The politics of central Europe, as Austria-Hungary snoozes on towards its demise, thrashing and flailing at Bismarck's nest of swords in its doomed and dying sleep, have driven saner men than John H. Maguire off the cliff to madness. Survey the site for the mine or the power plant, get the contracts signed -- don't think about the politics of the men you have to deal with, or how bloody their hands are, it's the only way. But when a hysterical spy invades Maguire's compartment in Bielitz, waiting to cross into the odd and insular Principality of Ruritania, that non-political mask will have to fall: at odds with the police and secret services of several nations, supported by and betrayed by the local branch of the Second International, in disguise in the circles of royalty and among rough warehouse councils of war, Maguire's fight and the choices he makes will determine the fate of the principality -- and which, if any, of the pretenders will end up on the throne.
A Ruritanian romance in the tradition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda or E. Rice Burroughs' The Mad King, Three Pretenders In Ruritania locates the quintessential homeland of swashbuckling adventure as a Liechtenstein-like enclave in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, and embeds it thoroughly in the actual politics and society of Europe's Nachsommer before the First World War. Full of spies and shootouts and double-crosses and derring-do and duels and craven pretenders, it's also got football, socialism, suffragists, consulting engineers, and cleartext telegraph codes, making it a very unusual Ruritanian thing to say the least. Incorporating a few minor edits to the original live serialization and including a bonus 'monograph' on Ruritania and its circumstances, this is the completed and compiled version of the novel, which was originally released as a free daily serialization in November 2016.
A Ruritanian romance in the tradition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda or E. Rice Burroughs' The Mad King, Three Pretenders In Ruritania locates the quintessential homeland of swashbuckling adventure as a Liechtenstein-like enclave in the crumbling Austro-Hungarian empire, and embeds it thoroughly in the actual politics and society of Europe's Nachsommer before the First World War. Full of spies and shootouts and double-crosses and derring-do and duels and craven pretenders, it's also got football, socialism, suffragists, consulting engineers, and cleartext telegraph codes, making it a very unusual Ruritanian thing to say the least. Incorporating a few minor edits to the original live serialization and including a bonus 'monograph' on Ruritania and its circumstances, this is the completed and compiled version of the novel, which was originally released as a free daily serialization in November 2016.
