Anthony Hope · 1894 · thriller

Anthony Hope's 1894 romance, which invented Ruritania and a whole genre with it. An idle Englishman travels to a small central European kingdom for a coronation, discovers he is the double of the king, and has to be crowned in his place when the real one is drugged and kidnapped by his half-brother the day before.

1. 1
   London

   Rudolf Rassendyll has an income, no occupation and a family resemblance nobody in his household will discuss - the result of an eighteenth-century indiscretion involving a visiting Ruritanian prince and a red-haired ancestor.

2. 2
   Dresden

   He tells his sister-in-law he is going walking in the Tyrol and takes the train east instead, on a whim, to see the coronation of a king he has never met and is about to discover he looks exactly like.

3. 3
   Strelsau

   In the capital the king is drugged the night before his crowning, and Rassendyll is put through the ceremony in his place to stop Black Michael taking the throne - a deception that then cannot be stopped.

4. 4
   Zenda

   The real king is held in the castle of Zenda with a drawbridge over a moat and a pipe rigged to drop his body into the water at a signal - and the rescue is the scene every adventure novel of the next fifty years borrowed from.