Checkmate [Paperback]

J. Sheridan Le Fanu's lesser known novel, Checkmate, involves self-interest, dishonesty, deception, revenge, and murder. Sir Reginald Arden, worried by mortgages on Mortlake Hall, is arranging marriage of his daughter Alice, unbeknownst to her, to Lord Wynderbroke, a middle-aged, wealthy peer. Some time previously Sir Reginald had ostracized his fiery, proud, spendthrift son Richard, but nonetheless he temporarily recruits his son's efforts in disguising the family discord from Lord Wynderbroke. Richard sees advantages to himself if Alice marries Wynderbroke, and discredits Mr. Longcluse, a recently arrived wealthy gentleman that has been showing romantic interest in Alice. Meanwhile, we readers are puzzled by Mr. Longcluse's relationship with a French citizen, a Monsieur Lebas, who is unexpectedly murdered in a betting parlor. The plot is further complicated by a murder that occurred some twenty years previously. Harry, a brother of Sir Reginald, was robbed and murdered outside Mortlake Hall. And so goes the early chapters.

The atmosphere is not as dark and threatening as in Le Fanu's highly popular Uncle Silas, but early on there is a vague concern that something is not quite right. A gentleman of apparently good credentials is ultimately revealed to be a formidable, highly wicked man; his meticulous steps to achieve revenge are reminiscent of a carefully played game of chess. The solution to this Victorian mystery is perhaps a little farfetched as it involves rather fanciful surgical techniques practiced by an unethical Prussian doctor. Nonetheless, Checkmate makes good reading and I give it four stars.

Checkmate (1871) is a good example of the sensation novel, a genre popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. The Victorian public was accustom to Gothic tales involving adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. However, the sensation novels authored by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Le Fanu, and others were considered particularly shocking because these crimes take place not in fictionalized Gothic locales, but in familiar Victorian domestic settings.

As editor and owner of the Dublin University magazine, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's literary influence was substantial, but following his death in 1873 his works faded into obscurity. Fortunately for the modern reader, M. R. James, a scholar of medieval manuscripts and a writer of ghost stories himself, helped restored Le Fanu's reputation by editing and reprinting (in 1923) Le Fanu's Madam Crowl's Ghost and Other Stories. Today, Le Fanu's short stories and novels are all available in reprint editions. Some have become television screenplays. Sutton Publishing released a reprint edition of Checkmate in 2000.

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