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  • Serial Killer - Talk about the Lady's Gambit.

    Or not

It can be understood as a last stroke of luck, an irony of fate or

a bitter victory

after decades of oblivion.

Be that as it may, the figure of the writer Walter Tevis (San Francisco, 1928-New York, 1984) has regained the place that he should never have lost thanks to the huge success

of Lady's Gambit

, the Netflix miniseries that tells the troubled life of Beth Harmon and has caused an unusual fever for chess.The literary original on which this adaptation is based, as reliable as

Superficial returns to Spanish bookstores at the hands of Alfaguara, which brings the head of novels such as

The hustler

,

The color of money

or

The man who fell to Earth

Starring characters as intelligent as they are misfits, strangers to themselves who cling to their addictions to stay afloat or succumb like the captain who refuses to abandon ship. Life and literature were part of the same plane of reality in the The case of Tevis, who used his novels and stories as a slightly distorted mirror in which to reflect his obsessions.

His characters were much more than pawns on an empty board.

Thus, his books can be understood as not disguised autobiographies in which billiards, gambling, alcohol, chess or a suicidal robot speak of their own life drives and experiences.

Tevis was not an orphan like Beth Harmon

But he felt a similar abandonment: when he was 9 years old, his parents admitted him to a children's hospital where he spent about a year in bed, suffering from rheumatic fever and a strange heart condition.

There he took his three doses of narcotics every day, the first and most dangerous of his addictions.

When he was discharged, he received a letter from his parents with a train ticket to Lexington, Kentucky, where they had moved in his absence.

He crossed the country to reach deep America, a place where, as he confessed years later, he felt "like a being from outer space," like the alien with humanoid features Thomas Jerome Newton in

The man who fell to earth

, later played by David Bowie in the Nicolas Roeg-directed film, Tevis found another game in which to pour out his frustrations as a teenager: billiards.

He played in the billiard halls of Lexington, during his training as a corporal in the US Navy and in Okinawa, where

He was stationed during WWII

.

There he witnessed and played games in which there was a lot of money at stake, the best possible learning to create a character like Eddie Felson, which would give him his first great success as a writer.

The hustler

, published in 1959, and its exemplary film adaptation by Robert Rossen, immortalized Paul Newman as that kind of disarming grin and fatalistic aura, faced with the caroms on the rug and his own ghosts. Tevis's creative stream dried up as his alcoholism became chronic, and the writer ended up taking refuge in his English literature and creative writing classes at Ohio University.

As revealed in an interview with the

New York Times

, approached writing with the same feverish state as a gambler on a winning streak: sessions of 15 or 20 hours in front of the typewriter alternated with blank months or years, drowned in bourbon and the smoke of four packets of cigarettes a day. In the last years of his life, sober and confident, he chained four books in which he alternated forays into the most stark and philosophical science fiction (

Mockingbird

and the short stories of

Steps of the sun

, unpublished in Spanish) with realistic novels in which his ability to describe shone, such as

Lady's gambit

and

The color of money

.

The continuation of

The hustler

, which we now only remember from Scorsese's movie, was the epitaph of Walter Tevis, who

died at age 56 of lung cancer

.

Now, the phenomenon created around

Lady's gambit

It is the final victory of a guy who defined his work like this: "In one way or another I am obsessed with the struggle between winning and losing."

Checkmate.

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