The most obvious literary precedents for Death of the Fox are to be found in the tradition of the historical novel, a form invented by Walter Scott in 1814 with the novel Waverley. It was popularized in America by James Fenimore Cooper in his sea adventures and frontier romances and continues down to the present day in such works as Colleen McCullough's novels of the last years of the Roman Republic. In his later Renaissance novel The Succession (1983), Garrett even pays somewhat ironic homage to the genre's originator by dealing directly with one of Scott's most famous subjects, Leicester's entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle.

The eminent critic Monroe Spears points out that Death of the Fox and its companion novel The Succession "are such remarkable historical novels that they may be considered either fulfillments of the genre or repudiations of it." They fulfill the best...