Checkmate (Horler novel)

Checkmate adds an element of crime and adventure to that atmosphere, but the countless coincidences throughout the plot guarantee a thoroughly predictable happy ending, complete with a double wedding.

Apart from Jessie Stevens, it is Dick Delabrae, a society columnist for The Sun, and his friend Robert Wingate, who happens to be the nephew of Lady Wentworth, whose pearls the gang wants to steal.

Her first visit to the casino is a huge success: Not only does she win more than £1,500 at baccarat but she also makes the acquaintance of Lady Wentworth, who immediately takes a liking to the charming girl.

Lady Wentworth is lured to the Comtesse's villa with the prospect of seeing Mary again but after her arrival she is tied to a chair and, in a drug-induced frenzy, stabbed to death by José Santes, a "dope fiend".

When Mary Mallory wakes from her stupor some time later it is only to encounter the French police accusing her of murdering Lady Wentworth, whose body she discovers in the same room where she was lying unconscious.

The members of the gang are arrested near the Italian border, and the two couples — Dick and Jessie on the one hand, Robert and Mary on the other — return to England to get married.

In Checkmate it is described how railway passengers, before boarding their train, would grab the latest novel from the bookstall at Victoria Station in order to be able to indulge in some light reading during their journey.

Checkmate itself would have been such a novel: sensational, thrilling — a variation of the old "damsel in distress" motif —, romantic, sexy, with characters larger than life, with many complications during the plot but a clear-cut ending where good and virtuous behavior is rewarded and evil is punished.

Girls such as Jessie Stevens, on the other hand, know what is going on and enjoy life to the full but never do anything illegal or immoral, which implies that they do not indulge in pre-marital sex or recreational drugs.

At one point in the novel Robert Wingate explains to Mary Mallory that, "apart from the millionaires, the courtesans, the crooks, and the gamblers", the majority of visitors to Cannes are "émigrés and hivernants — people who leave England in order to escape paying taxes, and who are able to make a better show financially than they would in their own country" (Chapter XII).