The Dorothy Dunnett Society

“Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth?” The Game of Kings
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    • “Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth?” The Game of Kings
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    K.C. Julius on Dorothy Dunnett

    K C Julius

    KC Julius, author of the Drinnglennin Chronicles

    Where do I begin to express how much the writing of Dorothy Dunnett has been interwoven into my life? As my 70th birthday approaches (looms!) in November 2022, my love affair with Dunnett’s work now spans nearly six decades. My father introduced me, a voracious teenage reader, to The Lymond Chronicles in the last ’60s. I was swiftly swept into Francis Crawford’s exciting, dangerous world, and very soon thereafter, seduced by the man himself. But even more than those audacious dimples, it’s been Lady Dunnett’s writing, her “painter’s eye,” that has stood the test of time, enticing me back over and over again to her vividly depicted tale and the delectable descriptions of people and places, such as this gem from Queens’ Play:

    Each in its nest of gauze and gilt thread, of tissue and taffeta, swathed in silver and satin, in velvet and white fur sugared with diamonds, each face painted, each brow plucked, hair hidden by sparkling hair of raw silk, the well-born of France sat in waxlight and flowers like half a hundred candied sweets in a basket. Last at the last table, soggy gristle next the sugar plums, sat Thady Boy Ballagh.

    Or this visual aria from Race of Scorpions:

    The pods of the carob trees dangled, black and leaking rank gum, ripe for cropping. There were pomegranates in baskets and gourds drying on roof-tops. In every village, it seemed, a donkey circled its trough of crushed olives, and the press thudded down, helped by many brown arms, as the mash yielded its oozings through wicker. Where the scent of orange had deadened the senses in March, the resinous odour of olives weighed down the humid, hot air of this journey. Instead of flower-infused silence, the air was filled with the clamour of autumn; the cries, the chaffing, the folk-songs, the team-songs of the villages; the chinking of blades; the rumble of flint-studded boards driven over the threshing ground. The objecting bray of working donkeys. The shuddering tramp of the oxen spinning the Persian wheels set over every deep well, so that the jars came up, roped with pomegranate wood withies, and tossed their icy water into the stone channels that fed the fields and the housewife’s wood buckets. Vines and almonds, lemons and oranges, pomegranates and sugar.

    And then, of course, there is the romance between my favourite characters, one of the greatest love stories ever told. How could anyone fail to fall under its alluring spell?

    On that, his hands locked, imprisoning them both. He held back one moment longer. Then he slid his fingers into her hair and bending his head, sought her mouth as a man withered by sun might seek water.

    — Checkmate

    Even now, after so many re-readings, my pulse quickens.

    Like many writers, Dorothy Dunnett has been my inspiration. Because I lack her extensive scholarship, my books are set in a fantasy world, but anyone familiar with Lymond’s exploits will find close parallels in the historical and geographical settings, glimpse both Francis Crawford and Nicholas de Fleury in Borne, one of my protagonists, and shades of Phillipa in Maura, another. I am, and will always be, deeply grateful for this singular author’s works, and the true pleasure, over many years, they have given me and so many others.

    Author: K C Julius
    Website Publication Date: 2nd June 2026
    Theme: Dorothy Dunnett, The Books
    Publication Type: Articles
    Medium: Text
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