When Current Biography interviewed 68-year-old Thomas B. Costain in 1953, he still considered himself “a reporter in the sense that a reporter tries to be accurate and interesting,” adding, “a writer has no right to be dull.” At that time he was completing his seventh novel in ten years, The Silver Chalice, another megabestseller.

Brantford-born Costain didn’t begin writing novels until he was 57. In the previous 40 years, he had been a reporter for the local newspaper and an editor for both Maclean’s magazine and The Saturday Evening Post where he discovered and developed such writers as J.P. Marquand, Charles Francis Coe, William H. Upson, and Canada’s Mary Lowery Ross. He also helped Earl Derr Biggers create the Chinese detective, Charlie Chan.
 

The name of Thomas B. Costain, the Brantford, Ontario-born former editor of Maclean’s, Saturday Evening Post, and advisory editor to Doubleday, was a byword in the world of letters earlier this century, yet today, he is hardly remembered. Following his first novel at age 57, Costain went on to publish romantic histories, the most popular being The Black Rose (1945) which sold more than two million copies. [Photo, courtesy Doubleday]

Born in 1885, Costain was so fascinated with history and so loved writing that he had completed three unpublished novels before he finished high school. A mystery story won him a job as a sports reporter on the Brantford Courier, a job he craved so that he could cover the out-of-town games of the local lacrosse team — then one of the best teams in Canada. By 1908, he had moved to the Guelph Mercury and, two years later, the same year he married Ida Spragge of Guelph, he was made trade book editor for Toronto’s Maclean Publishing Company. By 1915, he had become editor of Maclean’s magazine.

His achievements with Maclean’s attracted the attention of the famous editor of Saturday Evening Post, H.G. Lorimer, who lured him to Philadelphia where, as Merrill Denison wrote in a 1946 Maclean’s feature, he established a reputation for “spotting and encouraging hitherto unknown authors that made his name a legend in the writing world of the twenties and thirties.” Marquand was Costain’s most famous find as Marquand eventually wrote 95 stories and eight serialized novels for the Post, one of them prompted after both Costain and Marquand visited the battlefields of the American Civil War and another when Costain asked Marquand to “invent” a new Chinese detective after the creator of Charlie Chan died. Marquand made a trip to the Orient and created Mr. Moto.

Costain spent 14 years with the Post before becoming eastern story editor for Twentieth-Century Fox. He then launched, in 1937, his own pocket-size magazine American Cavalcade which he later described as “a promising infant but it died young.”

His work as editor gave him little time for writing, a situation that changed in 1939 after he became an advisory editor with Doubleday. For My Great Folly, his first novel, published in 1942 and set in seventeenth century Spain, was typical of the bestsellers that followed — historical romances, based on superb research, that were swift-paced and contained rousing action and intrigue. Denison in his Maclean’s article reported that Costain read some 500 books to prepare for a novel, and the 1953 Current Biography article declared that Costain “studied in detail not only the history and manners but also the language, and especially the slang of the time.”

His second novel, Ride With Me, based on Napoleonic times, examined the battles on the Iberian coast and the French retreat from Moscow. It took 15 months of research and was reviewed in The New York Times as a “rousing and thoroughly entertaining tale.” It was his next novel, however, The Black Rose, that carried him to the top of the bestseller lists. The initial printing of 650,000 eventually exceeded two million. A reviewer on The New York Times claimed that it “swashbuckles with the best of them.” A thirteenth century adventure set in England and Cathay, it was turned into a movie starring Tyrone Power.

Other bestsellers followed in quick succession. The Moneyman (1947) was followed by two novels with Canadian settings: High Towers (1949) and Son of a Hundred Kings (1950). The latter, in a plot reminiscent of Charles Dickens, tells of a young immigrant orphan from a small Ontario town.

Early Christianity was the theme of Costain’s The Silver Chalice, which topped all book sales of 1952. By then, with the Pageant of England series, Costain was noted as a non-fiction writer. Following the publication of The Conquerers (1949), the first volume of the series, historian Geoffrey Bruun wrote that “Thomas Costain belongs to the school of Michelet in his conviction that history ought to be a resurrection of the flesh, and he is in the great tradition of Scott and Dumas in his ability to make it fascinating.”

Between 1954 and 1961, Costain also produced a four-volume series of Canadian history called The White and the Gold. In one of his last books he returned to his roots to research and produce The Cord of Steel, a publication celebrating Alexander Graham Bell, Brantford’s most famous resident. For his continued interest in Canadian events and history, he was granted an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Western Ontario. This was just prior to his death, five months to the day after his 80th birthday.

Mel James