A schlocky, hilariously entertaining delight. Unless the translation I have, by Lord Sudley, does a huge injustice to Dumas' prose, Dumas is a better storyteller than a writer. But what a storyteller!

Some wonderful moments: d'Artagnan arriving in Paris with nothing but his yellow horse, a few crowns, and the advice his father gave him ("Don't sell the horse"), and promptly selling the horse; d'Artagnan, on his first day in Paris, getting caught in three quarrels and arranging three duels for the following afternoon; and the whole ridiculous diamond-tags-precipitated procession to London, with musketeers peeling off like cyclists as they're felled by would-be assassins.

Speaking of which, the body count in this book is very high but in such a cartoony "Kapow!" kind of way that it's not at all disturbing (which is perhaps in itself disturbing). At one point after running someone through with his sword d'Aragnan does reflect for an entire paragraph on the "strange destiny which governs men, driving them to kill each other in the service of strangers," but he snaps out of that easily enough and dives back into the story.

Other "sources of tension in the text" (die, inner English major, die) include the dearth of female characters of any complexity and the characterization of Lady de Winter. But Dumas is a novelist, not a professor of literature, and I think it's safe to say that his book is the better (or at least more entertaining) for it.