As someone who enjoy's chess, I was wondering if people can recommend any good books (or movies) that involve chess as an important part of the plot?

Book: I can think of "The Eight" by Katharine Neville.

Movie: I can only think of one, now... The Luzhin Defense - with John Turturro.

Although it's very old and may be hard to get hold of "The Chess Players" by Francis Parkinson Keyes is very good. It's based on the life of Paul Morphy.

Does WarGames count? How about Searching for Bobby Fisher.

revolver from guy richy involves chess, but not in a literal way, as in many films.
The shawshank redemption
star wars 
harry potter

Game Over! The Story of Kasparov vs Deep Blue '97

bastiaan: while they all contain scenes with chess, I was looking more for books or movies where the subject of chess is the main plot point. .5 points ;)

chessplayer11: Searching for bobby fischer  +1 Good one, I forgot about that one.

aabbccdd: Never heard of it, but I'll look for it (um, is that a book or movie?) +1

Chawill: Thanks, I'll look for that too +1

• Chess Fever was a hilarious old Russian short film. A bride nearly gets mad because her betrothed (played by the russian comidian Pudovkin) has more interest in chess than in her (and everybody around her likewise). The grandmaster tournament Moscow 1925 plays an important part in the plot. The world champion in this movie is played by J.R.Capablanca.
• Fools Mate is a French short by Claude Chabrol which has nothing to do with chess at all. The title is just a metapher on the tricking and cheating going on.
• Knight Moves (1992) A who's killing everyone thriller
• Night Moves, a 1975 Classic Detective movie not to be confused with the more recent Knight Moves, this movie featured Melanie Griffith and Gene Hackman as a detective who uses the famous game where the GM missed the sacrifice of his queen to mate with three little "Knight moves" to illustrate how he feels he is overlooking something important to solve a murder.
• Searching For Bobby Fischer (1993) Notice in the scene where Josh is playing the guy at the Manhatten Chess Club (the Gummy Bear guy) and notice what colour he has when the game begins. Then notice what colour the guy is playing when he tips over his king and resigns.
• Fresh (recent)
• Dangerous Moves (Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1985?)
• Return From the Ashes (1962?)
• The Seventh Seal (1959?).
• The Great Chess Movie with an interview with Igor Ivanov.
• Born American It was really a very bad movie, 3 young Americans decide to test the security on the Finnish-Soviet border, get caught and thrown in a gulag, in the gulag they find that the prisoner society is run by chess games, with human pieces, that decide who is the strongest.
• Long Live the Queen A Dutch childrens' movie, Esme Lammers. Tiba Tossijn stars as a bright but misunderstood schoolgirl who escapes unhappiness when, in her imagination, chess pieces come alive and the White Queen (vivacious Moniqe van de Ven) advises her both on the best moves to make on the chess board and in life itself.
• La diagonale du fou and stars Michel Piccoli as a Korchnoi-type soviet defector who has to face a brash young soviet for the world championship.
• Le maitre des ichecs is a period piece about a monstrous child prodigy who takes on the infamous "Mr. Staunton".
• Schwarz und Weiss wie Tag und Nacht which is in German and has English subtitles. It's a little corny, a computer genius programs computer to play chess, it loses badly to the World Champion who makes fun of the programmers effort, so the genius learns to play at the top level himself with the idea of getting even.
• Searching for Bobby Fischer is a very good movie about a father and son relationship in which chess takes an important part. But it's not a film "about chess".
• The Chess Players
• The King of Chess

There is a movie named Knight Moves about a Grandmaster who might or might not be killing people inbetween his matches.

Revolver is a great one- There is a post in the IMDB forum board for this movie which lists the corresponding chess moves to the action in the movie - who's the Kings, white Queen, black Queen, etc.  There is a scene where Jason Statam(sp?) is in the elevator and you see a crown on his head, and I think the elevator has something to do with the rank..?

I need to watch both of these movies again...

orejano> wow awesome list +32!

Thanks consigliori! +2

ok, I think I'll stop giving out points now. Joke wore off ;)

But if you can think of more please post!

there are great books about the game. here are some:

- Vladmir Nabokov's "The Defense" — 100 times better than the movie

- Stefan Zweig's "Chess Story"

- Walter Tevis's "The Queen's Gambit" (Heath Ledger was going to make it into a movie).

- Ronan Bennett's "Zugzwang"

- Paolo Maurensig's "The Luneburg Variations" 

Regarding fictional chess books, these are two of my favorites (both by Raymond Smullyan):

1. "The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes - 50 Tantalizing Problems of Chess Detection"
2.  "The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights - 50 New Problems of Chess Detection" 

The premise for both books uses retrograde analysis to solve mysteries concerned with deducing previous moves.  For example: On what square was the white queen captured? Or, is the white queen promoted, or the original?

You should join this group http://www.chess.com/groups/home/fanboys-amp-bookworms-amp-readers - this looks like the type of discussion we have all the time. 

Great Question!

A good short story is "The Three Sailors' Gambit" by Lord Dunsany.

hblume is right Vladmir Nabokov's The Defense (or The Luzhin Defense) is a great novel.  Easily the best chess related novel there is (& it's subject is chess & a chess master rather than just featuring a chess scene or game).

& I enjoyed The Queen's Gambit - but this is basically just a thriller - but a good one & it's entirely chess related. I recently read Zugzwang - i thought it was a bit of a bore & it's not essentially about chess - the featured game wasn't required for the plot.

I'm also a fan of Stephen Leacock - early 20th century Canadian humourist (well, born in Britain but became Canadian).  He wrote a short story called Pawn to King's Four which has the quote "I knew he had been thinking of something that he daren't risk. All chess is one long regret."  Very true at times ...

"Pawn To Infinity".  SciFi short stories, edited by Fred Saberhagen. "Midnight by the Morphy Watch" by Fritz Leiber was a good one.

Above recommendations are great.  As a Sci-Fi fan I particularly like Pawn to Infinity.  A recent award winner is "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon,  which features chess, a murder mystery and an alternate historical line.  See following link http://blog.chess.com/WyoKid/chess-stories

Katherine Neville has a recent follow-up, sequel to "The Eight" that is titled "The Fire".

The Chess Companion by Irving Chernev contains fourteen short stories about chess.  I believe this book is out of print, but is readily available in used bookstores or, of course, over the Internet.  It features stories by E.B. White, A.A. Milne, and Lord Dunsany among others.

Amy

I also just remembered The Flanders Panel (La tabla de Flandes) by Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte.  Here's a description from the book's official website:

"In the painting, the Duke of Flanders and his knight are locked in a game of chess, and a dark lady lurks mysteriously in the background. Julia is determined to solve the five-hundred-year-old murder, but as she begins to look for clues, several of her friends in the art world are brutally murdered in quick succession. Messages left with the bodies suggest a crucial connection between the chess game in the painting, the knight's murder, the sordid underside of the contemporary art world, and the latest deaths. Just when all of the players in the mystery seem to be pawns themselves, events race toward a shocking conclusion. A thriller like no other, The Flanders Panel presents a tantalizing puzzle for any connoisseur of mystery, chess, art, and history."

There's a novel by (I think) Anthony Glyn called The Dragon Variation, about a chess tournament and the world of pro chess in general. It's quite a sad book as I remember, in that most of the characters are damaged or fail in some way, but it's very much a novel set in and about chess. It'll be long out of print now (originally published in the UK in the 1960s, I think).