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[published by Popular Library; 1950]

Phantom Fortress is the story of Captain Ross Pembroke, a young Continental dragoon from Rhode Island. After escaping from the British prison ships at Charleston, Ross heads inland in an attempt to rejoin the rebel army. He stumbles into Francis Marion's men in the swamps, spends some time learning about partisan warfare, then joins Lee's Legion in time for the march through North Carolina and Virginia. Along the way, he finds time to woo Dorande van Kortenaer, a Dutch/French refugee from the West Indies, who starts out neutral and gets dragged into the rebellion by virtue of the friends she makes.

Phantom Fortress is the book which first introduced me to Banastre Tarleton, though as I reread it (for the umpteenth time) I'm not certain why it left me curious to learn more about him. It shows him in a very bad light -- your garden-variety raiding, pillaging, murdering psychopath. Well, at least he has tons of personality. (Foaming at the mouth does count as personality, doesn't it?)

As a measure of how close Lancaster comes to presenting an historically accurate Tarleton, check out this initial description:

A tall, slender man, immaculately uniformed, was striding towards the nearest bonfire that was topped by a mahogany table. He had an easy, gliding gait that told of lithe strength. By the burning mass he stopped, took off his helmet that, in addition to the regulation red plume, had a great plaque of glossy fur or feathers, Ross could not tell which, rising from the base of the visor. The man shouted in a clear, commanding voice to a sergeant who was superintending the conflagration, "Rot your guts, where are those blasted spades?"
 
The sergeant stiffened to attention, replied inaudibly. The officer's voice blared out, "I said at once! They only buried the blasted swine yesterday. Dig up his grave over there. There's not a crumb of treasure in the house and those Rebel bastards probably buried it with him...."
 
The sergeant and his party left at a double and the officer leisurely prodded the fire, tossing a couple of leather-bound books onto the blaze. Another voice called from the darkness and Ross stiffened with quick recognition... "Colonel Tarleton!"

Yeah, right. Mind you, Ban would probably forgive Lancaster a lot of the raiding, murdering portions of this portrayal in exchange for that improbable "tall [and] slender". In reality, the best information to be found indicates that he was a stocky little guy who probably stood all of 5'6". Perhaps Colonel Tavington wandered into this world by mistake. Lancaster's description certainly bears a much stronger resemblance to him than it does to Banastre Tarleton.

It's not a good Tarleton book, but I like it for other reasons. I vehemently disagree with Lancaster's world view, but his writing is enjoyable as unsophisticated, old-fashioned adventure. I don't find it difficult to turn off my real-world complaints and accept his stories as products of the era in which they were written. His books run on the edge of being "young adult," though there's enough to them to make them an entertaining read no matter what your age. He knows the period well enough to have written a couple of non-fiction books on it, but he doesn't let facts get in the way of the story. Some of it's real; much of it isn't. His interpretations of all the people involved -- not just Ban -- are drawn more from myth than truth, but he fictionalizes them into an interesting cast.

I first read my way through Bruce Lancaster's body of work when I was in high school, and my copies of most of them have been well-thumbed since. This one remains a favorite, even if I do fervently wish he could have risen above his limited, "all rebels good" / "all Brits and Tories bad or stupid" world view.