In 'The Count of Monte Cristo," an adventure story that has charmed generations of readers, Alexandre Dumas places his falsely imprisoned hero, Edmond Dantès, in a medieval fortress, where he remains trapped until, after years of grim isolation, he escapes and punishes his enemies. Dumas claimed to have based the revenge plot on a grisly case he had found in the Paris police archives. Tom Reiss's "The Black Count" is a biography of the man he believes Dumas took as a model for the book's hero—the novelist's own father, a general in the French revolutionary army who fell victim to internecine political wars in southern Italy and spent two years as a captive.
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