Top Ten Tuesday: Time for Some Thrilling Heroics

This week, That Artsy Reader Girl is giving us a freebie for Top Ten Tuesday!  I've decided to share my top ten favorite swashbucklers with you.

To me, a book or movie is a swashbuckler if it has adventure, sword fights (or brawls), daring escapes or rescues, and a certain amount of swagger.  I adore stories like that!  Here are my ten favorite, complete with a few story elements you'll find in them.  All titles are linked to my reviews.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas -- prison escape, long-lost love, revenge, murder, disguises, tall ships, young love, damsels in distress, bandits...

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson -- stolen inheritance, kidnapping, shipwreck, escape, mismatched buddies, disguises, treason, assassination, fencing, bagpipes...

The Princess Bride by William Goldman -- fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle -- archery, banditry, outlawry, brawling, courtly romance, captures, rescues...

The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley -- fencing, disguises, rescues, chases, more fencing...

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson -- pirates, treasure, tall ships, maroonings, sieges, rescues...

The Black Swan by Rafael Sabatini -- pirates, damsels in distress, kidnappings, rescues, tall ships, sea battles, fencing, brawling, treachery...

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope -- mistaken identity, disguises, fencing, kidnapping, doomed romance, rescues...

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy -- disguises, rescues, chases, fencing, romance, mistaken identities, damsels in distress...

Sackett's Land by Louis L'Amour -- exploration, chases, escapes, fencing, brawling, tall ships, sea battles, fortune seekers, romance...

And there you have it!  Are you a fan of swashbucklers too?  Got any to recommend?

Top Ten Tuesday: Go West, Young(ish) Woman! Go West!

This week's Top Ten Tuesday prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl is "Books Set In a Place I’d Love to Visit," and can be about real or fictional places.  I'm choosing to focus on all books set in the Old West because I would LOVE to take a time-travel trip back to the Old West and experience it for myself, at least for a little while.  I'd probably want to return to a world of antibiotics and clean drinking water after a while, rather than live there forever, but a visit to any of these books?  Yes, please!

So, here are my ten favorite novels set in the Old West.  All titles are linked to my reviews, unless I haven't reviewed that book yet.  Yes, one selection is a trilogy, but it didn't seem fair to have only one of the books here, or have the books take up three slots, so I put them all together.

1. Shane by Jack Schaefer -- A lone gunman befriends a struggling family and saves a town, but at great cost.

2. Borden Chantry by Louis L'Amour -- An amateur lawman solves a series of killings to protect his town.

3. The Knights of Tin and Lead trilogy by Emily Hayse (These War-Torn Hands, The Beautiful Ones, In the Glorious Fields) -- The King Arthur legend retold as gently magical westerns.

4. The Light of Western Stars by Zane Grey -- A woman goes west and figures out who she really is inside while experiencing a series of adventures and meeting a variety of interesting characters.

5. True Grit by Charles Portis -- A teenage girl insists on accompanying a U. S. Marshal on the quest to bring her father's murderer to justice.

6. The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley -- A dashing aristocrat fights injustice and tyranny from behind two different disguises.

7. Sixteen Brides by Stephanie Grace Whitson -- Sixteen women go west to claim their own homesteads, start businesses, and/or get married.

8. Hondo by Louis L'Amour -- A Cavalry scout physically saves a family on a remote homestead, and they save him emotionally.

9. The Virginian by Owen Wister -- A frontier school teacher tries really hard not to fall in love with a nameless hero who saves her from a series of mishaps and disasters and calamities.

10. A Sidekick's Tale by Elisabeth Grace Foley -- A young woman tries to save her family's ranch by entering into a marriage of convenience, but comic mishaps keep derailing her plans.

"The Further Adventures of Zorro" by Johnston McCulley

As you might be able to tell from the cover, in Johnston McCulley's second serialized Zorro story, Zorro takes to the high seas.  Because what could possibly be more exciting than the first Zorro story?  Why, Zorro plus pirates, of course!

On the eve of Don Diego Vega's wedding to Senorita Lolita Pulido, a band of pirates attacks Los Angeles, looting and pillaging.  The presidio just happens to be empty of soldiers at the moment because Captain Ramon sent them on a fool's errand so the pirates could have free rein.  His reward?  They kidnap Lolita Pulido for him.  Back in the first Zorro story (originally titled The Curse of Capistrano), Captain Ramon had tried unsuccessfully to woo the senorita, but of course lost out to Diego/Zorro.  Now Ramon is determined to ruin his rival, claim the girl as his own, and make people think he's a hero.  If he has to make -- and break -- a few pacts with some pirates, oh well.

Naturally, Diego dons his Zorro persona once again and sets off to rescue his lady love.  If you're not used to reading serialized adventures like this (think the swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas), then you might get a bit weary of the long string of escapes, captures, failed rescues, and so on.  I thought it was a very fun story, and I liked that the damsel in distress did some plotting of her own, involving several bids for freedom and a successful trick to free Zorro.

This is not great literature.  However, this is highly entertaining literature, and I'm so glad it's available in e-book form and not lost to the world.  I read this with the Kindle app on my phone, and while it had numerous typos, still... I'd rather have to decipher a word here and there than not get to read it at all!

Particularly Good Bits:

"If a thief, be a thief!  If a pirate, be a pirate!  But do not play at being an honest man and try to be a thief and pirate at the same time."

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for lots of swashbuckling violence and Captain Ramon intending to have his way with Senorita Pulido if she does not consent to marry him.

This is my 34th book read and reviewed for The Classics Club.

"The Mark of Zorro" by Johnston McCulley

I've been a Zorro fan for most of my life.  At a rummage sale when I was probably 8 or 9, I found an old picture book based on the Disney TV show, Zorro (1957-61).  I was already a lover of all things Old West by that age, and the dashing Zorro reminded me a lot of the Lone Ranger, one of my earliest heroes.  I read that already-well-loved book over and over, taping it back together whenever it fell apart a little more.  Later, I got to see some episodes of that show, plus the 1940 Tyrone Power movie, The Mark of Zorro.  I loved the show the most, as Guy Williams suited my adolescent self, with his bright smile and sly quips.  There was a Zorro TV show in the '90s that I liked too, though I only caught a handful of eps because my family didn't have cable.  And, of course, in 1998, Antonio Banderas donned The Mask of Zorro, and I love that movie version very, very much.  I also quite like Isabelle Allende's book.

So it's odd, since I've loved Zorro stories for almost 20 years, that I'd never read the original story until now.  And I'm regretting that, in a way, because I could have been enjoying this book for all these years!  It's such a zesty, fun-loving sort of story, exactly what would have pleased me in my teens.  Oh well, at least I've read it now!

And I've not only read it, I've listened to a breathtaking audio version too.  I actually listened to this a few months ago (my everlasting thanks to Deb Koren for telling me of its existence!), and then discovered when I started reading the book that, duh, this is what the audio series was based on!  Which means that I got to read this whole book with Val Kilmer's voice in my head, which... wow.  Talk about swoon-inducing!  In fact, I almost recommend the audio over the original book, based solely on the magnificence of Val Kilmer's vocal performance.

Okay, but anyway, the book we know now as The Mark of Zorro was originally a serial in a pulp magazine almost a hundred years ago, in 1919.  It was called The Curse of Capistrano, and the story caught the eye of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who changed the title to The Mark of Zorro when he made it into a movie.  The movie was such a smash that the whole serial was released as a book under his title instead of the original.  McCulley went on to write a bunch more books about Zorro, which is kind of surprising since at the end of the original, Zorro reveals his secret identity and declares he's going to get married and settle down, basically.  But whatever, sequels of swashbucklers are a good thing and I won't quibble.

I'd put a spoiler warning here, but surely you already know who Zorro's alter-ego is, right?  If not, skip this paragraph.  Anyway, as I read this, I wondered over and over how it would have worked for people reading it the first time who did NOT know that Diego Vega was also Zorro.  It was published in five installments, so there were probably about eight chapters per installment -- did readers realize that the reason Diego got so much page-time was that he was the hero?  Or were they like, "Dude, shut up about this annoying mush-brain and get back to the good stuff already!"

Okay, so the basic story is this:  back in the early days of California, when the Spanish dons held all the power and the mission priests held all the morality (remember, this is totally fictional), the pueblo of Los Angeles has a bunch of corrupt officials who beat the peasants and mistreat the natives and persecute their enemies and generally behave like Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisborne and the Sheriff of Nottingham in your typical Robin Hood stories.  (It so happens that I'm also a major fan of Robin Hood.)  This guy in a black mask and cape, deadly with a sword, starts showing up and punishing evildoers.  He calls himself Zorro, which is the Spanish word for 'fox.'  Lovers of justice applaud him, lovers of easy money do not.

Also, there's this guy named Diego Vega, a young man who makes Sir Percy Blakeney from The Scarlet Pimpernel (a probable inspiration for this story) look like a manly man.  He wants to read poetry, he wants to sit in the sunshine and dream, he's fatigued by everything, distressed and annoyed by everything -- and fabulously wealthy.  He asks Senorita Lolita Pulido to marry him, whines and fusses when she resents not being courted, and generally is the laughingstock of the pueblo.  And, weirdly enough, I actually started to think that his idea of not going through the process of courting, singing outside the senorita's window, not making of a fool of himself -- I thought that sounded rather sensible.  I think I would have accepted him.

Unless, like Lolita Pulido, I also had the dashing Zorro making virulent protestations of love every time I turned around.  

Anyway, this would never win any prizes for a beautiful writing style, but it's a cracking good story, full of adventure and intrigue, danger and romance.  I won't be waiting long before I read it again.

Particularly Good Bits:

"I am the friend of the oppressed, senor, and I have come to punish you" (p. 15).

Don Carlos had proved himself to be a courageous man in his youth, and now he was a wise man also, and hence he knew better than to participate in an argument between women (p. 37).

If This Was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for violence and a man menacing a woman.

This is my 8th book read and reviewed for the Mount TBR Challenge, and my 9th for the Classics Club.