In 1986, Faber published The Grass Arena, a stunning memoir of life on the streets by John Healy, a former vagrant, violent criminal and tournament chess player who'd been taught the game in prison: it was a bestseller that became a film. Healy was unprepared for the whirl of celebrity, and for the letdown afterwards when Faber didn't want any more books. He began showing up at the publisher's offices and in an explosion of temper, threatened to attack everyone with an axe. Terrified executives severed relations, and Healy remained out in the cold until The Grass Arena was re-issued as a Penguin Classic in 2008. To mark that occasion, Healy gave a reading for his fans, and I can be glimpsed among them in this enthralling documentary movie-portrait by Paul Duane. Healy is a lonely, haunted, brilliant man, for whom chess and literature were not simply aspirational alternatives to his former life: there is assertion and even aggression in chess and in the act of writing. The film skirts around his emotional life, but it's a gripping study.