Over the past thirteen years Thomas B. Costain has been writing books whose sales are reckoned in the millions. His earlier novels are crowded with bold adventurers and desirable slave girls who meet one another in exotic places. Lately Mr. Costain has turned to non-fiction and he has been rendering the pageantry of English history with something of the dash and color that he puts into his novels. Now, back with fiction again, he has attempted to combine the two genres in a novel of family destinies in nineteenth century England, "The Tontine," big in size and scope, jam-packed with characters, covering four generations and the better part of the nineteenth century….

Mr. Costain's novel centers upon the participants in the Waterloo Tontine (a fictional one), founded by a gangster named Hark Chaffery for his own profit, but quickly taken out of his hands and placed on a...