Yerby's plot construction reveals artistic weakness. Despite his skillful tangling and untangling of exciting narratives which mesmerize even many sophisticated readers, Yerby too often depends on contrived endings. Even more dangerously for a spinner of thrillers, he frequently snarls his plots with digressive essays on customs, language, philosophy, and history.

Such strengths and weaknesses are the trademark of an entertainer…. Surprisingly, however, Yerby's costume novels exhibit another dimension, disregarded by the readers who lament his failure to write an historical novel and by the others who condemn his refusal to write an overtly polemical treatise on the plight of the American Negro. Ideas—bitter ironies, caustic debunkings, painful gropings for meaning—writhe behind the soap-opera facade of his fiction.

Significantly, Frank Yerby, a Georgia-born Negro exile from America, has concentrated on the theme of the outcast who, as in existentialist literature, pits his will against a hostile universe...