Knight's Gambit (Vintage International)

This book is a collection of five short stories and one novella, all involving mysteries unraveled by Gavin Stevens, the county attorney of Yoknapatawpha County. The stories follow Gavin Stevens's life and career, from his first criminal trial right out of law school in the story Tomorrow to his late-in-life marriage in Knight's Gambit.With one exception, the stories in this collection are lighter fare than most of Faulkner's works. The exception is Tomorrow which is, by far, the best story in this book and ranks with the finest of Faulkner's fiction. Unlike most of the stories, it is not a murder mystery. Rather, Gavin Stevens tries to understand the reasons behind the lone hold-out juror's refusal to vote to acquit a defendant. Stevens's investigation takes him forty miles and back where he interviews the juror's neighbors and former employer. He pieces together twenty years of the juror's heartbreaking life story which he sums up in the phrase "the lowly and the invincible of the earth - to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."Hand Upon the Waters is another fine story, not because of the mystery but because of the character of the murder victim. When the story opens, Lonnie Grinnup is already dead. The reader learns about him through the reactions of the community and the recollections of Gavin Stevens. Lonnie was the last of his family and was feeble-minded. He lived in a fortified canvas tent beside a river and showed up at neighbors' houses when nights got too cold. Like the biblical parable of the widow who gave her last coin to help people poorer than herself, Lonnie used all that God gave him. He took in a deaf and mentally-disabled orphan whom no one else wanted and raised him as his son or little brother. I desperately wanted the story to end in justice and retribution.In the title novella, Gavin Stevens tries to stay one step ahead of someone who is planning a murder. The novella involves a chess motif of a knight double-checking a queen and a castle. Figuring out the chess parallel turned out to be more of a challenge than the mystery itself.Faulkner was not a lawyer and his courtroom passages aren't always convincing. Nonetheless, there is much human appeal to these stories. There is some evidence that Faulkner based the character of Gavin Stevens on himself, particularly in regard to Gavin's understated romance in Knight's Gambit. Those who are familiar with Faulkner's biography may recognize Estelle Faulkner in Mrs. Harriss of Knight's Gambit.

I wish I could say I was more interested and invested in these stories, but the truth of the matter is that some were hits and some were misses in my estimation. From reading the reviews of this collection, it seems that readers and reviewers were all over the board on which ones were the most memorable or best and which ones they did not care for. It seems like many reviewers enjoyed “Tomorrow” and I thought it a pretty solid story and I remember seeing the film with Robert Duvall years ago. I suppose there are moments in all these stories of Faulkner’s genius, but then there are some moments that are a tad too convoluted that stalls the momentum.I believe Faulkner is in best form when he is using stream of consciousness and in longer form with novels. I realize the Faulkner is an acquired read, and I’ve read some of his novels and enjoyed them despite their complicated form, style and technique (“As I Lay Dying is an example). While these stories in Knight’s Gambit are billed as mystery and there some elements of mystery as Gavin Stevens comes in to investigate, I do not think these would be considered mysteries in the traditional sense. However, there are elements of Stevens coming and unpacking or unearthing the whys of the crime. So, I think that at many points the why becomes a more prominent issue than who of these stories. There is also definitely a human element invoked within the stories that I thought was a nice touch, as evidenced in the aforementioned “Tomorrow” and also in the story “Monk.” I also enjoyed the opening story “Smoke” and thought that this one had an effective conclusion and unraveling of events.Overall, not bad, but I think I prefer some of Faulkner’s other works a little more.

The best thing about these stories is the central character, the county attorney Gavin Stevens. He is a whimsical creature with wild white hair (white even in his younger days). He wears a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard on his watch chain. He's been translating the Old Testament into Greek for twenty years. And he has unaccountable, lightening-like insights into what people are up to, and why.In these stories, he saves the innocent from the hangman, foils murderous intentions, unmasks clever killers, and sets the record straight on cases gone wrong. His young wide-eyed nephew records Uncle Gavin's amazing feats of deduction and detection.I enjoyed the first few stories the most. But eventually I got bogged down in Faulkner's convoluted sentences, minute descriptions, and confusing narrative style. The last story, Knight's Gambit, was particularly rich in capricious literary capers.I will never be a Faulkner fan. But several of theses stories are quite engaging, and the county lawyer is a charming character, so I'm glad I got the book.

Gavin Stevens, a Harvard phi beta kappa Southern lawyer who knows all the folk by name and custom, winds his way with great patience, wisdom, and insight through six mysteries in the hardscrabble South. The last story, from which the book gets its title, is the longest, takes a while to get moving, and can be confusing, but it delivers with unexpected poignancy.The mysteries are well structured, draped in detail and context, and evocative of a culture Faulkner reveled in writing about. As might be expected from Faulkner, some of the characters are dimwitted but not necessarily unsympathetic. Some of his, Faulkner's I mean, writing mannerisms can be irritating and distracting, but the stories are much clearer and straightforward than, for example, his, Faulkner's that is, The Sound and the Fury. If you can put up with some long winded sentences, bewildering side trips, and frequent explanations of who or what a pronoun is referring to (such as in the preceding sentence of this review), you'll get some enjoyable mystery stories.

I don't know whether the Great American Novel is still sought after. If it is, my money, for what it's worth, is on "Light in August" in which Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, roundly rejected on its first appearance by a dozen US publishers and eventually submitted to editing, for sale in "Sartoris" (in "Flags in the Dust", fortunately, the twenty-first century can read what he seems to have been submitting) accommodates something not far short of epic scale. There have been times, too, when I found even that book unreadable, but these days not so much, or so often. What we have here is a post-World War II collection - five pretty much unremarkable detective stories featuring Gavin Stevens - but a figure very far from the later Gavin Stevens of "Requiem for a Nun" - and a sixth, "Knight's Gambit", much longer, also featuring Gavin Stevens ( but here a much rounder and fully Faulknerian figure) which is in a completely different league. The five stories which together take up rather less space than the whole of the title story are little more than professional exercises in the genre, mostly designed to reveal their point in the last page or two, carefully plotted, economical, and - though Yoknapatawpha provides local colour (and no more)- could have been set anywhere. B movie sketches, more or less, with the author fully in charge, practicing the tricks of the trade, and sticking to the conventions of literary magazine prose. They don't even read like Faulkner. "Knight's Gambit" reads as though it began as a similar exercise, similarly plotted to take up no more than a single night's events and their aftermath, with a patent twist of an ending. But somehow Yoknapatawpha conquers it, and it ramges over more than forty years of the varying paces of the County's histories, and from Argentina to Heidelberg, the First World War in which Faulkner joined the RAF in Canada and the Second, into which Stevens, who is part of the US draft administration for Mississippi is able to despatch the plotter of the murder he has foiled while retranslating the New Testament into the original Greek, and meditating over chess with his nephew, whose vision of the narrative shapes the story. Faulkner's prose is back, too. and close to its best - best dealt with, as always, by listening as much as reading, and by giving it time. The story's apparent meandering doesn't in any way prevent a high-octane nocturnal climax which has to unwind at length, and Faulkner allows it to. But the background by this time - with both sides of the conflict enlisted in World War II- is too powerful for Gavin Stevens to survive as a Faulknerian creation to the end. A very reluctant, and very careful editor might have improved it, a bit. But by that time no-one was going to impose one on the author. Even so, most of it seems to be major Faulkner, and worth nearly every word.