Sir: In his dismissal of Conan Doyle's his- torical novels,
Bevis Hillier asks 'who reads The White Company today?' I do; and Sir Nigel and Rodney Stone, and the Brigadier Gerrard stories — though I find Uncle Berme unsatisfactory and I can't make headway with Micah Clarke or The Refugees. At a much higher critical level, Mary Renault, in an appreciative introduc- tion to a recent edition of The White Com- pany, emphasised Doyle's clear-sighted grasp of his historical background: the Jacquerie are not just a brutish menace to the heroes but human beings who have to live in appalling squalor, and the Company themselves fight for loot, not glory. And (as in the Holmes stories) there are splendid lines, like that of the ex-monk Hordle John, when asked why he left his monastery: 'There were seven reasons. The first was that they threw me out.'
Sebastian Robinson
7 Kirklee Gardens, Glasgow
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