The Brooklyn Rail

Unsung Hero

Tom Reiss’s works read like adventure novels, but the details are scrupulously researched and true. The Black Count is Reiss’s third book, and a seven-year obsession. The Upper East Side author, 48, recently told a New School journalism class about his compulsion to resurrect the life story of an unknown soldier, General Alex Dumas, whose swashbuckling escapades inform his son Alexandre Dumas’s novels.