A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


JON MANCHIP WHITE – Fevers and Chills: Three Extravagant Tales: Nightclimber/ The Game of Troy / The Garden Game. Foul Play Press, trade paperback, 1984.

    Some books are magical. Once read they are difficult to forget or put aside. Scenes and set pieces from them stay with the reader and haunt him for days later, sometimes years. These three novels by Welsh screenwriter (Crack in the World, Mystery Submarine, The Camp On Blood Island …), novelist, and folklorist Jon Manchip White, who taught at the University of Tennessee, all fall into that category of books that possess that magical, even mythic, quality.

    Robert Louis Stevenson called such stories “Crawlies.” John Buchan called them “Shockers.” White calls them “Extravagant Tales.”

JON MANCHIP WHITE

1. Nightclimber opens at night in a large city:

    It is always night.

    There is so little traffic that it seems to be as late as four or five o’clock in the morning. It is foggy. The cold is so piercing that it must be the dead of winter. To judge from the style of the street and the buildings, I am near the center of a big city. I cannot tell what city it is. For some reason I always think if might be London … all I know is that I have been wandering for many hours (days/months/years?) in order to reach this building …There is no one to stop me if I turn on my heel and go in the other direction. It is simply that my destination is inevitable. I have no other choice.

    The hero is an English art historian who since his days at Cambridge has been compelled to climb — not mountains, but buildings, and since the law frowns on such things he has always climbed at night. Now in Madrid, broke and behind on his book on the painter Velazquez, he finds himself recruited by two old school chums to climb a building in Paris and retrieve an antique key.

    Needing the money, he does so and soon discovers he is being tested. Basil Merganser, a wealthy East European and naturalized British citizen is something of a mysterious and sinister character. He wants something retrieved from the Cave of the Cyclops on the remote Greek island of Kavalla. The rewards are great, a beautiful woman is involved, and the world is about to descend into nightmare.

JON MANCHIP WHITE

2. The Game of Troy also takes a note from Greek myth, the oldest of the stories of the heroes, the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. The hero is an architect who has been having an affair with Astrid Sarrazin, the wife of Texas millionaire Gabriel Sarrazin, who rules over an estate known as El Pardo.

    “As I said when I called you, you’ll find it a challenge.”

    “What sort of a challenge?”

    “Why don’t you wait and see? We’ve got a whole weekend ahead to talk about it.”

    I made a sound of such unmistakable irritation that he decided to put me out of my misery, at least partially. He was walking past me, taking Astrid with him. He spoke as they went through the door with a note of amusement and something like triumph in his voice. The Texas accent was slightly more noticeable.

    He said: “It’s a maze.”

    The hero knows it is a bad idea, but the money is inviting and the chance to be with the woman he loves…

    Which is how the hero and heroine end up trapped in the maze with a modern Minotaur in the form of a deadly breeding bull, and hunted by Gabriel who wants his pound of flesh in torment before he ends the lovers’ misery, as the tension mounts and the nightmare becomes more palpable with each word, each page you turn.

JON MANCHIP WHITE

3. The Garden Game is the only book in the trilogy to feature White’s roguish series creation, mercenary Captain Lewis Teague. Major Rickman is a tough ex-military type approached by a cabal of wealthy men in the armaments business. This adventure again takes a note from the distant past, this time the distant past of Rome:

    “And what would I have to do to earn such a princely salary? Oh, I know you are very generous Mr. Martagon..”

    His pale, neat features remained impassive. He wasn’t a man to be disturbed by my sarcasm.

    “I am perfectly serious, Major Rickman. I will pay you a yearly fee of twenty thousand English pounds to act as my lanista.”

    “As your what?”

    “A Roman term, meaning a manager or trainer.”

    “Trainer of what?”

    “Why, of my troupe of Games-players, of course.”

    What Teague and Rickman discover is a deadly revival of the ancient gladiatorial games of decadent Rome, organized by a group of rich and slightly mad jaded men who find their only pleasure in blood and pain. How he is drawn into the madness and escapes takes up the rest of the novel, a thriller as compelling as it is fantastic.

    These three novels all manage to walk a fine line between the fantastic and the plausible. They recall some of Geoffrey Household’s novels such as The Courtesy of Death and Dance of the Dwarfs, and yet have a dark streak of humor running through them not unlike Edmund Crispin’s novels and elements that can only be called Poesque.

    They are clever tales that leave you thrilled, satisfied, and like the best of myths, just a little discomforted by the reminder that the gods of chance play such games with human fate and destiny. All three are fine entertaining tales, but Nightclimber in particular will stick with you.

    They are indeed extravagant tales in the best sense of that phrase. Short, to the point, and beautifully written, they are very much tales to be told on a stormy night, a perfect blend of fevers and chills, designed for a frisson of terror and sigh of relief as the heroes avoid one deadly trap after another, down to a satisfying and perfectly nuanced finale.

      Additional bibliographic data:

Nightclimber. Chatto & Windus, UK, hc, 1968. William Morrow, US, hc, 1968. Paperback reprint: Ace, n.d.

The Game of Troy. Chatto & Windus, UK, hc, 1971. David McKay, US, hc, 1971. Paperback reprint: Dell, 1972.

The Garden Game. Chatto & Windus, UK. hc, 1973. Bobbs-Merrill, US, hc, 1974. UK paperback reprint: Panther, 1975; US pb: Pinnacle, 1978.