A Hard Day's Knight: Travels with Lord Baltimore

"Lord Baltimore" is Stephen Doster's debut novel to be published in May 2002 by John F. Blair, Publisher.

Charging down the Gullah coast, his Keds pumping and his cigar puffing like a steam engine, comes Lord Baltimore, the enigmatic title character of Stephen Dosters debut novel.
Lord Baltimores appearance on a nearly deserted road is quite a shock to the novels hero, young Ensworth Harding, who has already had a pretty rough day.
Ensworth has been plucked from his comfortable country club and deposited in the middle of nowhere by his father, who has given him only a backpack filled with supplies, a letter to deliver in Savannah, and an admonition: See that open road ... Your destiny lies down there."
    Ensworths adventures will thrill fans of Cervantes, Mark Twain, Henry Fielding, and other masters of the picaresque. The dictionary defines a picaresque novel as one in which the adventures of an engagingly rougish hero are described in a series of usually humorous or satiric episodes that often depict, in realistic detail, the everyday life of the common people."
    In other words, Doster has written a novel in the rollicking style of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Jones. Lord Baltimore is the story of a boy learning to become a man, and the man who helps him along the way.
    The author has had his own adventures. Born in London to an English mother and an American father who was working for NATO, Doster was raised on one of the Georgia sea islands where Lord Baltimore takes place. Like Ensworth, Doster has ridden out a hurricane, worked on a highway construction crew, and encountered the Gullah culture of the Georgia coast. He also helped build the first youth hostel in the southeastern United States, drove across the country and back, and was present when then-Senator Al Gore invented" the Internet. (He cannot, however, top his Aunt Sylvia, who lived for five years with a tribe of Baluchistani warriors in Pakistan.)
At the outset of his junior year at the University of Georgia, Dosters housing arrangements fell through. Forced to live in his 1966 Ford Falcon van, he killed time by reading, including both volumes of The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillana by Alain Rene Lesage, a 19th-century picaresque classic.
    It was while reading this book," Doster says, that the seed of inspiration for Lord Baltimore was planted. It would be years later before Don Quixote caused that seed to germinate."
Before Lord Baltimore is through (and before Lord Baltimore is through with him), Ensworth Harding confronts witch doctors, con artists, kidnappers, Latin speakers, angry ghosts, escaped convicts, and a drug-running, coke-snorting sheriff. He even confronts his own naivete, and discovers the courage he never knew he had.

Stephen Doster was born in London and raised on St. Simons Island, Georgia. He now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he works in advertising. Lord Baltimore is his first novel.

Title: Lord Baltimore
Author: Stephen Doster
Price: $22.95 hardcover
ISBN: 0-89587-264-1
Specifications: 6 x 9, 360 pages
Publication Date: May 2002
Subject: Fiction