Chess plays an important role in the fiction of Lewis Carroll and Vladimir Nabokov, and in the film of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the characters play chess on a floating board while enveloped in the rising steam of a hot spring. Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) made the intellectual game — one in which there’s no element of chance and the player is entirely responsible for his own fate — popular throughout the world. But, as John Dryden wrote, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied”; and this chess prodigy and champion was mad indeed.

Fischer’s strange childhood provides …