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The Queen's Gambit is the first novel I've read in some time that I looked forward to cracking open in the evening to finish. Rather than simply wanting to get through it, I didn't want it to end. Published in 1983, the title has multiplied its Google searches in the last month by virtue of a successful . Walter Tevis is an author who'd been on my radar for a while though, with several science fiction novels, as well as The Hustler and its sequel The Color of Money. With The Queen's Gambit he explores artistry in sport again but focuses on a genius whose gender makes her journey so much more compelling. It is a great novel.

The story begins in the 1960s where eight-year-old Beth Harmon is interned at the Methuen Home in Mount Sterling, Kentucky when her mother is killed in an automobile accident. A smart but homely-looking and quiet child, Beth becomes a mascot of sorts to the tallest, most daring orphan in the home, a twelve-year-old black girl named Jolene. Assigned to clean the erasers in the basement, Beth observes the orphanage's janitor, Mr. Shaibel. She becomes fascinated by the game she sees the janitor playing on a milk crate and summons the courage to keep at him until he teaches her how to play chess.

Beth becomes addicted to the tranquilizers the orphanage plies the girls with. She becomes obsessed with chess, reading Modern Chess Openings illicitly in class and pressing her mentor to show her everything he knows about chess. Beth shows little interest in sportsmanlike conduct, bristling at having to resign games she's on her way to losing, playing to win and win all the time. Soon, Mr. Shaibel can no longer beat her. He invites a friend to their basement chess matches, a coach of the high school chess team. The coach gets permission for Beth to take a field trip to play his entire team. At the same time.

The surprising thing was how badly they played. In the very first games of her life she had understood more than they did. They left backward pawns all over the place, and their pieces were wide open for forks. A few of them tried crude mating attacks. She brushed those aside like flies. She moved briskly from board to board, her stomach calm and her hand steady. At each board it took only a second's glance to read the position and see what was called for. Her responses were quick, sure and deadly. Charles Levy was supposed to be the best of them; she had his pieces tied up beyond help in a dozen moves; in six more she mated him on the back rank with a knight-rook combination.

Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and her shoes squeaked as she moved down the rows of players. The room was silent; she felt her own presence centered in it, small and solid and in command. Outside, birds sang, but she did not hear them. Inside, some of the students stared at her. Boys came in from the hallway and lined up along the back to watch the homely girl from the orphanage at the edge of town who moved from player to player with the determined energy of a Caesar in the field, a Pavlova under the lights. There were about a dozen people watching. Some smirked and yawned, but others could feel the energy in the room, the presence of something that had never, in the long history of this tired old classroom, been felt there before.

The story follows Beth from that classroom triumph as she grows into a teenager, is adopted, enters chess tournaments to the surprise of everyone but herself, beats everyone to the surprise of everyone but herself, dances a very unhealthy tango with drugs and alcohol, loses her virginity, lands in Life magazine while in high school, travels abroad, consumes herself with chess and ultimately represents the United States in a tournament against the Russian grandmasters of the sport. Beth's ambition is nothing less than to become a professional woman and the best chessplayer in the world.

The Queen's Gambit is pure storytelling. Without window dressing or deviations, Walter Tevis introduces a goal for his orphaned protagonist and starts throwing obstacles in her way. Beth is not gifted with physical beauty or wealth. Her superintendent prefers she take her tranquilizers and give the adults as little trouble as possible. Her foster mother Mrs. Wheatley discourages chess at first as something girls don't do. Tournament officials stick her in the corner against the other women. Beth has more pitfalls open up under her than Indiana Jones. I was driven to continue reading to find out if she would get what she wanted.

Tevis' writing made a deep impression on me. I typically lose myself in a good story and completely ignore the way it's being told, but I couldn't help but appreciate how much detail that Tevis filled the page with while excluding descriptions or ideas or clever asides that didn't relate to the story. I forgot which decade it even takes place in, which is a quality I always admire. And I loved how non-judgmental an author he was, allowing Beth to experiment and make mistakes and evolve without lecturing the reader like the audience of an ABC Afterschool Special. He presents Beth with struggles that she will either overcome or won't. His prose is wildly vivid in its economy.

In January, Mrs. Wheatley called the school to say that Beth had a relapse of mono, and they went to Charleston. In February, it was Atlanta and a cold; in March, Miami and the flu. Sometimes Mrs. Wheatley talked to the Assistant Principal and sometimes to the Dean of Girls. No one questioned the excuses. It seemed likely that some of the students knew about her from out-of-town papers or something, but no one in authority said anything. Beth worked on her chess for three hours every evening between tournaments. She lost one game in Atlanta but still came in first and she stayed undefeated in the other two cities. She enjoyed flying with Mrs. Wheatley, who sometimes became comfortably buzzed by martinis on the planes. They talked and giggled together. Mrs. Wheatley said funny things about the stewardesses and their beautifully pressed jackets and bright, artificial make-up, or talked about how silly some of her neighbors in Lexington were. She was high-spirited and confidential and amusing, and Beth would laugh a long time and look out the window at the clouds below them and feel better than she had ever felt, even during those times at Methuen when she had saved up her green pills and taken five or six at once.

The Netflix mini-series is adapted by Scott Frank & Allan Scott, who together have 100 years of screenwriting credits. All seven episodes are directed by Frank, who wrote the screenplays for Dead Again and Little Man Tate and adapted the Elmore Leonard novels Get Shorty and Out of Sight to film. I don't know its development history but am delighted that rather than making a movie or TV series based on a cartoon or toy, Frank pulled this novel off a dusty bookshelf and told anyone who'd listen that a book about a female chess prodigy would make a great movie. The sublime Anya Taylor-Joy of The Witch and Emma was cast as Beth.