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In some of these, the swashbuckler gets the gentlemen instead, but they are all swashbucking and heroic and/or antiheroic. I loved Lies of Locke Lamora, will keep an eye out for the other recommendations here.
Steven Brust: "Jhereg" and the rest of the series (about a mafia boss in a fantasy world. Favourite quote (from memory): "No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between his shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.")
Also his "Phoenix guards" and "Five hundred years after", it's Three musketeers set in the same world.
(This world has quite a lot of magic, the rest are closer to our world.)
Megan Whalen Turner: "The Thief" and the rest of the series. The first one is the least flashy, but all are very, very good. Fantasy/alternate history in a ancient Greece-like culture, but ~renaissance tech.
Zen Cho: "Sorcerer to the Crown".
"Prunella had once thought life in London would be all flirting and balls and dresses, hitting attentive suitors on the shoulder with a fan, and breakfasting late upon bowls of chocolate. She sighed now for her naïveté. Little had she known life in London was in fact all hexes and murder and thaumaturgical politics, and she would always be rising early for some reason or other!"
Ellen Kushner: "Swordspoint" and "The Priviledge of the Sword".
"Let the fairy tale begin on a winter’s morning, then, with one drop of blood new-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as the single spot of claret on the lace cuff. And it therefore follows that evil lurks behind each broken window, scheming malice and enchantment; while behind the latched shutters the good are sleeping their just sleeps at this early hour in Riverside."
Madeleine E.Robins: "Point of Honour" and the rest of the series.
"It is a truth universially acknowledged that a Fallen Woman of good family must, soon or late, decend to whoredom."
(Our protagonist, who became a fallen woman by running away with her brother's fencing master, has instead descended to becoming a private eye/duelist for hire.)
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