RAFAEL SABATINI DEAD

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 103, 14 February 1950, Page 3

RAFAEL SABATINI DEAD

POPULAR NOVELIST AND DRAMATIST LONDON, February 13. The British author and dramatist, Rafael Sabatini, died at Boden, Switzerland, early to-day. Sabatini, who was on a month’s visit-to Switzerland, had been ill for some time. One of the most popular of English novelists, Sabatini was bom at Jesi, Central Italy, in ,1875. His father was Cavaliere Vincenzo Sabatini, and his mother Anna Trafford, an Englishwoman. Educated in Switzerland and Portugal, Sabatini when 18 could speak fluently English, Italian, French, German, Spafiisli, and Portuguese. Going to England, he took up journalism and worked oil a Liverpool newspaper. But, fired by the romances of the Mediterranean lands in which his boyhood had been passed, he wearied of ephemeral work and turned to novel writing.

The stories he produced were intensely thrilling, but had much more in them than the ordinary thriller of the day. Romantic as they were, they had a basis of history and were written with the sparkle of the Italian temperament. His first, “The Tavern Knight,” which appeared in 1904, sold reasonably well for the work of a beginner. Others published in succeeding years established him among the popular novelists. Then came international fame. “The Sea Hawk,” which appeared in 1915, was translated into five languages and, like others which followed it, such as “Scaramouche,” had a great sale in America. Sabatini also wrote histories of certain periods such as “’Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition” and “The Life of Cesare Borgia” as well as six plays.