Jim West On Chess: Chess in Rex Stout's "Gambit"

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Chess in Rex Stout's "Gambit"

Those of you who enjoy a good murder mystery, as well as chess, should consider getting hold of Rex Stout's Gambit which features the famous armchair detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin.

It is obvious to me that the Gambit Club is a fictionalized version of the Marshall Chess Club. This is Archie Goodwin giving directions on how to get there: Headed south on Sixth Avenue....I kept going, clear to Twelfth Street, turned left, stopped half way down the long block, and focused on a four-story brick building....A brass plate to the right of the door, nice and shiny, said Gambit Club.

Except for the fact that Sixth Avenue is now known as Avenue of the Americas, if Archie Goodwin had turned left on Tenth Street (instead of Twelfth Street) he would have arrived at the Marshall Chess Club!

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov