Bastard's Chronicle

BENJAMIN BLAKE -- Edison Marshall-Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

This week Edison Marshall, a ranking adventure serialist, moves into the field of the legitimate novel and gets the Literary Guild's accolade for March. Benjamin Blake has everything a best-seller needs: an alliterative title, a fat part for Tyrone Power when it reaches the films, and the ingredients of what critics like to call a rattling good yarn. It is set in the 18th Century, sauced with its political restiveness, and skillfully served up in a fake-archaic, first-person prose that has fibre enough to support a novel twice as serious.

The Power character, Ben, is a big, hot-blooded, black-haired Bristol bastard whose story is as old and formal as legend : the proud but-for-base-birth heir-to-the-manor who a) vows vengeance against his humiliators, b) wanders and adventures far, c) returns rich, to deal with friends and foes according to their deserts.

Chief humiliator is Uncle Arthur Blake, Squire of Breetholm Manor, who takes his elder brother's by-blow into service, spends a futile year trying to break his spirit. Benjamin beats him to a pulp, boards a Boston ship, is marooned for seven years on a South Pacific paradise.

There he sets up housekeeping with an island mate (throughout the tale Ben knocks the women over like duckpins and rather enjoys saying so) and becomes something of a chieftain. By the time he leaves, he has picked up pearls which, in London, net him all the King's Pardoning he needs, and thousands of pounds sterling into the bargain. The ending is technically happy but, like the treatment throughout, perceptibly tougher and more intelligent than such stories generally bother to be. Indeed Benjamin Blake turns out to be not merely an engaging adventure piece but an articulate tract against feudalism, both sexual and social.

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