crowleycrow @ 2011-03-06T08:41:00

Maybe you noticed -- I'm alerted by  thatmakesmemad   of the existence of a novel by S.J. Parris, just out, called "Heresy" and starring (it does sound like a movie) Giordano Bruno, who like other fictionalized historical figures, becomes a detective in the story, solving a murder in the course of his famed visit to Oxford to debate Aristotle.    (It's often claimed that Bruno espoused Copernicus in this lecture, but the Galileo scholar Ernan McMullin studied the records of the debate in detail and couldn't justify this; his account influenced my own account in Aegypt.) Ms. Parris also seems much influenced -- hard to tell in a brief review -- by John Bossy's detailed and interesting but in my opinion wrong-headed study "Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair," It would seem that this is to be the first of a series featuring Bruno.  According to this review the book avoids boringly accurate representation of historical speech and ideas, which should aid sales:

www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/13/heresy-sj-parris

Father Ernan McMullin, a good man and a fine scholar, was a friend of my family during the time we lived in South Bend, Indiana and my father was director of the student infirmary (and the only doctor).  Father McMullin (as we all called him though he never except officially called himself that) married two of my sisters -- the nicely ambiguous common way of describing that service once, I wonder if it's passe.  He died last week at 86 in retirement in Ireland, where he was born and became a priest.  

Harper Collins (my publisher!) has apparently spent a lot of money acquiring "Heresy" and seems to hope for great things from it.  So do I.  If people get to like one fake Bruno it may develop a taste for another.  

But  thatmakesmemad   also asks an interesting question about fictionalized real people: " I wonder if there are any other characters where you can effectively go from Dan Brown to Herman Hesse by reading different authors takes on them."

I can think of a movie-and-novel pairing:  "Shakespeare in Love" and "Nothing Like the Sun."  Others>?