D'Artagnan - H. Bedford-Jones

I’ve been a fan of the Three Musketeers for a long time, ever since I bought the Whitman edition of the novel when I was a kid and read it. I read the Classics Illustrated comic book version, too, and over the years I’ve watched and enjoyed most of the movie versions. I really liked the BBC TV series from a few years back and that’s how I see the characters in my head now.

So when I was in the mood to read a swashbuckler recently, I picked up D'ARTAGNAN, a pastiche sequel to the original, written by one of my favorite authors, H. Bedford-Jones. It was published originally as a three-part serial in the pulp ADVENTURE in September and October of 1928 and reprinted several years ago by Altus Press.

Set approximately a year after the events in THE THREE MUSKETEERS, this novel is supposedly, according to Bedford-Jones, expanded from an unpublished manuscript by Alexandre Dumas. ADVENTURE plays that up on the cover of the issue containing the first installment of the serial. However, according to the Fictionmags Index, the only material by Dumas is a one-page excerpt from an article that has nothing to do with the book itself. No matter. D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are back, protecting Queen Anne of France from the schemes of the evil Cardinal Richelieu, although D’Artagnan does most of the heavy lifting in this book, befitting the title. Aramis is wounded and barely shows up. Athos and Porthos are busy with other things for most of the first half, although they play major roles in the second half of the book.

The plot, which involves various rings used for identification, missing documents and letters, wild coincidence after wild coincidence, ambushes, swordfights, disguises, and a mysterious child, is almost impossible to summarize. All the political intrigue is so complicated that I’m still not sure I understood everything that was going on. But again, no matter. D’Artagnan and his friends gallop hither and yon and save the day. That’s all that’s really important.

Bedford-Jones’ prose is a little more flowery than usual, which I suppose is understandable since he was writing a Dumas pastiche, and the plot, as I mentioned, is downright murky. But the action scenes, and there are a lot of them, are great. The final climactic battle, in which D’Artagnan, Athos, and Porthos face overwhelming odds in a French tavern, is just terrific, the sort of thing that would have had me bouncing up and down in my chair in suspense and excitement if I’d read this when I was a kid.

The good stuff far outweighs the weaker bits in D’ARTAGNAN. I had a great time reading it. If you’re a Three Musketeers fan like me or just enjoy a good swashbuckler, you should definitely give it a try. It’s available in paperback and e-book editions on Amazon.

Forgotten Books: The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (Whitman Edition)

This is another of the books of my childhood. We've been watching the excellent BBC series THE MUSKETEERS on DVD (I'm sure I'll get around to doing a post about it sooner or later) and that reminded me of this volume I owned when I was a kid. Whitman published it in 1956, but it was a few years later when I bought a copy in Trammell's Dry Goods Store, one of many Whitman books I bought or read from the library over the years. (The Trammell brothers soon got out of the dry goods business and opened Trammell's Village Restaurant in the same space, next to the grocery story they owned...but that has nothing to do with this.)

Anyway, like a lot of Whitman juvenile editions of the classics, this version of THE THREE MUSKETEERS isn't the original. Instead, according to the title page, it's "Retold from Alexandre Dumas' Story". Who did the retelling? I have no idea. The author isn't given credit anywhere in the book. It's illustrated, though, by Peter Steffenson, and they're pretty good illustrations, too.

Surely everybody reading this blog knows the plot of THE THREE MUSKETEERS, so I won't go into that. I'll just say that whoever did this adaptation did a good job of it, because there are a number of scenes that have stayed with me for more than fifty years, including the opening, the numerous battles and swordfights, and the ultimate fate of Milady deWinter. Dumas deserves most of the credit for coming up with the characters and story, of course, but the "reteller" couched it all in prose that was exciting enough to keep an eight-year-old reading and pulled surprisingly few punches about the sordid aspects of the tale.

Being reminded of all this, I decided I wanted to own a copy of this particular edition again, so I found one pretty inexpensively on-line. That's a scan of it above. I may not ever get around to reading it again, but I'm glad to have it. It's not in great shape, but when you flip through those tanned pages, it smells wonderful. It smells like summer days and swamp coolers and freshly mowed grass and a just-cut watermelon that was sitting in a tub of ice for a while before you sliced it open. Some of you know what I'm talking about. And to think you can get all that from a cheaply produced kid's book published almost sixty years ago.