'Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest' Nabokov wrote of King Queen Knave. Comic sensual and cerebral it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle a tragi-comedy of husband wife and lover through Dreyer the rich businessman his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha and their bespectacled nephew Franz. 'If a resolute Freudian manages to slip in' - Nabokov darts a glance to the reader - 'he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set up here and there'.