Tumultuous Tarradiddle

THE KING LIVETH -- Jeffery Farnol -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

One pitch-black night in the early 19003 a visiting Briton went sight-seeing along Manhattan's slummy Hudson River, stumbled on an authentic bit of Americana -- a wounded gangster. The Briton was Jeffery Farnol, future romantic novelist, then in his 20s. To his "dingy, rat-haunted studio" in Hell's Kitchen, Farnol lugged the bleeding man, who soon recovered. Grateful mobsters, who included Gyp the Blood, Lefty Louie, Whitey Lewis and Dago Frank, gave young Farnol money, initiated him into the profitable practice of repeating for Tammany Hall during elections. "Dear me, yes," said Farnol later, "we used to vote ever so many times, changing our coats and going in time and time again." Young Farnol was quite touched by such underworldliness.

"If you scratch deep enough," he said, "you'll always find true worth. Several of the gang have gone to the chair since, but they were good fellows."*

In 1910 British Publishers Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. brought out Farnol's first novel, The Broad Highway. Though conceived in Hell's Kitchen, the book was a robustly romantic novel laid in 18th-Century England. Soon sales ran into the thousands, have since reached nearly a million copies. Overnight, Novelist Farnol found himself as famous as his old friend Gyp the Blood.

Bug-Eyed Boys and Buccaneers.

For 34 years Jeffery Farnol continued to toss off plays, short stories, romantic period novels (The Amateur Gentleman, Beltane the Smith, Martin Conisby's Vengeance, Black Bartelmy's Treasure], A generation of bug-eyed British boyhood wolfed his cloak-&-dagger yarns about buccaneers, outlaws, bravos, muscular blacksmiths, rebels, soldiers, dandies, heroes with names like Sir Marmaduke Vane-Temperly and heroines like Lady Herminia Barrasdaile. Even Author Farnol, who is chubby and nearsighted, tried to live up to his characters. He boxed vigorously, amassed a collection of old swords and armor. What the world really needed, he said, was heroes.

The King Liveth is Author Farnol's 28th novel, a tumultuous tarradiddle laid in 9th-Century England. Its hero is King Alfred, who stood off the invading Danes with Churchillian resolution. The story tells how Earl Ranulf, a sturdy Saxon with a passion for Latin literature, woos and wins the Lady Morwenna -- whose "shag of windblown, red-gold hair" was fatally attractive to the Danes. Ranulf and Morwenna help King Alfred collect an army of bone-cracking Saxons, finally crush Guthrum the Viking at the great battle of Ethandune, making England "a bulwark 'gainst Tyranny and sure refuge for all distressed folk."

Sample: "'Ha, my lords,' [Leofric] cried, 'ye heard the vaunt of this foul clapperclaw rogue? . . . Heed not the boy, but for this man, this threadbare lurcher o' thickets, look on him and behold a very liar! So now to prove our love for Earl Ranulf and loyalty to Royal Alfred, let us end such traitorous dog -- thus!' And, rising in his stirrups, Leofric made to hurl his spear . . . but in that moment Morwenna screamed, very womanly, yet rode between this deadly spear-point and Ranulf, shielding him with her own body . . . boldly as any man though, being indeed all woman, she screamed full-throated again and yet again. . . ."

Last week, in his south-coast home at Eastbourne, England, 66-year-old Author Farnol was at work on Novel No. 29. Said he: "It will be a sentimental romance -- a pre-infernal-internal-combustion-engine romance about beautiful women in bustles."

* In 1912 the same gang murdered Gambler Herman Rosenthal, precipitated one of Manhattan's most sensational political scandals -- the Becker Case.

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