Doctor Cobb's Game

A brilliant, bewitching novel inspired by one of the twentieth century’s most infamous sex scandals

Michael Cobb is a skilled osteopath, a gifted painter, and a lover extraordinaire. In 1960s England, the good doctor makes a startling diagnosis: the nation is sick, fast approaching its demise, and the only hope for a cure is a sexual awakening so potent it reaches into the highest corridors of power. To put his plan in motion, Cobb indoctrinates a bevy of hip young Londoners in an intoxicating blend of ancient myths, occult beliefs, and erotic arts. His most promising student is Cecile Banner, a beautiful and beguiling temptress for whom Cobb has in mind a very special target: Richard Derwent, the minister of war.

The fallout from Doctor Cobb’s game reaches all the way across the Atlantic to upstate New York, where Norman Scholes, an investigator for a powerful American think tank, reads between the lines of the official British government report on the scandal. Was Cobb a Soviet spy? A master of black magic, as he sometimes claimed? Or, as the prosecutors accused, a pimp operating in a delirious time and place?

Based on the outrageous events of the Profumo affair, R. V. Cassill’s bestselling novel is an unforgettable story of a lust powerful enough to topple a nation.

“A daring, enormously sexy book on themes of occult power, leadership and carnal love.” —Newsweek

“A staggeringly complex meditation of irrationality, the forms it assumes, its energy for good and evil, its sources in biology and myth . . . his best book.” —The New York Times

“Besides his skill with characters, Cassill is remarkably adroit at capturing moods—domestic, supernatural, and, of course, psychosexual. I know of only two writers who rival him in this respect. Their names are D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer.” —The New York Times Book Review

“What sets the book apart is the extraordinary skill and imagination that the author lavishes upon the title figure, Doctor Michael Cobb.” —Time

R. V. Cassill (1919­–2002) was a prolific and award-winning author and a highly regarded writing teacher. Among his best-known works are the novels Clem Anderson and Doctor Cobb’s Game and the short stories “The Father” and “The Prize,” the latter of which won him an O. Henry Award. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Purdue University, and Brown University, Cassill taught many acclaimed authors, including Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. He founded the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in 1967 and after his retirement became the editor of TheNorton Anthology of Short Fiction, a position he held for nearly a quarter century.