A journalist for many years on Canadian newspapers and a Saturday Evening Post editor (1920–34), Costain was 57 when he published his first romance, For My Great Folly (1942), dealing with the 17th-century rivalry between England and Spain. An immediate success, it was followed almost yearly by historical adventure tales, the best known of which are The Black Rose (1945), whose medieval English hero ranges as far as Kublai Khan's China, and The Silver Chalice (1952), about the early Christians in Rome.