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 legal, businesslike basis by Samuel Carboy, the financier who dominates the book. Staking his fortune on his faith in England and the Duke of Wellington, Sam Carboy strides into the London Stock Exchange on the day of the Battle of Waterloo and buys while everyone is selling. When word of Napoleon [Bonaparte's] defeat at last reaches London, prices rise again, and Carboy uses the profits of his day's speculation to build one of the greatest industrial empires in England. He expels his ornamental partner, George Grace, from the firm of Grace and Carboy and becomes a moving spirit of England's rapid economic expansion.

Mr. Costain traces the varied fates of the Graces and Carboys down to the formation of a new firm of Grace and Carboy by the great-grandsons of the original partners. In the meanwhile he has taken long looks at fashions in clothes throughout the Victorian period, the slang and manners of different decades, the movements for reform of the early abuses of industrialism, and the gradual improvement of social conditions. (p. 1)

Toward the end Mr. Costain plots some ingenious surprises for his readers. He introduces a weird set of villains, handles them with great adroitness and deadpan humor, and writes in his best vein in the long, slow but never dull dénouement of the book.

He is not at his best all through, however. The writing is often flat and flavorless. In his determination not to produce another adventure novel he deliberately blunts the points of action. Excitements are whipped up and come to nothing. Characters in whom the reader is just growing interested die off suddenly and implausibly, or vanish from the scene for twenty-five years. Many others are never seen; they are known only as shadowy references. Stylistically, the conscious or unconscious imitation of the manner of [Charles] Dickens never quite comes off. Coincidence—as Mr. Costain freely admits in some awkward asides to the reader—sometimes has its arm pulled nearly out of joint.

Nevertheless, Mr. Costain's very large following is not going to feel cheated. There is romance, history and color enough in this novel to satisfy a wide variety of tastes. (p. 11)