Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers, and Scam Artists

by Geno Zanetti (Editor), Stephen Hyde (Editor)

Overview

Once I hear the clatter of chips I almost go into convulsions," said Dostoyevsky, while Anatole France wrote, "The gambler is driven by the fascination of danger at the bottom of all great passions." The characters the reader meets in Players -- chess grand masters, poolroom hustlers, or street-hardened practitioners of the short con -- are all alike propelled by the ecstasy of risk. "The stake is money," France wrote, "in other words, immediate, infinite possibilities." In fact, as the reader hooks up with David Mamet in the poker room and meets Damon Runyon's Bookie Bob, Saul Bellow's immortal Yellow Kid, and learns from Herbert Asbury about the antics of Izzy and Moe, and from David Maurer about the discreet charm of the confidence man, Walter Tevis on Fast Eddie Felson and Minnesota Fats on the seductions of nineteenth-century gambling dens, high lives and low will merge and the world of gambler and con-artist will blur. Selected writings by Jorge Luis Borges, Hunter S. Thompson, Nick Tosches, and many others are featured.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560253808
Publisher:	Running Press Book Publishers
Publication date:	12/31/2002
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stephen Hyde and Geno Zanetti are a writing, researching, and filmmaking team based in Portsmouth, England. They are also the editors of White Lines: Writers on Cocaine.

Editorial Reviews

Quirky collection of pieces on the shadow side of risk from the anthology duo (White Lines, p. 1097).

In the age of the bear market, when many a 401(k) has turned out to be a crapshoot, it’s nice to be reminded that shooting craps has a long and dishonorable history. In "The Story of Dice," Ricky Jay argues that man's propensity to load dice is one of the overlooked triumphs of civilization. The best pieces here are essays, like Jay's, or slices of hard-to-find memoirs. An excerpt from Kent Walker's Son of a Grifter, for instance, paints a bloodcurdling portrait of his mother, a serial murderer who in collaboration with Kent's younger brother David finally went too far by murdering Irene Silverman, an 82-year-old apartment owner on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Mostly, however, this collection riffs on the softer side of riff-raff. A historical essay by Al Alvarez (from Poker—Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats) stands in nice contrast to John Molyneux's portrait of a quintessentially British poker palace, "Poker in the Strand." Rufus Jarman wrote "The Spanish Prisoner, the Beautiful Senorita and You" decades ago, but it outlines a get-rich-quick con game that is obviously the ancestor of the famous Nigerian coup e-mails received by thousands of Internet users every day. (In the postal version, a letter outlining the dubious situation of a Mexican or Spanish businessman, his beautiful daughter, and a lot of unclaimed cash waiting around for a suitable rescuer apparently attracted a regular supply of victims eager to mix chivalry and the profit motive.) The fiction, not as recherché as the rest, includes Kipling's "The Man Who Would be King," a selection from Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and aportion of Dostoevsky's The Gambler: beautiful pieces, but a bit too easy. Surely editors Hyde and Zanetti could have found more arcane gems.

Some predictable choices, then, but generally an idiosyncratic and enjoyable mix.

Kirkus Reviews