The Colonel's Campaign

COROMANDEL! (347 pp.)--John Masters--Viking ($3.95).

John Masters, 40, is an erect, ruddy-faced, Calcutta-born ex-army officer who applies staff college discipline to the writing of successful historical romances. He decided to turn author seven years ago, having never written anything but operation orders and situation reports, but before writing a single novel he drew up a strategic master plan listing 35 suitable topics from Britain's 300-year experience in India. He assigned himself the task of knocking off these topics at the rate of a book a year. The first four novels, schemed out in advance with Montgomery-like thoroughness and executed at his electric typewriter with Patton-style speed, swept triumphantly through U.S. bookstores, two of them through book clubs as well, bypassing all critical strongpoints. Masters' books have sold more than 1,000,000 copies, including paperbacks; last year's best-selling Bhowani Junction was bought by Hollywood for more than $100,000. This week, with his fifth book, Masters launches another spring offensive right on schedule.

Frontier to New York. Schooled at Sandhurst, Jack Masters became a British career officer and served in India as four generations of his family had served before him. In 14 years he chivvied the North-West Frontier tribesmen, dressed nightly for dinner, bagged his regulation tiger, and otherwise upheld the Kipling tradition of imperial soldiering. "Probably as close as you'll get to the perfect infantry officer," recalls a fellow campaigner. As a lieutenant colonel in World War II, Masters led a brigade of the famed Wingate force 200 miles behind enemy lines in Burma. Though it won him a D.S.O., Masters admits that he did not ask for the assignment. "I am a professional," he says. "I never volunteer."

After the British quit India in 1948, Masters decided to move to the U.S. and cast about for a new career. He first thought of running tours from the U.S. to the Himalayas--$2,950 per person for a 40-day Masters-minded trip. There were few prospective customers. Then a magazine writer heard him hold forth over a cocktail on America's false, Hollywoodsy picture of India, told Masters he ought to write about it some day.

A direct and literal man, Masters went straight to his hotel, typed eight pages and sold the article to the Atlantic. He brought his wife and two children over from England and settled down at New City, 30 miles north of Manhattan. "I applied what I had learned at staff college, the ability to think. I first decided what my objectives were: to tell the story of conflict in the army mutiny of 1857, and what India was like in those days, and on the second level--all my stories must have a second level, or the result is shallow--to show that hatred breeds hatred. To reach these objectives I made a plan, just like any other plan. Just as I would do if my objective was to take a certain hill by dawn on Sept. 19."

Result: Nightrunners of Bengal, a thriller grabbed by the Literary Guild and later bought by the movies.

Masters gets up daily at 7:10, gets the children's breakfast, starts writing at 8:30. Tacked above his desk, alongside a schedule showing the dates that the kids will be home on vacation, is a tightly scribbled chart of some 15 characters for his next novel. He types out his first draft at the rate of 11,000 words a day. Bhowani Junction took ten days. After checking and polishing the first manuscript, which may take two or three months, he dictates a second and final draft to his wife at the rate of 3,000 words an hour.

Golden Fleece to Giants. In contrast with Bhowani Junction, which told a tense and tragic story of half-caste Anglo-Indians emotionally and socially stranded in 1946 on the eve of Britain's withdrawal from India, Coromandel! is a wild, winy tale of one of the first British freebooters to arrive in India 300 years ago. A poaching, knifing, rutting fugitive from English law, Jason Savage leaps ashore on India's pearl coast with a dubious old map in his pocket and greed and wonder in his eyes. After falling in love with a dusky temple harlot and growing as rich as a maharaja, he escapes a massacre only by covering himself with ashes and stalking naked through the mob as a holy man.

Picking up a Portuguese girl, he pursues his map-promised treasure past wazirs, footpads, moguls and monks to a snowy Himalayan peak, where it finally flashes on him that the treasure, the dream, the Golden Fleece or whatever, "is inside you rather than at the end of any road or map." Coromandel! is a rich, nicely calculated mixture of sex, gore and preposterous adventure and, as the Literary Guild choice for April, is another sure big seller.

Some of Author Masters' plots and characters may be shallow, but his backgrounds and situations are stunningly authentic. His narrative prose is swift and workmanlike. If Author Masters acknowledges any master outside military manuals, it is Kipling. He thinks it is a waste of time to read outsiders' books about India. Of E. M. Forster's famed A Passage to India he snorts: "Bloomsbury!"

Though Masters is a railway buff and likes to spend summers camping and climbing, his professional discipline sets stern limits on his enthusiasms. His greatest fervor nowadays is for his adopted country. This year, besides polishing up the first volume of his autobiography for fall publication, he has turned out a short novel with a U.S. setting about the passing of the steam locomotive (second level: the decline of craftsmanship). "It is America that has enabled me to write," he says. "I don't feel that I could write anywhere but here. Here I lost my self-consciousness." He has discovered baseball. Just about the biggest party the Masters family ever threw at their modest red farmhouse outside New City occurred last fall. The printed postcards announced the celebration of two family triumphs--Jack Masters' naturalization as a U.S. citizen and the Giants' World Series victory.

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