The influence of Dunnett

 

The years prior to 1960 provided pretty solid reading in the historical fiction department of public libraries: Elizabeth Byrd’s Immortal Queen in 1956, followed by Serge et Anne Golon in 1957 with Angelique: The Marquise of the Angels. I had taken Game of Kings (1961) from the library for my mother to read, and when she handed it back to me with the words, “You will enjoy this,” she had no idea what she was doing.

I read it with growing delight because suddenly dialogue was not sprinkled with forsooth and pray, my lord, and pages were not filled with exposition and political backstory, nor was there any head hopping which was common back then. Instead, intelligent conversation that often had a sharp and witty edge to it. She had me hook, line and sinker by the time Buccleugh “stopped listening and went for a crowbar” in Chapter 1.

I looked for other books like it and found very few, if any. Like Dorothy Dunnett, I dallied with the idea of filling the gap by writing a book myself but hung back, unsure that I could do it.
Work and bus travel took up a lot of time, and relationships with the opposite sex were important, but the idea sat in the back of my mind all through the publication of the six Lymond novels. I studied her writing, and loved how she was precise in her use of grammar.

There was never any doubt over who was speaking or thinking, as there often is today in popular novels. I also liked the way she broke up long sentences – introducing three words, adding the dialogue tag and then completing the sentence. She didn’t always use dialogue tags, but action tags did the job superbly.
Her settings were so real that one holiday in France my husband and I trudged around Blois on a very hot day tracking the Dame de Doubtance to her lair on the Rue de Papegaults. We did something similar with the drum tower of Amboise and the traboules of Lyon, and the cisterns of Istanbul.

The characters Dunnett creates are unforgettable and almost real. Like everyone else I checked the history of the “real” characters and MacBeth from King Hereafter became the starting point for my first book in which a certain Daveth mac Finlay allies with Thorfinn to secure the throne of Alba.
Margaret Douglas became my next focus and the Scottish Queen Trilogy has dear Meg as a major player in her struggle to stay safe and achieve a secure marriage. Dunnett has her as an evil influence on Lymond, but once I read her life story, I understood Meg walked a tightrope her entire life. It began with her mother, who chose to stay with her son, the future King of Scotland, and handed Meg over to her father the Earl of Angus, whose lands had been confiscated by the Crown.

Dragged up by Douglas relatives all over the borders until her aunt Mary (Henry VIII’s sister) invited her to the English court, Meg had no one to rely on when Aunt Mary died in 1533. Desperate to marry, she was thrown in the tower when Henry discovered her affairs. Without heirs himself, he did not want Meg to marry and have children who could very well claim the crown. She was, after all, his niece and the granddaughter of Henry VII. He was a very real influence on her life choices.