The Nine Tiger Man

JOHN BARKHAM, NEW YORK WORLD - A delicious tale of low behaviour in high places; with particular attention to the activities of an irresistible and gifted East Indian Prince who takes his own form of revenge against the entire English Empire by inducting a bevy of highborn English females into the fine points of Oriental eroticism, proving that Debrett's Peerage is no match at all for the Karma Sutra . . . TIME - Wildly funny. The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . When East meet West: in this witty satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the British India of the 1850's, where representatives of Victoria's England preside uneasily over the glittering remnants of the Moghul Empire. The Nine Tiger Man is a piquant tale of a Maharaja's heir, a Viscount's daughter and an uninhibited chambermaid who sampled one another's environments and were never the same again. The women first encounter the Rao Jagnabad, warrior and slayer of nine tigers, when he visits England on a diplomatic mission. Fierce and handsome in gold-embroidered brocades and magnificent jewels, he meets the prim and proper Hon. Florence at a ball. She is overwhelmed by his powerful masculinity and dreams of him to the exclusion of all else, to the intense irritation of her fianc . Her maid, Rosie, is also overwhelmed and samples the Rao for herself. Fate decrees that, some years later, the two women are marooned in a crumbling palace on a remote, jungly island during the Indian Mutiny. They find themselves in the sole custody of the Rao along with two dozen other Englishwomen. A razor-sharp satire on class and Empire, the outcome is surprising, even to Rosie. Lesley Blanch's only novel was written while in Rajasthan: "I had pulled a ligament in my leg and had to stay on an island in Jaipur. You could hear the leopards coughing at dusk in the far hills, and the parakeets flew around turning the sky green. One day I saw what I thought was a log, but it was a crocodile. I had heard the story of a group of English women being put on that island during the Mutiny and not daring to escape because of the crocodiles - they were just stuck there, with no news, and fearing the worst. From that I imagined the whole novel." DAILY TELEGRAPH - Panache, high spirits, faultless timing and uncontrollable fun.