One of the literary stories of the year is the publication in June of a new book by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas died in 1870, but so prolific was he as a writer that his oeuvre was never properly catalogued. As a result bits and pieces keep appearing as researchers make their way through libraries and other archives. But this is something different: a 900 page novel that was all but completed when Dumas died. A Dumas scholar called Claude Schopp came across "Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine" while looking through back-issues of the newspaper in which it was serialised. He has now reconstructed the whole, adding a short passage at the end to bring it to a conclusion. It is by all accounts another swash-buckling yarn in the vein of The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. The chevalier is an aristocrat in the years after the French revolution who is caught between his royalist past and his fascination with the emerging Napoleonic empire. The high-point of the novel is especially apt, in this bicentenary year: it is a blood-and-thunder account of the battle of Trafalgar. In it we learn the answer to one of the great historical mysteries: who was the French marksman who killed Lord Nelson. Why, the Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine himself of course!