A French scholar has revealed that he has secretly been working for years on preparing for publication a “previously unknown” novel by Three Musketeers author Alexandre Dumas. In an Agence France Presse wire story, Claude Schopp explains that in 1988, “I was trying to check a detail for an article and after months of research had to look through copies of ‘Le Moniteur Universel.’ Imagine my surprise when among the spools of microfiche I came across an almost completed serial signed Alexandre Dumas.” The AFP reports that the 900-page Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, which will be published in June by Phebus press, is “a classic Dumas adventure story about the start of the Napoleonic empire and includes a swashbuckling account of the battle of Trafalgar,” and includes a fictive solution to the real-world mystery of who killed Admiral Horatio Nelson.