The Mad King

An American with a Central European face is mistaken for a mad king who has escaped his keepers - and finds that impersonating him is easier than explaining, and considerably more dangerous. Burroughs failed at ranching, gold dredging and selling pencil sharpeners before deciding at thirty-five that he could write better than what he was reading; this 1914 romance is his Ruritanian one, written at speed and moving like it.