of the English diplomatic contingent directed at frustrating the scheduled wedding of Mary, now 7 years old when she reaches the minimum marrying age of 13 years. There are also many subplots one of which is the efforts of a band of Irishmen who are seeking French help in ridding their land of the English. As was the case in The Game of Kings, the erudition of Mrs. Dunnett is again much in evidence.

According to Gale Research, a considerably more positive note was struck by Joan Aiken in a long review of Niccolo Rising in Washington Post Book World. "Aiken's first response after reading the book, she told readers, was 'simple awestruck admiration at the sheer volume of knowledge deployed in its construction and at the energy and power of organization required to create and manipulate such a complicated plot.'"Although the venues of the House of Niccolo series are outwith Scotland, there are plenty of Scots involved in the details of the stories. One must keep in mind that Scotland's major export over the centuries has been its men and women and, where ever they went, they made an impact on events there far in excess of their numbers.

The Johnson Johnson or Dolly Series
In intervals between historical novels, Dunnett has written a series of detective story thrillers. The first seven of these make up the Johnson Johnson series, in which the major continuing character is a bifocal-wearing American portrait painter named Johnson Johnson, who owns a yacht named the Dolly. According to Gale Research, each book in the series "is narrated by a woman, and each book's title refers to a bird which symbolizes the narrator. Thus, in Dolly and the Bird of Paradise, the sixth volume in the series, published in 1983, the 'bird of paradise' is Rita Geddes, a Scottish makeup artist."However, for the American versions of this series the volumes have been retitled and the name Dolly dropped as shown in the bibliography that is listed at the end of this article.

Gale Research reports that Lawrence Block, writing in the Washington Post Book World, had the feeling that the first half of Dolly and the Bird of Paradise was slow-paced but nevertheless "commended Dunnett's depiction of settings such as the Caribbean islands of Martinique and St. Lucia and enjoyed later aspects of the plot, which, he claimed, 'has enough twists and turns to disorient almost anyone.' Summing up the series in his Contemporary Novelists assessment of Dunnett, Sanderson wrote, 'The thrillers with their different narrators' voices are great fun, substituting for the classic car chase some hard sailing in foul weather.'"

Gale Research points out that her being a sailing enthusiast in her own life, "Dunnett has transmuted this personal interest into fiction with the Dolly series. Her background as a painter appears in expert references to Renaissance painting in the House of Niccolo series, and more generally in the word-portraiture of characters such as Francis Crawford of Lymond and Claes/Niccolo the upwardly mobile apprentice. Her love for the landscape of Scotland is apparent throughout the Lymond Saga, and her keenness for travel appears in virtually all of her books."Dunnett's many readers have responded with great enthusiasm to the extent that an international correspondence magazine on her work called Marzipan & Kisses was launched in Chicago in 1984, and it now has an additional base in Edinburgh.