Loved Queen’s Gambit?
Author has some sharp moves, like The Hustler
Quick, who wrote The Queen’s Gambit? Even though the 1983 novel — the basis for the hit Netflix miniseries — has recently become a paperback bestseller, the name of its author isn’t half as well known as it should be. Yet Walter Tevis, who died in 1984 at age 56, is more than a one-hit wonder.
Tevis’s first book, The Hustler (1959) is the classic novel about professional pool players, made into an equally classic film with Paul Newman as “Fast” Eddie Felson and Jackie Gleason as the dapper Minnesota Fats.
Published a quarter century later, Tevis’s final novel, The Color of Money, revisits the now middle-aged Felson as he cues up against a new, younger generation of pool players. Newman again starred in the film, which this time bore only the faintest resemblance to the novel.
But then, as Tevis admitted, he only wrote it for the money since his previous book — about a female chess player — never even reached a second printing during his lifetime. Today, a fine first edition of The Queen’s Gambit would cost you US$500 or more.
Born in 1928, Tevis was a sickly, unhappy child, confined for many months to a hospital bed and dosed with addictive phenobarbital because of rheumatic heart disease. This experience — and his sense of being unloved — scarred him for life.
Growing up in Louisville, Ky., Tevis regularly sought refuge in the local pool hall, so his early stories naturally concentrated on what he knew best. Once Hollywood optioned The Hustler, he used the cash to underwrite an MA in creative writing from the University of Iowa.
Afterward, Tevis settled with his wife and two children in Mexico, where he started to drink heavily while finishing his second novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth.
It, too, was made into a movie, starring David Bowie, whom Tevis thought perfectly cast, though he found the film overly artsy and confusing. His own writing is invariably clear, his prose tautly built on nouns and verbs.
Tevis published 19 short stories between 1954 and 1963, many of them clever “what if?” tales, sometimes ending with an ironic Twilight Zone twist. He could type one in an evening, revise it the next night and send it off. He never did any research.
Toward the end of the 1970s, his life changed dramatically. He got sober and became determined to relaunch his stalled literary career.
What came next was Mockingbird, a 1980 novel set in a decaying future where robots do all the work. No books have been published since 2189. Society’s mantras are “Don’t ask,
relax” and “quick sex is best.”
Like all his work, Mockingbird is obliquely autobiographical, a parable about freeing oneself from addiction and striving for self-realization. It is also a paean to literacy. As one character says, at a desperate moment, “Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”