Top 10 books about duels
Among the hoary lessons a debut writer must learn is that of Chekhov’s gun, the notion that anything introduced to a story must be there for a reason. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall,” Chekhov wrote, “then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” It is good advice, serving the demands of brevity and precision, avoiding the deadly burden of inconsequential intrusion into the sparse landscape of narrative.
My novel, A Melancholy Event, features not one but two guns, hanging in a pair. These are guns with a purpose, for they are duelling pistols, and thereby – with apologies to Shakespeare and Jeffrey Archer – hangs a tale.
More than a niche of its own, the literary duel is almost its own canon, bewitching writers of a certain romantic, invariably male, predisposition. As a catalyst for plot it is hard to think of anything more dynamic or indeed convenient, a device laden with symbolism, a gateway to the big themes of honour, revenge, conflict, death, and a handy way of wrapping things up if they seem to be going on too long. Add in a dose of authorial practice – Pushkin and Proust both fought in duels – and you have a grand literary tradition. For my novel, the true story of a duel is the catalyst for what TS Eliot termed a “shocker”, a slice of contemporary macabre. En garde!
1. The Duel by Anton ChekhovA story of two lovers who have fallen out of love and two men whose friendship cannot survive their opposing worldviews. Chekhov takes his regular ingredients (the bourgeoisie, decay and ennui), places them in the sweltering crucible of a seaside resort in the Caucasus, and throws in a duel. For Chekhov,
the duel is a catalyst for change and reconciliation, for his characters to learn something about themselves and the world around them. In common with many duelling stories, there is an air of comic ineptitude to the proceedings; unlike most, nobody dies from a gunshot wound.
2. The Duel by Giacomo CasanovaA feast of riotous detail, the clue to this exceptional piece of writing by the 18th-century libertine lies in the subtitle: “An episode from the life of GC, a Venetian.” Written before History of My Life, the autobiography that created the myth and defined Casanova’s legacy, The Duel features all the tropes: a young adventurer fleeing injustice, romantic misunderstanding, an affronted army officer and a window on to the life of a young man on the make in a European court.
3. The Flower of Battle by Fiore dei LiberiA deliriously absurd and beautiful treatise on the art of combat, Flower of Battle dates from the early 1400s. One of a handful of works by Dei Liberi, an Italian nobleman and
“the greatest fencing master of the late 1300s”, there are four surviving copies of this illustrated manuscript. As How To manuals go, it takes some beating, starting with simple hand-to-hand combat and progressing through the various stages of weaponry: daggers, swords, sticks, poleaxes and spears. But rather than the intricacy of the combat, it is the simplicity of the illustration that astounds, offering a glorious insight into the minds and mores of a distant world.
4. A Coward by Guy de MaupassantIf honour and bravery are consi