Favorite straddler: Alexandre Dumas's "Queen Margot." I am also a huge fan of his Musketeer books, which are well worth a read, no matter how many (lousy) film/tv versions of these stories you may have seen. i thought i knew all about those books...until i read them!

I recently read a biography of the notorious underworld figure Arnold Rothstein, and felt it mixed fact and fiction quite a bit.

Entitled "Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series" and written by David Pietrusza, it was an entertaining read which nonetheless strayed into myth in several places.

One explanation for this is the lack of factual information about Rothstein (particularly his alleged "fixing" of the World Series), so perhaps in cases like that the mixing of the two is acceptable.

Given time all fiction takes on the aura of fact(truth)--especially if it is more interesting or exciting.

sena jeter naslund's recent 'novel' about marie antoinette comes to mind (but can i remember the title???? no) and also margaret george's novel about cleopatra. actually i would put all of george's novels in this category. (she also has a great one about mary magdalene.) beautifully imagined and yet, the research is done too--but the imagination fills in the gaps, along with the intellect making educated guesses......

Any work that has either of these phrases somewhere in the title:

The Real/True Story of

The Untold Story of

is more than likely, if not exactly fiction, based on some highly unlikely propositions (ansd sources)

It's not a book, but I recently saw Elizabeth - the Golden Age. It is basically true but changes some of the details. I realize that "they" (in this case - the screenwriter) do this to make the story more interesting, but I'm a stickler for details.

I'm a newbie here, and I realize no one has posted in a while, but there is a book that straddles this and raises interesting questions. Has anyone read Sharon Kay Penman's "The Sunne in Splendor"? She proposes an alternative theory on what happened to the two princes in the tower and the true nature of Richard II and Henry VII.