The Rose Knight's Crucifixion: The Three Monks of Tears: The Rose Knight's Crucifixion #2 (ePub)

Lawrence Ellsworth is the pen name of Lawrence Schick, who began his career as a writer at TSR Hobbies in the late 1970s, where he wrote, developed, and edited a number of titles for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. When Ellsworth was a boy in the 1960s, publishers were reprinting many of the best pulp tales in inexpensive paperbacks, so Harold Lamb, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard enthralled Ellsworth at an early age. Poring through the libraries for any book in which the hero wore a sword soon led him to Dumas, Sabatini, Orczy, Tolkien, H. Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s historicals.

In the early 1990s Ellsworth led a troupe of writers who produced live-action role-playing weekends. While writing and researching The King’s Musketeers for this troupe, he became fascinated with early 17th-century France. This rekindled his interest in swashbuckler fiction, and he has since become a noted collector and authority on the subject, and his anthology, The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, was published in 2015. Ellsworth learned French so he could read Dumas’s novels in the original language. His acclaimed translation of Alexandre Dumas’s “lost” sequel to The Three Musketeers, The Red Sphinx, was published in 2017, and was followed up by his own translation of The Three Musketeers in 2018. (All of the above are published by Pegasus Books of New York and London.) Ellsworth has three children, Wyatt, Sanderson, and Honor, and lives in northern Maryland near Baltimore.