The Scarlet Pimpernel

Baroness Emmuska Orczy published The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905, and the book essentially invented the secret-identity adventure-hero template that everything from Zorro to Batman would later borrow. The original idea came to Orczy on the Temple Underground platform in London, a fact she repeated enough times in interviews that it has become its own piece of literary mythology. She wrote the story first as a play with her husband, then as the novel, then as a serial.

The setting is France during the Reign of Terror in 1792. The aristocrats are being sent to the guillotine in batches. A mysterious English rescuer signs his work with a small red flower, the scarlet pimpernel, and slips condemned French nobles out of Paris under the noses of Citizen Chauvelin’s secret police. The reader knows almost from the start that the rescuer is the apparently foolish English baronet Sir Percy Blakeney. The dramatic engine is his estranged wife Marguerite, French-born and once friends with revolutionary leaders, who is forced by Chauvelin to betray the Pimpernel without realizing she would be betraying her own husband. The plotting is melodramatic and very fast. The voice is breathless and quotable. A foundational text of popular adventure fiction.