The Snare

Wellington was out to save Portugal, but there were traitors in high places secretly opposing his methods and playing the spy for the enemy. All depended on secrecy and unity of action. Suddenly the drunken blunder of a young English officer gives the plotters their chance to upset the delicate balance. Their influence causes the Portugese Council of Regency to demand that the culprit be made a scapegoat. He is at large, and it falls to his brother-in-law, Sir Terrence O'Moy, British adjutant-general at Lisbon, to promise that he shall be shot when taken. The disentangling of the coil of circumstances developing from this situation occupies the remainder of this exciting and romantic narrative. About the Author Rafael Sabatini (29 April 1875 – 13 February 1950) was an Italian/English writer of novels of romance and adventure. By the 1940s, illness forced the writer to slow his prolific method of composition. However, he did write several additional works even during that time. He died on 13 February 1950 in Switzerland. He is buried at Adelboden, Switzerland. On his headstone his wife had written, "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad", the first line of Scaramouche. He is best known for his worldwide best-sellers: The Sea Hawk (1915), a tale of the Spanish Armada and the pirates of the Barbary Coast; Scaramouche (1921), a tale of the French Revolution in which a fugitive hides out in a commedia dell'arte troupe and later becomes a fencing master (Sabatini wrote a sequel ten years later); Captain Blood (1922), in which the title character is admiral of a fleet of pirate ships (Sabatini also wrote two sequels comprising short stories); and Bellarion the Fortunate (1926), about a cunning young man who finds himself immersed in the politics of fifteenth-century Italy. Several of his novels were adapted into films during the silent era, and the first three of these books were made into notable films in the sound era, in 1940, 1952, and 1935 respectively. His third novel was made into a famous "lost" film, Bardelys the Magnificent, directed in 1926 by King Vidor with John Gilbert in the lead, and long viewable only in a fragment excerpted in Vidor's silent comedy Show People. A few intact reels have recently been discovered in Europe. The fully restored version premiered on TCM on 11 January 2010. Two silent adaptations of Sabatini novels which do survive intact are Rex Ingram's Scaramouche (1923) starring Ramón Novarro, and The Sea Hawk (1924) directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Milton Sills. The 1940 film of the same name, with Errol Flynn, is not a remake - but a wholly new story which just used the title. A 1924 silent version of Captain Blood, starring J. Warren Kerrigan, is partly lost, surviving only in an incomplete copy in the Library of Congress. The Black Swan was filmed in 1942 starring Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara. In all, Sabatini produced thirty-one novels, eight short story collections, six non-fiction books, numerous uncollected short stories, and a play.