Gavin Stevens

Gavin Stevens, the fifty-year-old (183) "County Attorney" (144), is the central character of all six of the stories in Knight's Gambit, where as an unofficial detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes he solves five crimes and - in the story "Knight's Gambit" - prevents one. He is much the best-educated character in the Yoknapatawpha fictions: Harvard graduate, Heidelberg Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa. During the First World War he served "three years as a stretcher-bearer in the French army" (154). This experience has left its mark: "shock of premature white hair" (147). Stevens is the chess playing master - a knight who is something of "a split personality" (147) and whose divided mind can cover two squares at once - whose intervention in a murder scheme results in at least two enlistments in the U.S. Army at the start of the Second World War, and two marriages, including his own long-deferred one to the woman only known as Mrs. Harriss. During the last part of Faulkner's career, Gavin is the character to whom the novelist returns most frequently; he appears in sixteen texts altogether.