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Celebrated Crimes (Complete)

First published: 1839
Pages: 1,492

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About this book

Alexandre Dumas turned his novelist's eye on real history in this sprawling collection of famous crimes drawn from across Europe. He recounts the poisonings and betrayals of the Borgias, the horrors of the Cenci family, the plots surrounding Mary Stuart, the mass killings of the French Revolution, and other notorious cases stretching back centuries. Dumas worked from trial records and old chronicles, then dramatized them with the same flair for suspense and vivid character he brought to his fiction, so the line between reportage and storytelling often blurs. The result reads less like dry history than like a set of dark, gripping tales, each built around greed, passion, and vengeance. This free edition is available as a PDF and EPUB download.

About the author

Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas wrote at industrial scale, with a workshop behind him, and the most important member of it was Auguste Maquet, who drafted plots and researched the novels that went out under Dumas's name alone.