The Royal Game

THE CHESS PLAYERS (533 pp.) -- Frances Parkinson Keyes -- Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.95).

The ultimate in barbiturate prose is the point at which tedium becomes coma, and perennially bestselling Author Keyes may have reached this point in The Chess Players. Her great sedative skill can be appreciated only when it is understood that her material, as such, is fascinating. The novel is set in New Orleans and Paris in the 1850s and '60s, contains an amorous princess, various spies and diplomats, a slave auctioneer, lovely Creole maidens, and splendidly uniformed military personnel. The hero is a brilliant, brooding fellow who becomes the world chess champion and then chucks it all for love of a faithless woman.

The author has not troubled herself to invent this chess master. Paul Morphy, the only world champion at chess the U.S. has produced, was born in New Orleans in 1837. At ten, he began beating the best players in Louisiana, and at 21 he had beaten the best in the world. A year later he abandoned chess, possibly because the girl he hoped to marry scorned the game. Morphy, as Novelist Keyes resurrects him, is a colorless weakling, whose intellect, despite the fact that everyone thinks him brilliant, is an unfavorable blend of compoop and nincompoop.

As Morphy's shade wavers through a series of chess triumphs (actual) and a career as a Confederate agent in Paris (imagined), the reader notices a few things about the Keyes technique. There are no purple patches--only grey ones-- and there are no onstage sword fights or seductions. Novelist Keyes's strong point is research, and where Frank Yerby or Taylor Caldwell might liven the soggy chapter by unhooking the heroine's bodice, Morphy's chronicler merely recreates a chess game. While it is open to question how much the author knows about chess, the royal game, it is clear that she is a master of Authors, the game of royalties.

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