Today, few people would recognize the name "Rafael Sabatini", but in the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most popular authors in the world. He was called "the Alexandre Dumas of Modern Fiction" and "the Prince of Storytellers", and he almost singlehandedly resurrected the genre of the swashbuckler both in literature and on film. Historical romances and adventure stories were Sabatini's stock-in-trade and the focal point of the majority of his literary...