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Thursday, August 12, 2004 Tales of Sin CityMercury scribes look for literary truth amid the mobsters and mayhem
Literary scholars constantly seek the Great American Novel. Mercury li'l scholars went in search of the Great Vegas Novel. We didn't find it. But we did read 19 novels set in our unfair city and found a few gems and a surprising variety. Sure, most fiction about Las Vegas seems to touch upon mobsters and criminals of one kind or another, but a few of the books outlined here reflect a desire to deliver a meaningful take on Sin City. Some succeed and some fail miserably. None of America's "literary giants" has tackled Las Vegas. No Bellow, no Roth, no Updike, no Mailer, no Pynchon. No Richard Ford or Don DeLillo. Also, no Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx or Barbara Kingsolver. Why? Is Las Vegas too tough or too easy? Is it simply not on their modernist radar? Whatever the case, the best-known names among the novelists here are probably Larry McMurtry, Michael Connelly and Ian Fleming. Yet it's a local writer, H. Lee Barnes, who garnered the highest grade from our critics, and only Connelly achieved a tied-for-second-place honor. Most disappointing, to us, is that Las Vegas is rarely what these novels are really about. It is more often a metaphor or a device used to tackle a particular subject or to make a point. With the possible exception of Barnes' The Lucky, Las Vegas itself gets short shrift in these books. So, there is still a wide-open opportunity for someone to write the Great Vegas Novel. Perhaps this rather dismal bibliographical review will inspire some of you to take your shot.--Geoff Schumacher
Candyleg Ovid Demaris Gold Medal Books Year published: 1961 Type: Crime Grade: D- Ovid Demaris is a familiar name in Las Vegas, but not for this execrable dime novel. Demaris co-authored The Green Felt Jungle, a nonfiction exposé of Las Vegas' mobbed-up casino industry. In 1961, three years before the debut of Green Felt, Demaris published this mob suspense story revolving around a plan to rob a casino called the Arabian. Candyleg is the epitome of pulp fiction, incorporating all the rote elements-- gratuitous sex scenes, tough-talking wiseguys, cheesy lingo--certain to satisfy the old-school "paperback original" demographic. Sadly, Demaris provides little interesting description of Las Vegas, and he doesn't expound on the city's characteristics or philosophical underpinnings. Demaris offers, "Las Vegas was in the middle of nowhere. A desert outpost." No kidding. Candyleg is hack work. In this story, all the women are "dames" who talk too much and better shut their traps if they know what's good for them. The police are "the fuzz," prison is "stir" and a knife is a "shiv." In theory, this could be fun reading, but unfortunately it doesn't play out that way. For one thing, Demaris pads his 160 pages with mindless, irrelevant dialogue between the mobsters and their "dames," and the pace seriously lags until the last 50 pages or so.--Geoff Schumacher
The Cold Six Thousand James Ellroy Alfred A. Knopf Year published: 2001 Type: Crime Grade: B+ Nobody wallows in the gutters of crime fiction as brilliantly as Ellroy, and Las Vegas--at least the Las Vegas of the 1960s, the timeframe of this monolithic enterprise--is his kind of place. The downside of The Cold Six Thousand is that Ellroy was much more engaging when he wrote in paragraphs rather than the too-terse narrative shorthand style of this novel. The Cold Six Thousand covers the arc of time separating the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, 700 pages of paranoia and history--civil rights, Vietnam, the rise of the narcotics industry, the murders of JFK, MLK, RFK--and at the center of Ellroy's universe is Las Vegas. Everything moves through Sin City. It's the point where the individual agendas of Howard Hughes, the mob, J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedys, white supremacists, heroin dealers, Cuban exiles and dozens of additional bit players intersect. Ellroy doesn't spend much time on physical descriptions, but he's never been a slave to detail, and the image he evokes of the city at that period--lounge acts, dark bars, the decadent hijinks of sleazy matinee idols and Rat Packers, the power of dirty money--has a very accurate feel. Las Vegas is the vortex of The Life, as his miscreant cast calls the daily grind. The Life is not pretty; Ellroy's fictional reality is more accurate than we want to admit. The couple who most readily pass for protagonists here, being slightly less sleazy than everyone else, are contract killer/heroin smuggler Pete Bondurant and his significant other, Barb, who gave up a promising career in prostitution for a gig as a casino lounge singer. They're good people, relatively speaking--or at least they're what Ellroy gives his readers to cheer for, and, by the end of the book, we actually do want them to prevail.--John Ziebell
The Death of Frank Sinatra Michael Ventura St. Martin's Year published: 1996 Type: Mystery Grade: B I always think I should like this book more than I do. Ventura, an iconoclastic critic and insightful social commentator, is very engaging when he's not writing about Michael Ventura. He considers himself an aficionado of our valley, and there's certainly a lot of appeal in the way his Las Vegas spills out of the stereotypical box. The novel was billed as detective fiction, but the tale of P.I. Mike Rose pushing his personal appointment in Samarra has far nobler literary intentions than that. And for the most part, it carries them off. Rose might be the most uninspired private eye in fiction. More than anything, he's a guy trying to escape the past, but it surrounds him unrelentingly, like the city itself. He's got to watch over his brother, just released from the mental hospital, who constantly reminds him of it; his on-and-off lover used to work for his mom, dead of cancer from watching too many nuclear tests; and the ancient mob thug he may have to kill, in self-defense of sorts, was not only his father's best friend, but the cohort who probably disappeared him. Ventura is nothing if not hyperbolic, and it's no surprise that he invests so heavily in the bolder elements of Vegas mythology--sex and the mob. While his obvious expertise in the area of strip clubs is entertaining, his obsession with Godfather-style mob shenanigans is less so. Still, while we can debate Ventura's work in terms of reality, the novel earns its legitimacy as representation. When we're talking about Las Vegas--which is a mythical space, whether we like it or not--we can't trust the cultural essence of so unique a place to be accurately recorded by historians alone, because facts themselves never tell the whole truth.--John Ziebell
The Desert Rose Larry McMurtry Simon & Schuster Year published: 1983 Type: Literary Grade: B The Desert Rose is not one of Larry McMurtry's better-known novels. Its scope is narrower than his Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove, and it doesn't carry the emotional weight of The Last Picture Show or Terms of Endearment. But it's still a pretty good little story, highlighted by McMurtry's natural dialogue and his uncanny knack for capturing the thoughts and actions of female characters. And while The Desert Rose is set outside his home turf of Texas, McMurtry does a credible job of depicting at least a small piece of Las Vegas. The Desert Rose tells the story of Harmony, an aging showgirl, and her combative teenage daughter, Pepper. Harmony, a nave, trusting soul, lives in a duplex on a dirt road on the east side of Las Vegas and raises peacocks. She once was considered the most beautiful woman in Las Vegas, but her age is starting to show. Her husband left her and her daughter years before, and she's had nothing but loser boyfriends ever since. Meanwhile, Pepper is a beautiful, adventurous teenager who enjoys manipulating boys and is engaged in a lot of behavior (drugs, sex) her mother doesn't know about. She becomes involved with a rich older man at the same time that she is approached by her mother's boss about trying out for her mother's show at the Stardust. Dramatic tensions ensue. Although McMurtry doesn't trip over any Vegas clichés, he also doesn't venture far enough outside his narrow drama for a local reader to worry about an accurate portrayal of the city. It's not really a novel about Las Vegas so much as a neat little melodrama about a mother and daughter. There is one nice quote, however, in which McMurtry describes the surreal atmosphere of the Strip: "Once she got on her own road, bumpy as it was, she felt a little better. It was always a happy surprise to be reminded that there was a place that wasn't the Strip. Once you were on the Strip it sort of took you over, you could easily forget that there were other places and other ways to live."--Geoff Schumacher
Diamonds Are Forever Ian Fleming Coronet Books Year published: 1956 Type: Thriller Grade: B If, like the vast majority of people, your only exposure to 007 is through the increasingly formulaic and downright wacky movies, reading any of the Bond novels will astound you. The book version of James Bond relies on not so much on gadgets and witty repartee as it does undercover and detective work. You won't find the film's razor-tipped pocket finger trap, the piton gun or exploding pastry. The villain isn't stealing diamonds to create an elaborate, world-threatening laser satellite, he (actually they) just want the money. Bond is on the trail of a diamond-smuggling operation that is taking hot diamonds to America from what was at the time the British colony of Sierra Leone. Remember when England had colonies? How quaint. The trail goes through Saratoga and to Las Vegas, where an important portion of the middle of the book takes place. Fleming does get the city right, although from a snooty, cosmopolitan perspective. This is the Las Vegas of 1954, when it's still transitioning from dude ranch with gambling to swinging cocktail lounge with gambling. He states that Vegas has invented "The Gilded Mousetrap School" of architecture. "It was an inelegant trap, obvious and vulgar," he writes, "and the noise and machines had a horrible mechanical ugliness which beat at the brain." The featured casino, the Tiara, is run by the mob, which isn't a huge surprise now, but this was written well before major indictments, so it was a relatively ballsy touch. The novel has a car chase rather than a movie's moon-buggy chase, which winds up in a drive-in movie, further establishing that Las Vegas extends beyond the four-mile Strip. When the villains catch Bond, they don't set up an elaborate death trap. They just put on their stomping boots and kick him half to death. While Fleming gets Vegas right, he's a little fuzzy on Nevada. Presumably his research trip didn't extend too far from the neon. The mob boss has bought the fictitious ghost town of Spectreville and refurbished and revamped it as his personal playground. Even in '54 that would have attracted undue attention to a secret operation.--F. Andrew Taylor
Dice Angel Brian Rouff Hardway Press Year published: 2002 Type: Literary Grade: B On its simplest level, local author Brian Rouff's novel Dice Angel is a story about a nice but relatively luckless slot bar owner. Victimized by a crooked accountant, a shrewish ex-wife, a fair-weather banker and an insanely vengeful IRS agent, Jimmy Delaney's life is near implosion when Amaris, the Dice Angel--like the title says, right?--finally makes her appearance. Is she in time to save the day? I'll say this much; you won't regret spending a few bucks for the novel to find out. There's nothing harder to carry off than a funny story that makes serious points, and Rouff does it quite well. Most of his characters seem to have wills of their own; they start splendidly but can't wait to go wrong. The language of the novel is uncluttered, the plot strong and his vision lucid. Another key to his success is a comic essential that doubles as a superb narrative tool: a faultless sense of timing. Rouff has a strong sense of place, and it shows. One thing that outsiders often misunderstand about Las Vegas is that our simulacra is its own reality. Dancing naked or playing a pirate in staged naval battles on the Strip are legitimate careers. In a place where all the odds are posted, we recognize our trade-offs, and Rouff's book is rich with phrases that ring achingly true, whether he's commenting on "multitasking" Elvis impersonators, the climate ("like living on the moon, except for the gambling") or the Fremont Street Experience ("It's free, and it's still not worth it"). With stops in spots like the Huntridge Pharmacy, the Luxor and the county morgue, Rouff really covers the city.--John Ziebell
The Executioner: Vegas Vendetta Don Pendleton Pinnacle Books Year published: 1971 Type: Adventure Grade: D+ You can't expect a whole lot from an adventure series like The Executioner. It's the pulpiest of pulp fiction, catering to a very specific demographic--men (probably military veterans) who spend a lot of time in gun stores and fantasize about taking the law into their own hands. But when The Executioner--Vietnam vet Mack Bolan--finds himself in Las Vegas in the series' ninth installment, you gotta wonder what's going to happen. Bolan, whose mission is to kill mobsters (in retaliation for their slaughter of his family), offs 14 of them in efficient fashion in the book's first chapter and snags $250,000 of their skimmed casino cash in the process. Not a bad day's work. But he has bigger plans in Las Vegas. Somehow, however, the book goes sideways around Page 50, when Bolan encounters a comedian who proceeds to deliver a long, horrible routine satirizing political correctness (in 1971 no less). This, clearly, is an excuse for the author to vent, but the comedian's jokes are so excruciating, and the digression so long, that it brings the narrative to a screeching halt. Of course, the obligatory hot chicks enter the story on Page 68, and Pendleton is completely out of his element again: "They were dressed alike, in peekaboo hotpants and plunging see-through tops which, altogether, revealed seemingly infinite legs and an extra dimension or two in divine developments elsewhere, and Bolan found himself wondering if they needed some sort of license to walk about in public like that." Ouch. Pendleton does a little better with the action sequences, which make up most of the book. Rest assured that he kills a whole bunch more mobsters, including some casino higher-ups and wiseguys who arrive from back East. To his credit, he gets the Vegas geography right, but he doesn't try to do much more. The best that can be said about this book is it's better than Candyleg.--Geoff Schumacher
Father of the Four Passages Lois-Ann Yamanaka Farrar, Straus & Giroux Year published: 2001 Type: Literary Grade: C- Ever been haunted by all the babies you aborted because you didn't want them to interfere with your drug habit? Sonia Kurisu knows how you feel. She's the heroine of Father of the Four Passages, considered to be Lois-Ann Yamanaka's most challenging novel. This relentless trawl through the world of a bitchy, drug-addled banshee as she claws toward redemption has a couple of things going for it, among them an irascibly engaging first-person voice and a promising spiritual conceit: See, Sonia's three dead children are starting to make spooky cameos in the real world, admonitions that her deadly lifestyle of drugs and dissipation is endangering her fourth son, Sonny Boy, the only child she's kept. In hopes of escaping the visions, Sonia flees to Las Vegas, where she takes a shot at finishing school, sings in a casino lounge under the moniker Tiger Lily Wong and hangs out with a cast of druggies and would-be boyfriends. Of course, Sonia can't escape reality--or surreality: Not only do her dead children continue to haunt her, but she discovers Sonny Boy is autistic. Soul-scouring, sober realization and spiritual cleansing follow. Yes, just like that, Sonia--suddenly buoyed on a frothy wave of tribal pagan spiritual ga-ga--sees the cruelty and selfishness of her ways, and she engages in a number of arcane rituals to put to rest the agitated souls of her children and affirm her motherly commitment to Sonny Boy. This redemption seems so clumsily shoved along by an authorial hand that it dooms Father of the Four Passages, and shines a light on numerous other flaws: one-dimensional asshole characters (whether it's Sonia's shallow, bitchy sister Celeste or her father, Joseph, who has inexplicably abandoned the family to travel the world, his only contact with his daughters a trickle of maddeningly inscrutable letters rife with all kinds of diaphanous pseudo-wise prattle), fake-artistic technique for the sake of technique and frequent passages that aim for the poetic but arc weakly toward pathetic. Yamanaka has shored up a lame plot and thin characters around a skeletal tale of responsibility and atonement that, while original in places, collapses under the weight of its own trying too damn hard.--Andrew Kiraly
Keno Runner David Kranes University of Nevada Press Year published: 1995 Type: Literary Grade: B+ As Keno Runner opens, New York writer Benjamin Kohlman is a guy with problems. He can't seem to achieve his potential in either his professional or private life. His lover has dumped him and, hungry for the kind of book-list hit that will bolster both his reputation and self-confidence, he heads for Las Vegas to interview one Janice Stewart, acquitted in a fairly spectacular arson/murder trial, to write her true crime story. The opening pages have a chaotic feel and Kohlman seems an uncertain soul; he doesn't inspire much confidence from the get-go, and things aren't looking any better when he reaches Las Vegas. Stewart has renamed herself Angel and works as a keno runner at the Golden Nugget. When Kohlman asks her to sign over the exclusive rights to her version of the arson story, she somehow perceives the contract as a marriage proposal, and things just get weirder from that point on. In the course of being randomly assaulted, threatened, betrothed and seduced by a woman with a straight razor fetish, Kohlman meets a surreal circle of characters that includes 18-year-old entrepreneur CEO Barnett and his little sister Alyce, a musical prodigy; REM, an amputee beggar with more connections than casino presidents; Comus, an Amazon feminist director who's shooting a video for the president; and Challenger, the strangest heavyweight fighter in fiction. There are plenty of Las Vegas bits in the novel, and most are pretty winning--including my favorite, the white tiger that briefly escapes to daylight before being tranquilized on the streets. Kranes is an intelligent, polished and lyrical writer with a particularly good ear for dialogue. The book's real weakness, more irksome to some than others, is the taint of quasi-magical realism, for lack of a better term, that failed to work in so much late '80s literary fiction.--John Ziebell
Last Call Tim Powers William Morrow and Company Year published: 1992 Type: Fantasy Grade: D+ Las Vegas is cluttered with cultural myths: the big win, the new start, the meteoric rise. In Last Call, Tim Powers depicts the city as a place where historical myth lives and breathes--think Egyptian god stories, fertility myths, Jungian archetypes--the stuff of a thousand snorefest college courses. Where gangsters are gods in fedoras and gamblers are minor deities, where card games have higher stakes than mere money. Thus it's hard to sum up the plot of this sprawling bungle of a novel that reeks with underdeveloped characters, overintellectualized plot and "writerly" touches that read like something out of a nightmare fiction workshop. But let's try nonetheless: Bugsy Siegel was an embodiment of the legendary Fisher King, a sort of male font of spiritual fecundity. He's murdered by Georges Leon, an evil warlock from an underworld (overworld?) populated with shamans, wizards and mediums who play the most extreme version of high-limit poker, one that involves combining tarot cards in different combos to gather spirit power and eventually own souls. Protagonist Scott Crane--son of the evil Leon, who has a whole set of bodies he can inhabit at will--must fight his way through different cult factions via the tarot/poker game called "Assumption" and eventually square off with dear ol' Dad. Powers get props for the sheer amount of muscle in his skullbox. This 535-pager may look like a beach-ready paperback, but it's got the heft of a frickin' sandbag, filled with so many twists, reversals and subplots it'll make your head...slowly tilt down and snore. See, appreciation for Powers' mental prowess is one thing; too bad all that brainy brawn doesn't translate into a readable book. The characters are vivid, but flat; the dialogue has all the crackle of wet bread; and much of the writing is downright execrable. Worst of all, constantly looming over the labyrinthine plot is this thunderhead of philosophical self-importance, as if Powers is thumping his bird-chest and saying, "Look! Fantasy novels can be deep and important, too!" Second worst of all, the author, overscrupulous in wanting to "get Vegas right," includes laughably detailed directional markers for off-Strip streets and neighborhoods, as if to prove the good little boy did his homework. The problem is the stony specificity of such details drains even more life out of the narrative. Powers gets credit for a fascinating premise, but his execution of it turns up one shitty hand.--Andrew Kiraly
Leaving Las Vegas John O'Brien Watermark Press Year published: 1991 Type: Literary Grade: A- Many people don't realize that Leaving Las Vegas--the flick featuring Nicolas Cage as a sweet, suicidal drunk and Elisabeth Shue as an improbably unskanky, improbably big-hearted prostitute--is based on a book. That's too bad: John O'Brien's 1991 novel is a slim tour de force that shines a lurid but strangely hopeful light on human relationships. The novel isn't so much about Las Vegas as it uses the city as a handy metaphorical terminal for two people on different journeys. Las Vegas is where Ben the alcoholic--a man whose very function, it seems, is to drink--chooses to die; it's where Sera the prostitute--finally untying herself from the countless tentacles of her pimp--chooses to live anew. Surprise: Ben and Sera meet and fall in love. Don't groan. There are no soap-opera surges of music or blissy happily-ever-afters; what might founder as a romantic contrivance succeeds on the page in organic, earnest fashion. O'Brien renders Ben and Sera's relationship so skillfully that the logic of it is graceful and ineluctable: What happens if you meet the love of your life at the hour of his doom, at the zenith of her freedom? There can be no talk of changing one another, of "working things out," of that brand of possession that calls itself by nobler names. Leaving Las Vegas redeems a term that's been ravaged by the pop-psych, talk-show, self-help circus: unconditional love--a love that must necessarily be brief, fragile and intense. That said, it's not a very "Vegasy" book. Details are spare; there's little sense of place. The dog-eared tropes and myths of Sin City are left in the wake of a story that instead spends much of its time inside character's hearts. In that sense, it's one of the truest Vegas books, affirming the humanity of the ultimate pair of "tourists"--two souls who are just dropping in on the way to more important things.--Andrew Kiraly
Loaded Dice James Swain Ballantine Books Year published: 2004 Type: Mystery Grade: B- Loaded Dice is the fourth novel by James Swain in a series that features Tony Valentine, a retired Atlantic City cop whose "grift sense"--an innate and almost supernatural knack for catching gambling cheats--keeps him busily employed as a consultant to casinos. When Valentine is promised a fat fee for a quick trip to Las Vegas, he thinks the visit will be a holiday of sorts. He's certainly not expecting to step off the plane into a snarl of coinciding and deadly problems, from a crooked cop who erroneously blames Valentine for the death of his stripper girlfriend to Pakistani fundamentalists planning to blow up Sin City. Jim Swain is a professionally trained magician, one of the greatest card handlers in the world, and knows as much about casino cheating as anyone alive. He is fascinated by crossroaders, in terms of both philosophy and practical application, and it's a passion that he's successful at passing along. He enjoys not only the puzzles themselves, from the simplest card marking strategies to the most complex computerized attacks, but explaining the processes to the uninitiated. Although real scams are more geekfests than glamour, Swain always manages to make Valentine's cases interesting, and writer who can keep an audience engaged with crimes based in mathematics has a rare talent indeed. While Swain may not get Vegas totally right--especially some geographical anomalies, like placing Summerlin 10 minutes from the Strip--we can probably attribute his errors to artistic license. He's focused on a specific industry that he understands very well, and doesn't stray far afield. He has a great descriptive eye, and can construct characters with the best of them. His casino execs may be more Thugs-R-Us than Wharton School, but it's hard to disabuse people of the notions they cherish--such as the delusion that the gaming industry still operates the way it did in Bugsy's day.--John Ziebell
The Lucky H. Lee Barnes University of Nevada Press Year published: 2003 Type: Literary Grade: A H. Lee Barnes' novel The Lucky follows narrator Pete Elkins--petty thief, busboy, student, ranch hand, casino dealer, grunt--through his teens and early twenties, from his arrival in Las Vegas as a fatherless kid to Vietnam and back. But while the book covers a significant arc of Pete's life, it's not wholly his story; like narrators created by Fitzgerald or Conrad or Didion, he's a witness as well. Through a chain of serendipitous events, Pete is virtually adopted by iconic gambler and casino owner Willy Bobbins, who bears a very strong resemblance to local legend Benny Binion. Bobbins, a Texas mobster exiled to Las Vegas by the threat of a homicide indictment, is consistently contradictory: a ruthless businessman and generous philanthropist, an illiterate genius, a thug who subscribes to a moral code, a killer and loving father. His family is no less interesting, or hazardous; one son is a walking calculator, the other a drug-addled sociopath, and his daughter somewhere in between. It's Bobbins' wife, Stella, who somehow manages to keep the whole mess from imploding, more than enough work for any character in fiction. For realist writers, all fiction is local, and credibility never comes unearned. Believable stories have to rise organically from the interconnection of setting, personality and voice. Barnes' carefully crafted prose offers an evocative take on Las Vegas of the 1960s and '70s, decades that were in turn magical and bleak, capturing the romantic faãade and the violent underpinnings of the pre-corporate glory days. While the novel offers images of Montana and Vietnam that are better and worse than Las Vegas, as well as equally vivid, those locations don't have the same impact on Pete's character; Las Vegas is the landscape that reflects everything imperfect in him, and the one he must come to grips with in the end.--John Ziebell
M*A*S*H Goes to Las Vegas Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth Pocket Books Year Published: 1976 Type: Comedy Grade: F The witty banter and Catch-22-like situations that made the M*A*S*H movie and subsequent television series so successful are not much in evidence in this gimmicky extension of the original novel. To be fair, situational comedy does not transfer well to the printed word. The zany situations that the M*A*S*H regulars find themselves involved in here might be somewhat humorous on camera but they feel forced and telegraphed on the page. The plot goes like this: Radar O'Reilly, who, after his stint in Korea, got very rich with a restaurant chain featuring his trademark stew, is in love with a Russian opera singer who's performing in Las Vegas. O'Reilly flies to Las Vegas to pledge his love and ask her to marry him. After hijinks ensue, she agrees to marry him. O'Reilly and his bride-to-be fly to Maine to enlist the help of Hawkeye Pierce's wife to organize the wedding at Nero's Villa, a Las Vegas casino that bears an uncanny resemblance to Caesars Palace. It's supposed to be a small, intimate wedding, but we quickly see, as O'Reilly's wild and crazy friends are invited and prepare for the trip, that it's going to be a big ol' farce. The novel is chock-full of ethnic stereotypes, bigotry and sexism. The mobsters who run Nero's Villa talk like cliché Italian wise guys, the men are all chauvinists who lie to their wives in pursuit of strippers and prostitutes, and there is a nasty anti-gay theme throughout. All this might be palatable if the book were funny. But it didn't elicit even a smile from this reader. The book might have been a little better if it had focused on the main M*A*S*H characters, but the majority of the narrative deals with a wide cast of other characters only faintly connected to Radar, Hawkeye, Trapper John, Hot Lips and Father Mulcahy. And what made reading this book a huge waste of time was that it dealt very little with Las Vegas. The elaborate sendup of Caesars Palace is the only thing in the book that attempts to say something about the city.--Geoff Schumacher
The Only Girl in the Game John D. MacDonald Gold Medal Books Year published: 1960 Type: Crime Grade: A- John D. MacDonald was a prolific writer of short stories and novels who was considerably better than the pigeonhole in which his publishers put him. Most of MacDonald's dozens of novels were paperback originals featuring provocative cover art and over-the-top back cover sales copy. Despite this handicap, MacDonald developed a devoted following, especially for his series of novels featuring Florida boat bum and "retriever of lost fortunes" Travis McGee. MacDonald also wrote the novel on which the celebrated film Cape Fear is based. After the Cape Fear novel (entitled The Executioner) and before McGee's debut, MacDonald delivered a novel about Las Vegas called The Only Girl in the Game. It's classic MacDonald, with its slow but sure development of deeply hewn characters and inventive plot payoff. Most important, MacDonald gets Vegas. Besides his careful attention to the details of hotel operations and casino table games, he shows a credible understanding of what makes Sin City tick. "In all the big hotel casinos of Las Vegas, it is always a few minutes after midnight," he writes, rather than opting for the clichés about there being no clocks or windows. The fictional setting is the Cameroon, a mob joint run by a former hoodlum serving as amiable front man for the string-pullers back East. This scenario might seem a little too easy today, but MacDonald brings a fresh approach through the eyes of the protagonist, Hugh Darren, a našve young manager brought in from out of town to improve and legitimize the hotel side of the operation. He also creates a sincerely wrought female lead in the form of late-night lounge singer Betty Dawson. MacDonald's portrayal of the mobsters running the casino doesn't hold up as well, as he often relies on stereotypical looks, attitudes and language patterns. MacDonald's take on Vegas is not particularly positive. It's clear throughout that he believes the casinos prey on people's weaknesses. Desperate compulsive gamblers are a recurring theme. At one point, the young hotelier thinks: "Here, attuned to the constant clinking of the silver dollars in forty thousand pockets, honesty became watchful opportunism, friendship became a pry bar, love turned to license, and legitimate sentiment drowned in a pink sea of sentimentality. It would not be a good thing to stay in such a place too long, because you might lose the ability to react to any other human being save on the level of estimating how best to use them, or how they were trying to use you." The Only Girl in the Game focuses almost exclusively on the Strip, with only a handful of brief forays beyond the neon. But it holds up well as a stark portrait of the city's primary industry circa 1960.--Geoff Schumacher
The Perfect Age Heather Skyler W.W. Norton Year published: 2004 Type: Literary Grade: C Heather Skyler's first novel is a coming-of-age tale set, appropriately enough, here in her hometown. At 15, Helen Larkin is hired as a pool lifeguard at the Dunes, a job that consists mainly of selling sunscreen and making sure kids don't run, jump and splash. There is nothing unusual in the setup: Helen is pretty and smart, the setting is easily imaginable, and Gerard, the boss, and Miles, the head lifeguard, are exactly the people we'd expect to meet. The Perfect Age follows Helen through three summers on the job, a structural ploy that allows the story significant freedom from external pressures but, in the long run, has an affected feel. Focusing on Helen's seasonal work lets Skyler set her central character on a strong trajectory toward adulthood, but it also insulates Helen from the greater world she inhabits, like a kid in a bubble. Beyond the Dunes pool, Helen has no friends, and lacks even a circle of acquaintances to hang out with; it's hard to imagine a teenager who needs so little peer reinforcement. Her boyfriend Leo is equally isolated, a band geek whose ambition is to go to UNLV. It's certainly no surprise to find her parents cheating on each other; in a storyline that has the compression of a soap opera, their antics are pretty much inevitable. The book is insightful and well-crafted, but a vague timeline and the fact that nothing is ever at stake make it read more like an extended meditation than a novel--or, more accurately, like a well-tuned collection of MFA workshop manuscripts. While the story takes place in Las Vegas, it just as easily could have been set anywhere that has a public pool and a smart, struggling teenager with a loving but harmlessly dysfunctional family.--John Ziebell
Shooter's Point Gary Phillips Dafina Year published: 2001 Type: Mystery Grade: B- Gary Phillips, besides being a great guy in general, is the literary renaissance man of South Central LA. He's written everything from political commentaries through comics and retro pulp to a whole slew of genre fiction, including the Martha Chainey novels, a series set in Las Vegas that has been well-received by mystery fans. I admire much of Phillips' work; nobody I can think of has better narrative energy, and he works hard to maintain a really nice lack of predictability in his fiction. The specific problems that I have with Shooter's Point are basically shared by any story that tailors itself to a particular audience. The first thing we have to believe is that a showgirl-turned-courier--or a music teacher, or lawyer, or retail clerk--has the wherewithal to track down and bring to justice, say, the kind of seasoned killer who drops a heavyweight champion during a title fight. For those who can buy into that basic premise, the rest of the story should offer no problems. The novel doesn't always have a Vegas feel; some locales are right, but designators like "LVMPD" and "Las Vegas Boulevard" and "Bellagio" seem forced into other passages. (The city also comes under martial law in fairly short order, but that's a different issue.) Minor complaints aside, Phillips does create characters that work, some great dialogue and a well-knit plot. It's easy to like Chainey, who's smart and sexy and has a no-bullshit view of the world, and it's also refreshing to find a mystery that doesn't spend a lot of time whining about personal problems that are supposed to make the protagonist unique. If we're gonna read series fiction, we deserve amateur sleuths who like sex and alcohol.--John Ziebell
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season John Gregory Dunne Random House Year published: 1974 Type: Literary Grade: B+ This book defies classification. Dunne's subtitle suggests that it is a memoir. A promotional blurb from David Halberstam on the cover of the paperback edition describes it as "half reportage, half autobiography." But on the first page, Dunne offers a disclaimer that calls its nonfiction status into question: "This is a fiction which recalls a time both real and imagined. There are, for example, comics, prostitutes and private detectives in Las Vegas; there is no Jackie Kasey, no Artha Ging, no Buster Mano. I am more or less `I,' he and she less than more he and she." Whatever the hell that means, it strongly suggests that while a lot of the stuff in the book actually happened, Dunne has taken great liberties in fashioning his narrative. Let's call it a highly autobiographical novel and be done with it. The real question is whether it is any good. It is. Dunne, who died earlier this year, was an excellent writer of novels, essays and screenplays, the latter in collaboration with his writer wife, Joan Didion. The basis of the book is a prolonged stay in Las Vegas during which he was separated from his wife and his L.A. home. Dunne apparently was on the verge of a nervous breakdown of some sort and fled to Vegas to be alone and get his head together. His reporter instincts get the best of him, however, and soon he is getting to know some of the folks in Las Vegas and spending lots of time with them, observing their lives (and thus excusing himself from living his own). Dunne profiles a cast of Vegas characters but spends the most time with three: the aforementioned Jackie Kasey, a lounge comedian; Artha Ging, a prostitute; and Buster Mano, a private detective. Dunne hopes to "find absolution through voyeurism" in following these folks around for days at a time, but it's not clear whether that ever happens. In the process, however, he develops engrossing and often humorous narratives around these three, each of whom escorts him into an intriguing aspect of the Las Vegas experience. The book is steeped in sexual activity and rough dialogue, reflecting the streetwise lifestyles of his main characters. While Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season chips away at the veneer of Las Vegas, the book isn't focused or ambitious enough to reach the core. The city is merely a convenient setting for Dunne to work through his bizarre midlife crisis.--Geoff Schumacher
Void Moon Michael Connelly Little, Brown Year published: 1999 Type: Crime Grade: A- Cassie Black is a smart, sexy paroled felon with a job selling Porsches, and like almost anyone who's introduced in the opening pages of a crime novel, she has a history. Once upon a time, she was one of the best cat burglars working in Las Vegas. Her area of expertise was creeping the high-roller suites in Strip casinos, cleaning out hotel room safes while big players slept off their post-winning highs. That all ended when a job went wrong in the Cleopatra Casino. Cassie's lover died, she went to jail and their unborn daughter was destined for state-mandated adoption. But the straight life is more work than it's worth, and Cassie wants her daughter back, so...yeah, you guessed it. She's looking at one last score. And of course, the setup she's sold requires her to return to the Cleo, where she risks a mano-a-babe confrontation with the security expert who did in her boyfriend. On the night of a void moon, always a forecast of bad luck, a phenomenon meant to echo the job that went sour. And of course, since this is Las Vegas, there's more sleaziness going on than meets the eye... Connelly is always a smart and engaging writer; his characters are believable, his plots well-crafted and his use of language above average. He was also a prize-winning crime reporter, so he gets details right; this story probably won't inspire readers with enough nerve to creep hotel rooms, but it sure provides a wealth of information to anyone with a layperson's curiosity about the craft. And while it might be more a casino novel than a book about Las Vegas, there's no arguing that he gets that part of it dead on.--John Ziebell
These are some of the Vegas-oriented novels we didn't read:
The Vegas Legacy, Ovid Demaris, Delacorte Press |
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