In Celebrated Crimes [eight volumes: this version, 1895], Dumas the elder, recognised master of historical fiction (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers) turns to historical fact. In this series you will find: ambition, adultery and assassination; battles, barricades, bravery and betrayal; kings, queens and courtesans, conspiracies and conquests; desire and deception; intrigue and infamy; love, lust, loyalty and lies; monks and murderers; palaces, popes, princesses and pestilence; romance, revenge, regicide and repentance; seduction and sieges; tyranny, treachery, torture and triumph; wicked schemes, cruel deaths, and narrow escapes. 

In this volume: 

• Joan of Naples - The much-married queen does what she must to survive ‘the violence and treachery of this barbarous age’. ‘An angel soiled by crime, she lied like Satan himself .’ 
• The Man in The Iron Mask (an essay) - How much of the well-known story is fact, and how much fiction? Dumas reveals his sources. 
• The Return of Martin Guerre - The inhabitants of a French town, his wife and family welcome home Martin Guerre after long years away at the war: but is he really who he says he is? 

Celebrated Crimes - Volume 6 by Alexandre Dumas père 1895 (Translated by George Burnham Ives).