Cressida's First Lover by Jack Lindsay (1932)

I wasn't expecting a great deal of this and was pleasantly surprised. Lindsay was the son of the more famous Norman, and had a long career of 60 years or so where he never quite reached notability in the broader sense. This, his first novel, is a strange amalgam of the tone of a 30s romp and the setting of ancient Greece. Cressida is concerned that her life is going by and no lover is presenting himself. Caught while entering a tryst with a sentry, her sailor captors whisk her off into adventure. She kills their leader, roams a foreign land, meets and beguiles a young prince, amuses herself intriguing with his grotesque father, makes jealous a prospective princess and her interfering mother, fascinates an oily advisor who plans a revolt, and escapes when everything gets a little too hot! All the while, of course, manipulating like mad to keep everybody on side. Some of her inventions and twists on a sixpence are lovely. Lindsay makes this, with elegant, well-modulated prose, a pleasure, if a slightly guilty one. I shall be interested to see whether he returns to comedy in subsequent novels - he's good at it. There are one or two moments where the prose loses control and becomes efflorescent, but on the whole this is a joy. The stuff of which TV adaptations could easily be made.