James Clavell's "King Rat" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Changi

"Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was - an obscene and forbidding prison."
Utram Road is another prison, even worse than Changi.
China is... er... China!
Changhai is a county in Liaoning Province, People's Republic of China.

Answer: It is never mentioned

His rank is Corporal, but his first name is never revealed. With some exceptions when he is referred to by his rank, he is called 'King' and referred to as 'The King'.

Answer: Lieutenant Grey

Colonel Brant is an Indian Army officer, a man still suffering from the defection of his beloved Sikh soldiers during the fall of Singapore in 1942.
Major Barry had the King sell a Ronson lighter for him.
Colonel Sampson accepted money from the King in exchange for keeping Grey occupied during a major deal.
Provost Officer Grey is out to get the King from the opening sentence of Book 1: "I'm going to get that bloody bastard if I die in the attempt."

Answer: Stud

Seven-card stud is played two down, four up, one down.
Draw is played with an initial five-card deal, then the players discard and receive replacements for the discards.
The Chinese game of pai gow is played with tiles, and pai gow poker with cards.
"Peter Marlowe looked at him, his eyes flinty. The eggs were getting cold. 'What are you trying to prove, Grey? Any fool knows it's four cards face up and one down- one in the hole.'"

Answer: Not bad

Blow your wig: lose control
Share crop: sexually easy female
Dead hoofer: very bad dancer
Not bad: really good. The King felt Marlowe was not appreciative enough when Marlowe used the English understated compliment of "Not bad" to describe the fried egg.

Answer: Kooa

"'Kooas are about the best cigarette around,' the King said at last. 'Course they don't compare with Camels. American cigarette. Best in the world. You ever had them?'
'Yes,' Peter Marlowe said, 'but actually, they tasted a little dry to me. My brand's Gold Flake.'"

Answer: How to treat cheap tobacco to make it taste better

Marlowe taught them the process for free, and the flabbergasted King couldn't believe he wanted nothing in return.
"'I don't want anything', said Peter Marlowe.
'Nothing?' The King sat down feebly, wrecked."

Answer: Larkin and Mac

Colonel Larkin, Major 'Mac' McCoy, and Lieutenant Marlowe formed a "unit", a group of men who join together to watch out for one another. It was very hard to survive in Changi without belonging to a unit. Three was a perfect unit number: one to guard the unit's possessions, one to forage, and one spare (in case of illness or other misfortune).

Answer: Threw it into the air

"Sunny took a firm grip on the string and started swinging the pup around his head on the end of the rope. He whirled it maybe a dozen times, laughing as though this was the greatest joke in the world. Then as the screaming pup gathered momentum, he gave it a final whirl and let go of the string.

The pup must have gone fifty feet into the air. And when it fell on the iron-hard ground, it burst like a ripe tomato."

Answer: In a hollowed-out beam

The compartment in the 8x8 beam was so well-crafted that at first when the guard Yoshima tried to find it, he thought that his informant was mistaken about the hiding place.

Answer: A coupling condenser

When Daven's radio was discovered and confiscated, Marlowe's unit had to use theirs to make sure the camp continued to have a source of news. When they assembled the radio from the parts hidden in false bottoms crafted into their water bottles, it did not work. Mac, the electronics specialist of the group, told Marlowe that the radio's "particular sickness" was due to one part: a coupling condenser, three hundred microfarads.

Answer: Rusa tikus

Tekka maki: sushi roll made with tuna.
Tikka masala: Curry dish made with chicken marinated in yogurt and spices, thought to have originated in the UK, not India.
Rusa kutub: Caribou or reindeer (did you know that both sexes of reindeer have antlers?)
Rusa tikus: The tiny Malayan "mouse deer", which Marlowe describes as weighing only a couple of pounds. The officers were overjoyed to be able to buy the little rat haunches when they thought they were buying deer meat!

Answer: 12

The King bribed the camp instructor Vexley with cigarettes to coax him off the subject of whales and onto the subject of rats. Rats can have twelve litters per year with up to twelve young per litter. Yikes.

Answer: The men did not want to use names of women they knew.

"Naming males was easy. But none of the men wanted their girls' names or their sisters' or their mothers' names attached to the females. Even mother-in-law names were some other man's passion or relation of the past. It had taken them three days to agree on Beulah or Mabel."

Answer: Trina

Their wedding was performed between air-raid alerts, and both sets of parents were against the marriage. Trina remarried when Grey was reported lost in action in 1942.

Answer: Spitfire

Marlowe had crashed a Hurricane, but loved his Spitfire. "He found a small promontory overlooking the wire and wished himself into his Spitfire soaring the sky alone, up, up, up in the sky, where all is clean and pure, where there are no lousy people - like me - where life is simple and you can talk to God and be of God, without shame."

Answer: To tease his guests

When Marlowe crashed his Hurricane in Java, he found refuge in a native village. When Marlowe asked the headman why the man kept the toilet bowl, the man confessed that it amused him to see his guests wondering why he kept such a ridiculous ornament.

Answer: That Charles was able to put his intestines back in

In the Malayan Regiment, Raylins, formerly a junior bank manager, was ordered to take twenty men across a causeway to fight the Japanese. His twenty men, who had been as ill-prepared for war as he, suddenly numbered only three. The soldier named Charles lay on the road, gut shot, laughing as he tried to cram his dirty entrails back into his body. Raylins went mad, and in Changi he repeatedly asked his fellow prisoners if they knew Charles, and if they thought he had succeeded in putting his intestines back in.

Answer: Sam

Sutra, the local village headman, would not introduce his daughter Sulina to the likes of the King. The King felt he had to call Sulina something, and thought the name 'Sam' suited her.

Answer: The King's Malayan girlfriend

Kasseh was the Malayan woman kept by the King in Sutra's village.