Chessmen of Mars (John Carter #05) – Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922)

There is a game on Mars similar to chess – very similar save that it is played on a board of a hundred squares with ornate pieces. The Martians call it jetan, and it is as old as the civilisation of Barsoom.

But in the Martian city of Manator jetan is no game. The chiefs of Manator play with living pieces – criminals, slaves or warriors eager for fame – and the opposing chessmen duel to the death for possession of their squares.

The chiefs of Manator play for great stakes, but the most closely fought contest in the huge arena was that in which the prize was Tara, Princess of Helium and daughter of the Warlord of Mars – a prisoner and slave in Manator.

Blurb from the 1973 NEL paperback edition

Despite throwing another coat of paint over the same repetitive plotline Burroughs manages to get away with it rather well and with a return to form, as this is the best in the series since ‘A Princess of Mars‘
We return to the introductory prologue structure where Burroughs himself is alone late at night and receives a visitor, John Carter, who has discovered how to transport his clothes to Earth with him for a change and appears fully clad in the harness and trappings of a Martian jeddak.
Seeing a chess set in the author’s room, Carter tells Burroughs of Jetan, the Martian game of chess, which is played on a ten by ten board of orange and black squares, which leads to the tale of Tara of Helium, Carter’s daughter.
Tara is betrothed to one of her dad’s mates, as is the custom on Mars, and at a Royal function in Helium, is a bit miffed that her fiance seems to be spending far too much time with another woman, when he is expected to be taking the first dance with her. She then gets into a conversation with Gahan, Prince of Gathol, who invites her to dance. Seeing her intended still in no hurry to sweep her off her feet, she has a quick whirl around the floor with him after which (he seems like a man who doesn’t waste his time) he announces that he has a long felt want, and plights his troth. This annoys Tara, who gives him the rough edge of her tongue and flounces off. She gets even more vexed when she discovers that Gahan has asked John Carter for her hand in marriage. Fuming, she jumps into her flyer and sets off for a quick jaunt around the Martian deserts, unaware of a great storm approaching.
She gets lost and finds herself a prisoner of the Kaldanes (one of Burroughs’ most memorable creations), a strange race of spiderlike creatures who use specially bred headless humans as vehicles, and for food. The Kaldanes can link to the human nervous system in the neck and control the body.
She escapes the Kaldanes with the aid of Ghek, a renegade Kaldane, and Gahan of Gathol, who was part of a search party looking for Tara, and is now in disguise as the mercenary Turan.
They end up in the city of Manator, where human slaves and warriors are employed in a giant live game of Jetan, where the pieces occupying the same square have to fight to the death. (They are also very big on taxidermy, these Manatorians. Stuffed dead warriors everywhere. )
Gahan has to fight in the public Jetan game to save Tara from becoming the prize of another.
Marvellous stuff.
Elston B Sweet, A prisoner in Leavensworth prison, Kansas, having read the serialisation in Argosy All Story Weekly in 1922, was inspired to make a Jetan set, and the game became popular in the prison. He wrote to Burroughs who wrote back to congratulate Mr Sweet on having created the first ever Jetan set (on Earth anyway).
Burroughs subsequently included the rules for Jetan in an appendix to the published novel.