Editor's Note: Sometimes, the unlikely thing happens

Andrew Kiraly, Mercury associate editor and international man of irony, is, as we speak, on a cruise to Ensenada. That's right, the cool-as-ice Kiraly is whooping it up with the liver-spotted set, playing shuffleboard, dancing to big band music and dressing up for the Captain's Dinner. This isn't supposed to happen. Surely, cruises aren't hip and edgy enough for the twisted brain behind the World Report, Week in Review and Idiot Box Savant. Yet I am not making this up.

H. Lee Barnes, CCSN English professor and author of a respectable short story collection about Vietnam, recently published a terrific novel set in Las Vegas. That's right, a local writer has penned a full-bodied work of fiction that tells a great story and manages to avoid the clichés that plague most Vegas novels. This isn't supposed to happen. Surely, a local writer isn't capable of delivering a novel of this caliber. Yet I am not making this up.

The Lucky, Barnes' novel published in 2003 by the University of Nevada Press, hasn't received the attention it deserves. Part of the problem is the publisher. Like most university presses, Nevada's isn't big on publicity. Big sales are nice but not a top priority. As a result, most people across the state--not to mention the country--haven't even heard of the book. After reading it, I believe it could have been--should have been--picked up by a New York publisher and given wide exposure.

We at the Mercury have done just about everything within our limited powers to tell readers about this book. Last year, John Ziebell wrote a positive review, and a few months ago we published a cover story, "In Search of the Great Vegas Novel," in which we read a bunch of Vegas-centered novels and rated them. The Lucky received the highest grade of all.

Barnes' novel is inspired by the colorful Binion family. You know the Binions. Benny Binion was one of the great Vegas characters, a Texas outlaw who went straight--sort of--and got rich running a high-stakes gambling palace on Fremont Street. His older son, Jack, kept the business thriving and growing long after Benny dropped out of day-to-day operations. His younger son, Ted, had a chronic drug problem that cost him his gaming license. Then Ted was killed by his girlfriend and her lover--or at least that's what the jury decided at the first trial.

Barnes, drawing on his pre-academia experiences as a police officer and casino dealer, crafts a compelling story about a teenager named Pete who moves to Las Vegas with his mother and sister in the early 1960s and soon finds himself entwined with the Binion--er, Bobbins--family. Willy Bobbins, who owns The Lucky hotel-casino, is a fascinating character who shares many characteristics with Benny Binion, including owning a cattle ranch in Montana. Willy's sons, George and Ruben Lee, are close approximations of Jack and Ted. These comparisons make for an interesting subtext, but the novel is no docudrama. Barnes' story is, first and foremost, a coming-of-age story. Pete deals with some of the same things that kids his age everywhere experience--then and now. Living in a low-rent apartment in Naked City (the neighborhood north of the Stratosphere that's now charitably called Meadow Village), Pete hangs out with his friends at the White Cross Drugstore lunch counter and spies on showgirls sunbathing nude at the apartment pool.

But the book is also about Pete, through his relationship with the Bobbinses, getting up-close exposure to the gritty facts of Las Vegas life. When Willy takes Pete under his wing, Pete sees and participates in what happens behind the scenes in the casino business, and it's often not pretty. Willy Bobbins is known to have killed a couple of guys in his Texas days, and he tends to mete out justice outside the formalities of the system.

Along the way, Barnes provides a strikingly accurate, if stingy, portrait of Las Vegas in the 1960s. While hacks dwell almost exclusively on the mob element and the glitzy Strip resorts, Barnes refuses to get pulled into that well-trod territory. Instead, he gets the geography and the place names exactly right, as well as the operations of a casino.

My one complaint about The Lucky is that Barnes does not give us even one paragraph in which he takes a step back from the narrative and tries to describe or explain Las Vegas in a big-picture kind of way. Some might argue that this was a wise move, since it's easy for such exposition to ring false or feel out of place. But after having read The Lucky, I think Barnes would have been up to the task.

In any case, this is a novel that deserves to be read by a lot more people. Here's what you all should do: Go to the Vegas Valley Book Festival on Saturday, buy the book, listen to Barnes speak during a panel discussion at 10:30 a.m. and have him sign your new copy. Then go home and start reading.

And when Andrew Kiraly returns from Ensenada, he plans to read The Lucky too. Exhausted from all that waltzing with his wife and kibbitzing with Harold and Miriam from Akron, he'll need some down time with a good book.--GEOFF SCHUMACHER