The Squares of the City by John Brunner, 1965.
It's not uncommon for a novel to be at least loosely based on actual events, sometimes animating an otherwise lifeless subject. What is uncommon is for the plot to be shaped after something as abstract as a chess game, but that is exactly what John Brunner has done in The Squares of the City. As Brunner explains in the Author's Note at the end, the book is based on the 1892 world championship game between title holder and American master William Steinitz, and the Russian master Mikhail Ivanovich Tchigorin. Brunner goes so far as to put a name and method of "capture" to each piece to reveal the parallels between game and book.
The story begins with the commission of Boyd Hakluyt, a traffic expert. Hakluyt's mission is to unsnarl the traffic of a planned city, Ciudad de Vados, the capitol of a fictitious progressive South American country. Hakluyt travels through the squares of the city and encounters various prominent figures, finding strife in the seemingly peaceful city. A clandestine contest is being waged between the right-wing, headed by President Vados, and the left-wing, with Vados' opponent Diaz as its leader. The two manipulate those beneath them in a deadly game with a country as its prize.
From many authors, the use of chess as a structure for a plot might be shocking, but John Brunner is inventive enough to make the shocking mundane. Although The Squares of the City is a political drama, much of what Brunner wrote was science fiction ranging from Shockwave Rider which predicted the internet in 1975, to his Hugo award winning dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar.
I recommend The Squares of the City both for its relatively engaging story and its surprisingly contrived plot. Though it's based on a chess game, you won't need to be a chess aficionado to appreciate the story. Now, if someone will just write a detective story based on monopoly...
