Grifter's Game – Lawrence Block, 1961 ★★

Pulp Does as Pulp Is

Paperback readers want simplicity. Never mind flowery titles; give ‘em a generic description with an author’s name up front. Call it Nelson DeMille’s Globetrotting With Guns V or Dan Brown’s Made-Up Historical Facts To Play With Your Head IV. Makes choosing easier.

Pulp fiction itself already is a famous movie title; other generic options exist. Want a novel about a grifter who plays games with his marks? Here you go. Grifter’s Game is a generic title for a generic novel. Not bad. Not great. Generic.

We meet Joe Marlin getting ready to skip on a big hotel bill in Philly. He fooled around with a woman he figured was rich. He figured wrong and ran up the bill courting her. Marlin’s a sleazy guy, but has a code of not mistreating little people. Stiffing a hotel is one thing; stiffing its employees another:

I never signed for tips. Two reasons for that. For one thing, I didn’t see any percentage in conning bellhops and waitresses who were probably as broke as I was. And when people sign for tips they get watched closely. Everybody watched them.

So I tipped in cash and I tipped heavy – a buck to a bellhop, a straight twenty percent to a waitress. It was expensive, but it was worth it. It had paid off.

Ever think about a life of crime? Lawrence Block has tips for you, too. Like how checking into a new hotel in Atlantic City without luggage makes clerks suspicious. Don’t have luggage? Steal some before checking in. You might even net some merchandise worth keeping. Joe Marlin winds up with an envelope stuffed with heroin, setting our plot into motion with Chapter 1 just underway.

It’s a generic plot, alright. Marlin finds something else at the hotel, a woman named Mona. Mona is super-hot. Also, she wants Joe the moment she sees him. They have groovy sex right there on the beach under the boardwalk at night. But there are complications. She has a husband, rich but old. She likes the idea of being a widow.

Oh, did I mention the husband is the same guy whose luggage Joe stole?

Mona herself presents the concept clearly: “Why do pretty girls marry rich old men? You know the answer as well as I do.” Wonder why Joe goes along like he does? Block reminds you about the pretty part:

She was just a little too good-looking. That bothered me. When a woman’s beauty blinds you, your work suffers.

Originally titled Mona, Grifter’s Game was Block’s first novel under his own name, launching one of detective fiction’s big names. Before this, he wrote soft-core porn in the 1950s under various pseudonyms, with titles like High School Sex Club, Campus Tramp, and The Adulterers.

Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with being generic. Sometimes you want a steak, sometimes a hamburger. Grifter’s Game is for the latter. People act a certain way because it suits the story; the author keeps you reading by keeping the plot taut. Descriptions are minimal:

Atlantic City.

A cruddy little town. A three-way combination of Times Square, Coney Island and Miami Beach. It was hardly the most exciting place in the world.

Later, our story moves west:

They were playing a straight house. Nothing was loaded. The house took its own little percentage and got rich. Money made in bootlegging and gunrunning and dope smuggling and whoremongering was invested quite properly in an entire town that stood as a monument to human stupidity, a boomtown in the state with the sparsest population and the densest people in the country.

Vegas.

The real tour Block gives is of the human underbelly. Drug dealers, thieves, fences, and prostitutes populate it. Block makes sure you know right away Joe Marlin belongs in their company. Even though he’s the narrator, it is a challenge feeling sympathy for him. Block still tries.

Lawrence Block in recent years, when he was a frequent guest on "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson." He is today one of crime fiction's best-known names. Image from http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2013/10/lawrence-block-on-craig-ferguson.html.

Thus his rule quoted above on not stiffing bellhops. Block also hints at a conscience. After Mona works her magic on Joe for a while, he begins to ponder his need for her, and getting hubby out of the way. He’s not comfortable about it:

The dinner was probably good. Big hotels cook dependably if not imaginatively. They don’t ruin steaks, which was what I ordered. But I didn’t taste my dinner. I thought about him and I thought about her and I tasted murder instead of meat.

Murder instead of meat… A bit purple, no? The fact is that line sticks out because it is a rare clam in Block’s efficient, generally smooth prose. There are others, but my main stylistic issues with Grifter’s Game center more on drab atmosphere and repetition.

Joe ponders his situation:

She wanted me and she wanted money and I don’t know how in hell she could have us both.

A few pages on, Mona gives Joe her own thoughts:

“I want the money and I want you and I can’t have both. I’m a spoiled little girl. I can’t do anything. All I can do is want.”

Mona also keeps reminding Joe how she doesn’t want another man after being with him, not even her husband. “I don’t want him touching me tonight, Joe,” she says. “Not when you’re this close to me. I couldn’t stand it.” You don’t need to have seen Body Heat or Double Indemnity to figure out what’s coming; it’s foreshadowed on every page.

Such obliviousness leaves an impression. Joe watches a Hitchcock movie, perhaps Strangers On A Train though he doesn’t identify it, and amuses himself noticing the far-fetched plot coincidences until it dawns on him he’s had similar experiences. Later, he coaches Mona on being a good actress when the time comes:

“Don’t overwork the grief bit, but let yourself react naturally. You’ll probably be a little sorry once it’s done, you know. The normal human reaction. Let it show, but don’t milk it.”

A strength of a good generic crime novel is in keeping things simple; Grifter’s Game does that well.

In terms of story, two main issues clouded my enjoyment. One is the lack of personality. Joe and Mona play out assigned roles Block tips off with the names he gives them. Think of a fishing net and Nat King Cole, and Grifter’s Game feels as predestined as John Calvin.

My other story issue was with the ending. By necessity it is hard-toned, but in a way that pushes the sourness, already seeping through the pages, to a place where it becomes not organic but contrived. Yes, it’s a genuine surprise you don’t expect, so points for that, but you don’t believe it, so the points get taken back.

By 2004 Grifter’s Game had apparently been out of print for years. Block had moved on. His Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr books each have their own legions of fans in the mystery-reader community. Block is the only writer to garner four Edgar Awards for best mystery short story. Then Grifter’s Game was pulled out of mothballs, given a garish new cover, and became the debut novel for a series of crime-fiction paperbacks, Hard Case Crime.

Hard Case Crime has kept on publishing through to the present day, mixing up vintage work that fell out of print from crime-fiction legends like Evan Hunter and Erle Stanley Gardner with original novels by Block, Max Allan Collins, and Donald E. Westlake. Stephen King, a non-crime fiction legend, produced a couple of originals, The Colorado Kid and Joyland, to help promote the book line.

There’s even a novel from Watergate co-conspirator E. Howard Hunt, House Dick, first published like Grifter’s Game back in 1961.

Strange as this may read, Grifter’s Game for all its flaws gave me a hankering for more Hard Case Crime novels. Sure, Grifter’s Game is a very basic story, but one that suggests possibility. Like sitting in a car on your 14^th cigarette at three in the morning, watching the lighted window of the house across the street while your fingers caress the cool metal of the Smith & Wesson in your shoulder holster… That doesn’t go away when you read a novel that uses such story elements to less than their full effect. Rather it builds, maybe out of frustration.

Nothing wrong with being generic. Even if a story doesn’t click all the way, you get a taste for what did and end up wanting more. Perhaps Hard Case Crime had this in mind when they kicked off their series with such an elemental, fast-moving example of pulp fiction, generic all the way through yet still hard to put down.