Theodore S. Blackwood – författare

Somerset, 1685: a gentleman wins a wife in a quarrel over a toast, Monmouth lands at Lyme with a rabble, and a letter that could hang everyone is in the wrong hands. Sabatini was Italian-born, raised across Europe, spoke five languages and chose to write in English because, he said, all the best stories are told in it; this early novel already has the swordwork and the irony that made Scaramouche.

A self-made paint millionaire from Vermont builds a house on the water side of Beacon Street and discovers that Boston's old families will accept his money and not his daughters. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary man in America; he made his hero's crisis a matter of business ethics rather than romance, which nobody had thought to do.

A young wife, caught in a lie, tells her husband she has had a baby - and then has to produce one, at short notice, in a New York flat, with the help of a friend and a series of borrowed infants. Mayo was an actress who turned playwright and gave Broadway one of its most durable farces; the mechanics are ruthless, and it was filmed three times.

A Chicago street tough is shanghaied aboard a ship sent to kidnap an heiress, and the voyage takes them to a lost Japanese island and a headhunters' village - after which the real trouble is Chicago. Burroughs wrote it in 1914, between Tarzan and Mars, and gave the brute a conscience he never asked for; the second half, in which the mucker comes home, is better than the first.

Billy married: a house, a husband who composes, relatives who visit and stay, and the discovery that being adored is not the same as being consulted. Porter gave the language the word Pollyanna in 1913 and is remembered for the wrong book; this one is sharper than its reputation, and the quiet argument about whether a wife is permitted her own work runs under every comic scene.

The son of an English earl is stolen at three by his father's enemy and raised as a swordsman who does not know his own name - and grows up to lead an outlaw band against the barons in the war of Simon de Montfort. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and selling pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than what he was reading; this was his second novel, written the same year as Tarzan.

Lupin announces a theft, is arrested, escapes, and conducts his next case from a cell - and then a certain English detective arrives and has his name changed by the lawyers. Leblanc was an unnoticed jobbing writer until a magazine asked him for a crime story in 1905; France took the gentleman burglar to heart and preferred him, cheerfully, to Sherlock Holmes.

The life of a novelist as his friend saw it: years of rejection, a father who despises the work, a girl who waits, and the slow arrival of a reputation. Edna Lyall was Ada Ellen Bayly, a clergyman's daughter who took a near-anagram of her own name and wrote novels that argued - for Irish Home Rule, for women, for freethinkers. This 1889 book is her quietest, and the publishing detail is exact.

Two writers, one who can produce what sells and one who cannot, and the woman who married the second on the strength of his reviews. Gissing lost a brilliant academic career at eighteen for stealing to keep a prostitute he later married, and knew the reading room, the pawnshop and the three-volume deadline from the inside. The literary life has not had a more truthful account.

A young Englishman at Aix-les-Bains meets a girl who is companion to a rich widow, and the next morning the widow is murdered and the girl has vanished - and everyone knows what to think. Inspector Hanaud of the Surete does not. Mason had been an actor and an MP and would run naval intelligence in Spain; he invented Hanaud in 1910 as a deliberate anti-Holmes - fat, jovial, and interested in people.