Dorothy Dunnett wrote some of the most demanding and most rewarding historical fiction of the twentieth century. Her two great sequences follow brilliant, secretive men across Renaissance Europe, from the Scottish Borders to Constantinople, Timbuktu, and Moscow, and they have a reputation for turning casual readers into lifelong re-readers. Many later novelists name her as the writer who showed them what historical fiction could do.
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This guide covers all 22 of her novels: the six Lymond Chronicles, the eight books of the House of Niccolò, the standalone King Hereafter, and the seven Johnson Johnson mysteries with their confusing alternate titles. It also answers the question every new reader asks: whether to begin with Lymond or Niccolò.
About Dorothy Dunnett
Early Life
Dorothy Dunnett was born Dorothy Halliday on 25 August 1923 in Dunfermline, Fife. She grew up in Edinburgh and was educated at James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, the school Muriel Spark also attended.
She joined the Civil Service as a teenager at the start of the Second World War and worked as a press officer for government departments in Edinburgh, later moving to the Board of Trade. At the Scottish Office, she met Alastair Dunnett, a journalist who went on to edit The Scotsman from 1956 to 1972. They married in 1946 and had two sons, Ninian and Mungo.
Before she was a novelist, she was a painter. She took classes at Edinburgh College of Art and Glasgow School of Art, worked as a professional portrait painter from 1950, and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy. That training shows in her fiction, which is full of precise visual detail, and it supplied the profession of her series detective, the portrait painter Johnson Johnson.
Writing Career
Dunnett came to fiction late and almost by accident. In the late 1950s, she complained to her husband that she had run out of things to read, and he suggested she write a book herself. The result, after about 18 months of research, was a long and intricate novel about a sixteenth-century Scottish outlaw.
British publishers turned it down. Alastair Dunnett then approached the American editor Lois Dwight Cole, and the novel was published by Putnam in the United States in 1961, with a British edition from Cassell following in 1962. Dunnett was 38. Five more Lymond novels followed between 1964 and 1975.
Alongside the Lymond books, she wrote a series of light, contemporary thrillers under her maiden name, Dorothy Halliday, beginning in 1968. In 1982, she published King Hereafter, a single enormous novel about eleventh-century Scotland and Orkney that took years of research. She then spent the rest of her career on the eight volumes of the House of Niccolò, published between 1986 and 2000.
Her public life was as full as her writing life. She served as a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish National War Memorial, and the Edinburgh Book Festival. She was appointed OBE in 1992 for services to literature, and became Lady Dunnett when her husband was knighted in 1995.
Writing Style
Dunnett does not explain. Her heroes are seen almost entirely from the outside, through the eyes of people who misunderstand them, and the reader has to work out what Lymond or Nicholas is really doing from scattered clues. Motives that seem obvious in one chapter look quite different three books later.
The prose is dense, witty, and allusive. Characters quote poetry and song in French, Latin, Spanish, German, and older Scots, often without translation, and the dialogue moves at the speed of people who are cleverer than most of those around them. The set pieces are famous: a rooftop race, a chess game played with living pieces, a duel, a sea chase.
Underneath the fireworks is serious research. Real people outnumber invented ones, the politics and trade are accurate, and her fictional characters are fitted into the gaps in the record with great care. The combination of scholarship, plotting on a scale of thousands of pages, and strong emotion is what her admirers mean when they say nobody else writes like her.
Dorothy Dunnett Series in Reading Order
Dunnett wrote three series and one standalone novel. Each series is listed below in publication order, which is also the order to read it in.
The Lymond Chronicles
Setting: Scotland, England, France, Malta, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia, 1547 to 1558
Books: 6 (1961 to 1975)
Main character: Francis Crawford of Lymond, younger son of a Scottish noble house
The Lymond Chronicles follow one man through eleven years of the mid-sixteenth century. Francis Crawford of Lymond is a scholar, soldier, musician, and linguist with a ruinous reputation, and the series begins when he returns to a Scotland that regards him as a traitor. The titles all come from chess, and the books are one continuous story that must be read in order.
1. The Game of Kings (1961)
In 1547, with Scotland under threat from an English invasion, the outlawed Francis Crawford of Lymond comes home at the head of a band of mercenaries. He is wanted for treason and seems determined to make enemies of his own family, but his real purpose only emerges slowly. The opening chapters are the hardest in the series; the last third is among the best in historical fiction.
2. Queens’ Play (1964)
The child Mary Queen of Scots has been sent to the French court for safety, and someone there wants her dead. Lymond is asked to go to France and protect her, and does so in disguise. The setting is the glittering, dangerous court of Henri II, and the book is the most self-contained of the six.
3. The Disorderly Knights (1966)
In 1551, Lymond travels to Malta, where the Knights of St John are facing a Turkish attack and are divided among themselves. The story moves from the Mediterranean to North Africa and then back to Scotland, where he sets out to build a professional fighting force. This is the book in which the series reaches its full scale.
4. Pawn in Frankincense (1969)
Lymond sails across the Mediterranean as an envoy carrying a gift from the King of France to Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The official mission covers a private search that takes him along the North African coast, through the Greek islands and finally to Constantinople. Many readers consider it the peak of the series, and it is certainly the darkest.
5. The Ringed Castle (1971)
Lymond goes to the Russia of Ivan the Terrible, where he offers to create a modern army for the Tsar. The second strand of the novel is set in the England of Mary Tudor, among courtiers, merchants, and the navigators trying to open a northern sea route to Muscovy. It is a colder, more inward book after the heat of its predecessor.
6. Checkmate (1975)
In 1557, Lymond is in France again, commanding troops in the war against Spain and England, in the months leading up to the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin. The final volume gathers every thread from the previous five and settles the questions the series has been asking since its first chapter. Do not read anything about it in advance.
The House of Niccolò
Setting: Flanders, Italy, Trebizond, Cyprus, West Africa, Scotland, Iceland, Poland, Persia, and Russia, 1460 to 1483
Books: 8 (1986 to 2000)
Main character: Claes, later known as Nicholas, a dyer’s apprentice from Bruges
The House of Niccolò is set a century before Lymond, in the world of fifteenth-century merchants, bankers, and mercenary companies. Its hero begins at the bottom: Claes is a large, cheerful, apparently simple eighteen-year-old apprentice in a Bruges dye works. He turns out to have an extraordinary gift for numbers, codes, and schemes, and the series follows the trading house he builds across Europe and far beyond it.
The titles are published with the accent in some editions (Niccolò Rising) and without it in others. They are the same books.
1. Niccolò Rising (1986)
Bruges, 1460. Claes is an apprentice in the Charetty dye works, known mainly for good humor and for the trouble that follows him around. Over the course of one year, in Flanders, Burgundy, and Italy, the people around him begin to realize how much he understands and how far he is prepared to go.
2. The Spring of the Ram (1987)
In 1461, Nicholas leads a trading expedition to Trebizond on the Black Sea, the last fragment of the Byzantine Empire, with a rival Genoese agent racing him for the same prize. The Ottoman army of Mehmed the Conqueror is closing in on the city. It is a tight, fast adventure and a good test of whether the series is for you.
3. Race of Scorpions (1989)
Cyprus is being fought over by two claimants to its throne, Queen Carlotta and her half-brother James, and both want Nicholas and his mercenary company on their side. Set in 1462 and 1463, the novel deals with sugar, siege warfare, and a contest of wills on an island where nobody can be trusted.
4. Scales of Gold (1991)
With his bank in Venice under pressure, Nicholas takes ship for West Africa in search of the source of the gold trade. The voyage runs via Portugal and Madeira to the Gambia River, and on to Timbuktu. The African chapters are some of the most ambitious writing Dunnett ever attempted.
5. The Unicorn Hunt (1993)
Nicholas arrives in Scotland for the first time, and the series acquires the Scottish court of the young James III as one of its permanent settings. From there, the story travels to the Tyrol, Venice, Egypt, and Sinai, on the trail of both hidden gold and a private matter that is best left undescribed. This is the book in which the series’ personal stakes sharpen.
6. To Lie with Lions (1995)
Between 1471 and 1473, Nicholas makes himself indispensable at the Scottish court while pursuing plans of his own that few people around him can see. The centerpiece is a voyage to Iceland, with its fishing grounds, rival fleets, and volcanic landscape. The ending changes the direction of the series.
7. Caprice and Rondo (1997)
The seventh book opens in Poland, in the Baltic port of Danzig, and goes east: to the Crimea, to Persia, and to the Russia of Ivan III. In the West, Charles the Bold of Burgundy is marching towards the wars that will destroy him. It is the most far-traveled book in a far-traveled series.
8. Gemini (2000)
Nicholas returns to Scotland in 1477, where James III is at odds with his own brothers and the country is sliding towards crisis. The final volume resolves the mysteries of his birth and family that have run through all eight books. It was Dunnett’s last novel, published the year before her death.
The Johnson Johnson Mysteries (the Dolly Books)
Setting: Scotland, Ibiza, the Bahamas, Italy, Yugoslavia, Madeira, and Morocco, from the 1960s to the early 1990s
Books: 7 (1968 to 1991)
Main character: Johnson Johnson, portrait painter, yachtsman, and British intelligence agent
These are a complete change of register: short, funny, contemporary thrillers. Johnson Johnson is a famous portrait painter in bifocal glasses who sails a yacht called Dolly and works quietly for British intelligence. Each book is narrated by a different young woman who is drawn into one of his cases, and each narrator’s profession shapes the plot.
The first books appeared in Britain under the name Dorothy Halliday. They are not historical fiction, but they belong on any complete Dunnett list, and they have the same love of misdirection as the big novels.
A note on the titles. Almost every book has been sold under two or three names. The original British titles all began “Dolly and the … Bird” (“bird” being 1960s slang for a young woman). American publishers gave the first four books different titles, and later reissues renamed the first six again. The reissue titles are the ones most often seen on current editions.
| Original UK title | Year | US title | Later reissue title |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dolly and the Singing Bird | 1968 | The Photogenic Soprano | Rum Affair |
| Dolly and the Cookie Bird | 1970 | Murder in the Round | Ibiza Surprise |
| Dolly and the Doctor Bird | 1971 | Match for a Murderer | Operation Nassau |
| Dolly and the Starry Bird | 1973 | Murder in Focus | Roman Nights |
| Dolly and the Nanny Bird | 1976 | None | Split Code |
| Dolly and the Bird of Paradise | 1983 | None | Tropical Issue |
| Moroccan Traffic | 1991 | Send a Fax to the Kasbah | None |
1. Dolly and the Singing Bird (1968)
Also published as: The Photogenic Soprano (US), Rum Affair (reissue)
Tina Rossi, a celebrated coloratura soprano, comes to Edinburgh to sing and, privately, to meet her lover. She finds an unknown corpse instead. The trail leads to the Hebrides aboard Johnson’s yacht.
2. Dolly and the Cookie Bird (1970)
Also published as: Murder in the Round (US), Ibiza Surprise (reissue)
Sarah Cassells, a newly trained cook, hears of her father’s violent death on Ibiza and refuses to believe it was suicide. She goes to the island to find out what happened. Johnson is there too.
3. Dolly and the Doctor Bird (1971)
Also published as: Match for a Murderer (US), Operation Nassau (reissue)
Dr Beltanno MacRannoch is a brisk, unsentimental Scottish physician working in the Bahamas, and a medical emergency puts her in the middle of one of Johnson’s cases. The action moves between New York and Nassau. She is the driest of the seven narrators and one of the funniest.
4. Dolly and the Starry Bird (1973)
Also published as: Murder in Focus (US), Roman Nights (reissue)
Ruth Russell is an astronomer working in Italy. A murder pulls her into a chase that begins in Rome, with Johnson and the Dolly never far away.
5. Dolly and the Nanny Bird (1976)
Also published as: Split Code (reissue)
Joanna Emerson is a highly trained nanny who is also an expert in codes. Her new job takes her from Winnipeg to New York and on to the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia, which explains the pun in the later title.
6. Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (1983)
Also published as: Tropical Issue (reissue)
Rita Geddes, a small, tough make-up artist from Glasgow, is on Madeira trying to find out who killed a friend and fellow make-up artist. Although it was the sixth book published, current editions number it first in the series.
7. Moroccan Traffic (1991)
Also published as: Send a Fax to the Kasbah (US)
Wendy Helmann, an executive secretary, travels to Morocco on company business that turns out to be far more dangerous than a negotiation. Rita Geddes returns in a supporting role. It is the only book in the series that never had a “Dolly” title.
Which order to read them in. Publication order, as listed above, works well, and each mystery stands alone. Current editions number the series differently, so readers who prefer that sequence can start with Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (Tropical Issue), then read the other six in publication order.
Standalone Novels
King Hereafter (1982)
King Hereafter is Dunnett’s only standalone historical novel. It is set in the eleventh century, in Orkney, Norway and the kingdom of Alba, and its hero is Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney, a Norse and Celtic warlord with a claim to rule in mainland Scotland.
The novel rests on a bold historical argument. After several years of research, Dunnett concluded that Thorfinn of Orkney and the historical King Macbeth were not kinsmen, as historians generally hold, but one and the same man. The National Library of Scotland, which holds her papers, has published an account of how she researched King Hereafter, including the roughly 700 books she read for it.
The result has nothing to do with Shakespeare’s villain. This Macbeth is a capable, far-sighted ruler trying to turn a scatter of earldoms into a kingdom, with a Norwegian wife, Groa, who is his equal. It is a long, dense and deeply moving book, and a good choice for readers who want Dunnett at full strength without committing to six or eight volumes.
Where to Start with Dorothy Dunnett
Lymond First or Niccolò First?
This is the question Dunnett readers have argued over for decades. The House of Niccolò is set in the fifteenth century and the Lymond Chronicles in the sixteenth, so Niccolò comes first by the calendar. Lymond was written first, between 1961 and 1975, and Niccolò second, between 1986 and 2000.
The recommendation here is publication order: read all six Lymond books, then all eight Niccolò books. Dunnett herself advised readers to begin with Lymond, and she thought of the two series as one fourteen-volume work. The two are connected, and the Niccolò books were written for readers who already knew Lymond.
How they are connected is something to discover, not to look up. Reading Niccolò first will not ruin either series, and some readers prefer it, but certain moments in the later Niccolò novels land with full force only if Lymond is already behind you. For the same reason, avoid family trees, character lists and fan sites until you have finished both.
The Best First Book
Start with The Game of Kings. Be prepared for a difficult first hundred pages: the hero behaves appallingly, the quotations come thick and fast, and nothing is explained. The standard advice from Dunnett readers is to keep going and not to worry about what you miss, because the book rewards trust.
If You Want…
If you want a gentler way in: Niccolò Rising is more straightforward on the surface, with fewer untranslated quotations and a hero who is easy to like from the first page. If The Game of Kings defeats you, try this before giving up on Dunnett.
If you want a single novel: King Hereafter is complete in one volume and shows everything she could do.
If you want the high point: Pawn in Frankincense is the book most often named as her masterpiece, but it depends entirely on the three before it. It cannot be read first.
If you want something light: any Johnson Johnson mystery. Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (sold as Tropical Issue) has the most memorable narrator, and Dolly and the Singing Bird (Rum Affair) is the first published.
If you are new to historical fiction altogether: Dunnett is not the easiest starting point. Our guide to historical fiction for beginners suggests more forgiving first reads, and she will still be there afterwards.
Books by Time Period
Eleventh Century: The Age of Macbeth
King Hereafter covers the Norse and Celtic north in the decades before the Norman Conquest: Orkney, Norway, Alba, and the England of Cnut and Edward the Confessor. For more fiction from these centuries, see the Medieval Europe hub and our list of the best medieval historical fiction.
Fifteenth Century: The Late Medieval and Early Renaissance World
The House of Niccolò runs from 1460 to 1483. It takes in the Burgundy of Charles the Bold, Medici banking, the fall of Trebizond, the Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus, the trans-Saharan gold trade, and the Scotland of James III. In English history these are the years of the Wars of the Roses, which stay in the background. The Medieval Europe hub is the best place to find neighbouring novels.
Sixteenth Century: The Tudor Era
The Lymond Chronicles run from 1547 to 1558, which in England means the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I. Dunnett’s angle is Scottish and European: the regency of Mary of Guise, the French court of Henri II, the Knights of Malta, the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman, and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible. Mary Tudor’s court appears at length in The Ringed Castle.
Readers arriving from English Tudor fiction will find familiar figures seen from an unfamiliar side. The Tudor England hub and our list of the best Tudor historical fiction cover the wider period.
Twentieth Century
The Johnson Johnson mysteries were contemporary when written, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. They are thrillers, not historical novels.
Popular Dorothy Dunnett Series
The Lymond Chronicles
The Lymond Chronicles are the books on which Dunnett’s reputation rests. Across six long novels they tell a single story, planned from the start, in which small details from the first volume turn out to matter in the sixth. The reader’s understanding of Francis Crawford changes repeatedly, and so does the understanding of the people around him.
What makes the series unusual is the combination of scale and control. The action covers most of the known world of the 1550s, with dozens of real historical figures, yet the emotional centre is a handful of people: Lymond, his mother Sybilla, his brother Richard, and Philippa Somerville, who is a child when the series begins. The supporting cast is one of the richest in the genre.
It is also simply exciting. Dunnett wrote action as well as anyone, and each volume has sequences that readers remember for life. If you enjoy long series that reward attention, it belongs alongside the sequences in our guide to the best historical fiction series.
The House of Niccolò
The House of Niccolò is longer, cooler and in some ways more ambitious. Where Lymond is an aristocrat and a soldier, Nicholas is a man of business, and the series is as interested in alum, sugar, insurance and exchange rates as in battles. Few novelists have made commerce this gripping.
Its hero is also harder to judge. Nicholas begins as an underdog and becomes powerful, and Dunnett lets the reader see the damage his cleverness does as well as its triumphs. The moral questions are more open than in Lymond, and the answers are held back until the eighth book.
The geographical range is even wider: Trebizond, Cyprus, Timbuktu, Iceland, Persia. Readers who finish both series often say they admire Niccolò more and love Lymond more, though plenty would reverse that.
Awards and Recognition
Dunnett was appointed OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 1992 for services to literature. Her historical novels were published before most of the prizes now associated with the genre existed, and her standing rests on readers and fellow writers more than on trophies.
Her public service was recognised in its own right. She was a trustee of the National Library of Scotland and of the Scottish National War Memorial, a director of the Edinburgh Book Festival, and an honorary vice-president of Scottish PEN. The National Records of Scotland marked her centenary with a profile of her life and records, Dorothy Dunnett OBE, novelist and artist.
In 2006 a memorial stone was laid for her in Makars’ Court in Edinburgh, the paved court beside the Writers’ Museum where Scotland’s great writers are commemorated. It was laid by her grandchildren.
Legacy
Dorothy Dunnett died in Edinburgh on 9 November 2001, aged 78, a year after the publication of Gemini. Both of her major series were complete. There are no unfinished manuscripts or posthumous novels, and no continuation by another writer.
The Dorothy Dunnett Society
Her readers are unusually well organised. The Dorothy Dunnett Society, founded in 2001, is a Scottish registered charity run entirely by volunteers. It publishes a magazine, Whispering Gallery, maintains a library of research and essays, runs discussion groups, and holds an annual Dunnett Weekend.
A warning for new readers: the Society’s site and its wiki are written by and for people who have finished the books. Save them for afterwards.
The Companions and Other Books
Because Dunnett quoted so widely and explained so little, two reference books were compiled to help. The Dorothy Dunnett Companion (1994) by Elspeth Morrison identifies and translates the quotations, and explains the historical figures and allusions, in both series as far as they had then been published. The Dorothy Dunnett Companion II (2002) completes the job. Both can be used while reading without major spoilers, although the entries assume some familiarity with the books.
The Lymond Poetry (2003) collects the poems and songs quoted in the Lymond Chronicles, with translations. Dunnett also wrote one non-fiction book with her husband, The Scottish Highlands (1988), and a short story, “The Proving Climb” (1973).
Screen Adaptations
None of Dunnett’s novels has been filmed. In late 2016 it was announced that the British production company Mammoth Screen, the makers of Poldark and Victoria, had acquired the television rights to the Lymond Chronicles. The announcement reported by Dunnett Central came alongside news that Michael Joseph would reissue the Lymond Chronicles, King Hereafter and the House of Niccolò in Britain.
No series has reached the screen since then, and no broadcaster, cast or release date was named in that announcement. For now the books are the only way to meet Lymond.
Her Influence
Dunnett’s influence on later historical fiction is wide. The clever, damaged, multilingual hero seen through other people’s eyes, the long series planned as a single design, and the refusal to simplify the past can all be traced back to her. Writers of historical fiction and of fantasy alike have named her as a model, among them Guy Gavriel Kay and Ellen Kushner, as an NPR feature, All The Writers You Love Probably Love Dorothy Dunnett, set out.
Similar Authors You’ll Enjoy
Patrick O’Brian
Patrick O’Brian is the closest match in quality and in kind. His twenty Aubrey and Maturin novels share Dunnett’s wit, her trust in the reader, her period language and her habit of leaving important things unsaid. Begin with Master and Commander, or see the Aubrey and Maturin reading order.
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel wrote about the generation just before Lymond’s, and her Thomas Cromwell is another brilliant man of obscure origins whose mind the reader has to work to follow. Wolf Hall makes the same demands on attention and pays them back the same way. The Wolf Hall trilogy reading order covers all three books.
Sharon Kay Penman
Sharon Kay Penman offers long, serious, thoroughly researched novels of medieval Britain and France, with a more direct style. The Sunne in Splendour is set in the same decades as the House of Niccolò, during the Wars of the Roses, and Here Be Dragons will suit anyone who admired King Hereafter.
Diana Gabaldon
Diana Gabaldon shares Dunnett’s Scottish settings, her long view of a single relationship across many volumes, and her fondness for a hero who is cleverer than he lets on. Outlander is far easier to read than Lymond and adds time travel. The full sequence is in the Outlander reading order.
Elizabeth Chadwick
Elizabeth Chadwick writes about real medieval lives with a strong sense of daily texture, and she is a good choice after the intensity of Dunnett. The Greatest Knight begins her William Marshal novels, which are listed in the William Marshal reading order.
Bernard Cornwell
Bernard Cornwell is a very different writer, plainer and faster, but he is the natural next step for readers who came to Dunnett for the battles and the sieges. The Winter King shows him at his most thoughtful, and The Last Kingdom covers the Norse world of Britain two centuries before King Hereafter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Dorothy Dunnett?
Start with The Game of Kings, the first of the six Lymond Chronicles, and read that series in order before moving on to the House of Niccolò. If you want a single book, read King Hereafter. If The Game of Kings proves too difficult, Niccolò Rising is an easier way in.
Should I read Lymond or Niccolò first?
Read Lymond first. The House of Niccolò is set about a century earlier, but it was written later and assumes readers already know the Lymond Chronicles. Dunnett herself advised publication order, which means the six Lymond books followed by the eight Niccolò books.
How are the Lymond Chronicles and the House of Niccolò connected?
The two series are linked, and Dunnett regarded them as a single work in fourteen volumes. The nature of the link is revealed gradually in the later Niccolò novels and is best discovered by reading. Avoid character lists, family trees and fan sites until you have finished both series, because they give it away.
Is the Lymond series hard to read?
Yes, at first. The Game of Kings opens with a large cast, a hero whose motives are hidden, and many quotations in French, Latin, Spanish and old Scots that are not translated. Most readers find that the story carries them through after the first hundred pages, and that the later books are easier because the style has become familiar.
Do I need to understand the untranslated quotations?
No. The quotations add colour and occasionally a clue, but the plot never depends on them, and plenty of readers finish the series without translating a line. The Dorothy Dunnett Companion by Elspeth Morrison identifies and translates them for anyone who wants to look them up.
What order do the Lymond Chronicles go in?
The order is The Game of Kings (1961), Queens’ Play (1964), The Disorderly Knights (1966), Pawn in Frankincense (1969), The Ringed Castle (1971) and Checkmate (1975). The books tell one continuous story from 1547 to 1558 and must be read in this order.
What order do the House of Niccolò books go in?
The order is Niccolò Rising (1986), The Spring of the Ram (1987), Race of Scorpions (1989), Scales of Gold (1991), The Unicorn Hunt (1993), To Lie with Lions (1995), Caprice and Rondo (1997) and Gemini (2000). The series covers the years 1460 to 1483 and should be read in sequence.
Is King Hereafter about Macbeth?
Yes. King Hereafter is a novel about the historical Macbeth, the eleventh-century king of Alba, and has no connection with the plot of Shakespeare’s play. It is built on Dunnett’s own theory that Macbeth and Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney, were the same man, a view most historians do not share.
Why do the Johnson Johnson books have so many different titles?
The seven mysteries were first published in Britain as the Dolly books, with titles such as Dolly and the Singing Bird, under the name Dorothy Halliday. American publishers retitled several of them, and later reissues renamed them again, so that Dolly and the Singing Bird is also The Photogenic Soprano and Rum Affair. The other reissue titles are Ibiza Surprise, Operation Nassau, Roman Nights, Split Code and Tropical Issue, and Moroccan Traffic was sold in the United States as Send a Fax to the Kasbah.
How historically accurate are Dorothy Dunnett’s novels?
Very accurate. Dunnett researched from primary sources, most of her characters are real people, and the politics, trade and warfare are faithful to the record. Her heroes Lymond and Nicholas are invented, and King Hereafter rests on a theory about Macbeth’s identity that is her own.
Are Dorothy Dunnett’s books suitable for younger readers?
They are written for adults. The novels include battle violence, torture, the deaths of sympathetic characters and some sexual content, although little of it is graphic. Confident older teenagers can read them, but the difficulty of the prose is a bigger barrier than the content.
Has the Lymond Chronicles been made into a TV series?
Not yet. In late 2016 it was announced that the production company Mammoth Screen, the makers of Poldark and Victoria, had acquired the television rights to the Lymond Chronicles. No series has been broadcast, and none of Dunnett’s other novels has been adapted for film or television.
Did Dorothy Dunnett write any more books before she died?
No. Dorothy Dunnett died in Edinburgh on 9 November 2001, the year after her final novel, Gemini, was published. Both major series were finished, and the only books to appear afterwards were the second volume of The Dorothy Dunnett Companion and The Lymond Poetry.
Conclusion
Dorothy Dunnett asks more of her readers than almost any other historical novelist, and gives more back. The fourteen novels of Lymond and Niccolò form one of the great sustained achievements of the genre, King Hereafter is among its finest single volumes, and the Johnson Johnson mysteries show how much fun she could have with a lighter touch.
The way in is The Game of Kings. Give it two hundred pages, look nothing up, and read the rest in the order she wrote them.
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