Gwynedd Hughes on Dorothy Dunnett
Gwynedd Hughes, documentary director and screenwriter
A big fat shabby old paperback plopped onto my desk. I eyed it suspiciously. The first of a series of six historical novels, sporting a terrible cover, with some daft female swooning in the arms of a blond twit in tights. I’m secretly more of a science fiction nut, and besides, I was right in the middle of dramatising Thackeray’s Vanity Fair for television. So I really wasn’t sure there was room in my head for another romantic foray into the past.
I started reading. There was a shipwreck. A cheetah, and a hare. Some young chaps in doublets jumping about the rooftops, apparently inventing parkour. I hadn’t got the first idea what was going on. Just when I was about to give up, I realized this wasn’t actually Book One… And that’s how I finally came to put Queens’ Play temporarily aside, to find and read The Game of Kings, and then all the rest of them, in the right order, without interruption, days of my life disappearing into Lymond land. There were still stretches where I had no idea what was going on, but who cares? I was happy to follow Dorothy obediently, through those dark thickets of plot, to the sunlit glades where her impossibly vivid heroes and villains do battle. Bliss.
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