Novel Historical

THE LADY FOR RANSOM (274 pp.)] -- Alfred Duggan -- Coward-McCann ($3.50).

As a writer of historical novels, Englishman Alfred Duggan (The Little Emperors) is out of step with most of the others in his business; he 1) follows history, instead of twisting it to fit his story; 2) is steeped in his subject but does not smell of the library; and 3) keeps sex in its place. Duggan's penalty is that his novels have scant chance to become U.S. bestsellers. His satisfaction on the other hand, can be that he is writing some of the best historicals to be had nowadays--historical which are also good novels.

Duggan's Lady for Ransom is told in the first person by an 11th century soldier-turned-monk who never raises his voice. In a Byzantine Empire setting in which rape and pillage were as common as piety, Author Duggan does not muster enough sex-and-sadism scenes to outfit a single chapter of many historicals. He simply tells a fine story full of color and action, informed with a sense of history as pervasive as it is unobtrusive. Professors trying to explain how the Turks were able to wallop the Christian armies of Byzantium could do much worse than assign The Lady for Ransom.

Byzantine Deceit. Like a lot of Frankish knights of the day,11th century Roussel de Balliol offered his sword for hire--and even then, before the Crusades, the steadiest work around was fighting the infidel. When Roussel and his troop of 300 mailed warriors got a chance to hire out to the Emperor of Byzantium to fight the Turks, he jumped at the chance. Out in Asia Minor, at the very frontiers of the Christian world, there were chances which a mercenary might never have in Europe.

Not only would Roussel be paid in gold for an honest day's slaughter. There was always the chance that he could hack away a chunk of territory from the Turk and rule it himself under the Emperor. Roussel's wife Matilda, a forceful battle-ax from Lombardy, endorsed the idea. Like most mothers, she was thinking of her children's future and her own too, and there was not much future with a hus band who fought by the day.

Things went reasonably well for a while, but soon Roussel discovered that Byzan tine Empire politics were veined with in trigue and deceit. When Emperor Ro-manus Diogenes and his huge force of 60,000 men were beaten by treachery at Manzikert in 1071, confusion became the real ruler of the Empire. Emperors were made and unmade overnight, and an honest free-lance soldier scarcely knew his employer from one battle to the next. Roussel tried desperately to keep on the winning side, and for a time it seemed that his chance for a personal domain might come. But when, in the blazing Asiatic heat, he was himself defeated by the Turks, his spirit faded. When he was poisoned by a disgruntled court politician, no one was surprised. Matilda did not even weep; she took herself to a nunnery.

Orderly Confusion. Author Duggan tells his tale with a fine authority that loses nothing from being quiet. His battle scenes are the more exciting because he knows how to describe confusion in orderly language. And always he writes as a man of the times he describes.

The moral and political decay of the Byzantine Empire spreads like a cancer as his story progresses, but Duggan is moved neither to sentimental sermons nor to tedious explanations borrowed from some textbook. He knows, and makes the reader know, that after all. he writes of a day in which "if the officers are killed the men retire, in good order, towards the nearest wine-casks."

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