Rummage in the Attic

SON OF A HUNDRED KINGS (465 pp.)--Thomas B. Costain--Doubleday ($3).

Cloak & dagger romance and bustles-and-bows nostalgia both have their merits--and faithful droves of customers. It is a lucky author who can straddle the two fields without coming a cropper. In Author Thomas Bertram Costain's case, a firm hand with historical fiction (The Black Rose, The Moneyman) has been no guarantee of success with the gentler, slower-moving Gay Nineties period piece.

Son of a Hundred Kings (for the background of which 65-year-old Author Costain rummaged through the attic of his own Canadian youth) jogs along on the track of a mild mystery: Who are Hero Ludar Prentice's father & mother? In 1890, Ludar, age 6, arrives alone in Balfour, Canada from England, wearing a sign on his back: "This is Ludar Prentice. He has no money. He is going to his father Vivien Prentice at Balfour, Ontario, Canada. Be kind to him." Since Ludar's father, himself a new arrival from England, has just committed suicide, and since Ludar can give only the vaguest information about his background, a kindly carpenter takes him in and the townsfolk take up a collection.

Ludar's growing up is the old story of the sensitive, struggling youngster who wants to be a writer. He falls into first-love and writes his first novel. To fill up the picture, Author Costain offers such familiar turn-of-the-century sideshows as a feud between the sons of Balfour's leading family, the sight of the first car on the town's streets, a runaway cutter, balls, belles and sleighbells. None of these trappings quite disguises the fact that Hero Ludar is as dim as a 50-year-old memory and that Son of a Hundred Kings offers, after all, a pretty flat solution of the mystery of Ludar's parentage. A lot of Literary Guild members will be praying for Costain to get back to cloaks & daggers.

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