From the Blogosphere
I’ve had very little time for blogging recently because I’ve been swamped with work, but I thought I might share some links to blog articles that have caught my eye on the web lately:
Over at the Rap Sheet, Ali Karim reviews the debut novel, Spycatcher, by former SIS officer Matthew Dunn.
Megan Abbott has been on tour promoting her latest novel, The End of Everything. On her blog she gives some thoughts on real-life missing children cases that may, or may not, have been an influence on the novel.
If like me you’re obsessed with all things related to the Black Dahlia case, then you might be interested to read Black Dahlia Avenger author Steve Hodel’s brief obituary of LAPD Homicide Detective Ed Jokisch, the last surviving member of the original 1947 investigation.
This is not particularly recent but Crimeculture has been publishing a series of interviews that Charles Rzepka has been conducting with King of American Crime Fiction, Elmore Leonard. These have to be amongst the most in-depth interviews Leonard has ever given.
At The Crime of it All Len Wanner has posted an excellent interview with Smokeheads author Doug Johnstone.
Tabloid Journalism Hush-Hush Style
News of the World Final Edition
I was in the U.S. when the News of the World released its final edition, and the ongoing scandal has inspired me to reread some of James Ellroy’s work on tabloid journalism in his historical fiction. In Ellroy’s LA Quartet and Underworld USA trilogy, certain tabloids, specifically Hush-Hush magazine which actually existed and Ellroy read as a child, are intricately involved in criminal conspiracies, disseminating false information often in collusion with organised crime or branches of government. In American Tabloid, the scandal rag Hush-Hush comes to its demise when, fed information by rogue intelligence operatives and organised crime figures, it prematurely prints an article claiming the Bay of Pigs invasion to be a complete success and Castro has been overthrown.
Ellroy writes the Hush-Hush articles in lurid prose using an extreme form of alliteration. I’ve typed out the specific article as it appears in American Tabloid below. If you love (or hate) the tabloids you might appreciate Ellroy’s hyperbolic prose style:
COWARDLY CASTRATO CASTRO OUSTED!
RETREATING REDS WREAK RAT-POISON REVENGE!
His rancorous Red reign ran for a rotten two years. Shout it loud, proud and un-kowtowed: Fidel Castro, the bushy-bearded beatnik bard of bilious bamboozlement, was determinedly and dramatically deposed last week by a heroically homeland-hungering huddle of hopped-up hermanos righteously rankled by the Red Recidividists’s rape of their nation!
Call it D-Day ’61, kats & kittens. Call the Bay of Pigs the Caribbean Carthage; Playa Giron the Patriotic Parthenon. Call Castro debiliated and depilatoried – word has it that he shaved off his beard to dodge the deep and dangerous depths of revenge-seeker recognition!
Fidel Castro: the shabbily-shorn Samson of 1961! His deliriously delighted Delilahs: God-fearing, red, white & blue revering Cuban heroes!!!
Castro and his murderously malignant machinations: trenchantly terminated, 10-4, over-and-out. The Monster’ maliciously maladroit maneuverings: still morally mauling Miami!!!!
Item: Fidel Castro craves cornucopias of cash – getaway gelt to felicitously finance future finaglings!
Item: Fidel Castro has cravenly criticized America’s eminently egalitarian and instantly inclusive racial policies, reproachfully ragging U.S. leaders for their nauseously niggling neglect of Negro citizens.
Item: as previously posited, Fidel Castro and seditious sibling Raul sell homicidally hazardous Heroin in Miami.
Item: as the Bay of Pigs waggled and waxed as Castro’s Waterloo, the mendacious mastiff’s minor miscreant minions mined Miami’s Negro section with rat-poison-riddled Heroin! Scores of Negro drug addicts injected these carcinogenic Commie cocktails and died doomonically draconean deaths!!!
Item: this issue was rushed to press, to insure that Hush-Hush readers would not be left hungrily homesick for our properly protectionist parade of Playa Giron platitudes. Thus we cannot name the aforementioned Negroes or offer specific details on their dastardly deaths. That information will appear in scintillatingly-scheduled subsequent issues, in courageous conjunction with a new ongoing feature: “Banana Republic Boxscore: Who’s Red? Who’s Dead?”
Adios, dear reader – and let’s all meet for a tall Cuba Libre in laceratingly liberated Havana.
Len Wanner’s book Dead Sharp (Two Ravens Press, 2011) contains nine informative, and entertaining interviews with Scottish crime writers, and a Ten Commandments for successful interviewing. In his Ten Commandments Wanner asks “Am I a good enough interviewer to tell you how to become a better one?” On the evidence of the interviews here, he is. He picks his questions well, is friendly without being gushing, presses his point to get an answer, and manages to bring a lightness and humour even to such glum and serious subjects as gender politics.
It is probably inevitable that the book begins with Ian Rankin, and that his name, and the description “Tartan Noir” should turn up more than once, even in interviews with other writers. Wanner’s interview with Rankin sets the tone for the questioning throughout the book; that is, unexpected, and revealing. The question “If Rebus is an ‘Old Testament sort of guy’, what kind of God are you?” elicits the response from Rankin that “I’m a much more forgiving God than Rebus would accept”, which tells us something about Rankin, and Rebus, but also leads to a discussion about Presbyterianism and guilt in Scottish crime writing that brings in Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride, both subjects of later interviews.
Wanner’s jokey, and quick-witted style of questioning doesn’t always get him as far as he hopes. Questioning Allan Guthrie on what it was like adapting his novel Two-Way Split as a screenplay, he gets the one word response “Interesting”, while a question about whether he has been tempted to write a series, is rewarded with “No. Never”. Guthrie’s guarded style distinguishes him from the more loquacious subjects here, but later Wanner manages to draw him out on the subject, and we are treated, at some length, to Guthrie’s thoughts on crime and detective fiction, and the “nightmare” which, in his view, is the Police Procedural.
The interviews are revealing about the details of writing methods. Karen Campbell, for example, writes strictly without music playing, and says “I think you write the book you want to read yourself, don’t you?” Alice Thompson is apparently more autocratic. She often writes in noisy cafes, and says “I don’t think about the reader at all”. More interesting is what the writers have to say about genre, Brookmyre taking the position that “what we like in crime fiction is the reassurance our choices would have been vindicated …” while for Rankin it is a “vicarious thrill”. To varying degrees, all address the idea of crime fiction as a genre well suited for exploring political and social issues. Paul Johnston is asked whether crime fiction has “tasked itself with addressing such uncomfortable truths [as heroin addiction]?” he answers: “Well, it should do as far as I am concerned”.
Most of the writers interviewed here are university educated, but their relationship with the academy is sometimes uneasy. Rankin, who began writing his first Rebus novel while he was a postgraduate student, likes the idea of crime fiction being studied in universities, because he thinks it deserves to be taken seriously. Even so, he is scathing in his dismissal of the theoretical turn in literary criticism, describing Deconstruction as “scientism. It was people saying ‘We need to look more scientific. We need to look like we know what we are doing.'” Rankin’s ambivalence is shared by Paul Johnston, who says there is “no reason why there shouldn’t be an academic tradition of studying crime fiction”, but Johnston is strongly aware of the commercial imperatives of crime writing, a point that comes out of many of these interviews. Indeed, it is crime fiction’s ability to transcend itself, to deliver Rankin’s vicarious thrill, and yet still satisfy the more literary interests of character development, social and historical commentary, and complex morality, that makes it so compelling to many readers.
Dead Sharp is fascinating for the details of it’s subjects’ writing lives, but what emerges most strongly from this entertaining book, is Scotland. That may seem an obvious point to make about a book of interviews subtitled “Scottish Crime Writers and their Craft”, where you might expect Scotland to feature quite significantly. But what emerges here is a group of writers who are quite different from each other, both personally, and in terms of the books they write, but who are all exploring ideas of Scottishness, and what Scotland might be like, as a place, and as a nation. Brookmyre comments that Scottish writers seem to be more acceptable to publishers than in the past, and suggests that stories about Scotland are perceived as “more modern, and immediate and raw”.
It’s a debatable point, but judging from the interviews here, Scotland, and in particular Scottish cities, seem to inspire Scottish crime writers. Louise Welsh speaks of being inspired by Glasgow, while MacBride, whose novels are set in Aberdeen, jokes about The “Edinburgh Mafia” in the form of Ian Rankin and his fans, but identifies Rankin’s most famous character, Rebus, as quintessentially Scottish in his refusal to accept that he might be wrong. Scottish crime writing, like this book, and he suggests, perhaps Scots themselves, is irreverent, and often funny, even in the face of hardship and horror. Neil Forsyth sums up the difficulty of the Scottish writer, claiming that writing is essentially quite a cocky thing to do, and that since being cocky doesn’t go down well in Scotland, the only defence is self-deprecating humour. If there is one thread that binds these writers together, self-deprecating humour would be it.
Dead Sharp is a terrific introduction to some of the best contemporary Scottish crime writers, in which they explain their modes of working, and their views on developing the genre, and entertaining readers. The description “Tartan Noir” may be frustrating to writers like Rankin, and those who have no choice but to coexist with his success, but as MacBride explains, the thing about “Tartan Noir” is its diversity, and that there is no one style that defines it. As these excellent interviews show, Scottish crime writing refuses to be pinned down to a snappy marketing description. As Karen Campbell puts it, “We’re more than that, much more”.
Ellroy Opts Out, Goodbye to Facebook and Other Stories
This story must have slipped me by, but it seems James Ellroy closed his FaceBook page back in April and signed off in typically abrasive fashion:
Dear FB Friends,
Fuck Facebook!!!!! — It has proven to be worthless as a book-selling device, and is nothing but a repository for perverts, reparation-seekers, old buddies looking for handouts, syphillitic ex-girlfriends looking for extra-curricular schlong and hack writers begging for blurbs. For those looking for the REAL Ellroy shit, go to my wigged-out website: JamesEllroy.net.
Sayonara, Motherfuckers!!!
Put this alongside the news that the writer of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin, and the film’s star Jesse Eisenberg have both closed their FaceBook accounts it may be too early too say FaceBook’s days are numbered, as Will Heaven writes at the Telegraph, but it seems that the networking site is beginning its decline.
Very sad news to hear of the passing of actor Peter Falk who has died at the age of 83. Falk had a distinguished career on stage and screen, but he will forever be remembered as the shambling, dishevelled but always underestimated Lieutenant Columbo in the Detective series:
A rather different story, but it was stunning to hear of the arrest of former Boston crime boss and FBI informant James ‘Whitey’ Bulger in Los Angeles. Bulger had been one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives for fifteen years after going into hiding in December, 1994. Good news for the relatives of Bulger’s victims who will finally get a chance to see justice served. Bulger was memorably the inspiration for the character of Frank Costello, the Mob Boss played so brilliantly by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed:
With the arrest of Bulger and recent assassination of Osama Bin Laden it has been a good year for law enforcement with the top two targets removed from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list. You can read the list here, it makes for interesting albeit disturbing reading.
My wife and I are going to the US to visit friends and family, and hopefully get some work done! I’ll be blogging again in mid-July.
States of Crime
This week I make my first visit to Belfast, Northern Ireland where I’m giving a paper titled ‘Rogue Cops and Shakedown Artists: Agents of the State in James Ellroy’s American Tabloid‘ at the ‘States of Crime: The State in Crime Fiction’ conference held at Queen’s University. Looking forward to hearing lots of great papers, including a talk by novelists David Peace and Eoin McNamee. Should be fun.
Stephan Kessler's Daniel and King Cyrus in Bel's Temple
Attempts to trace the origins of crime fiction suffer from an infinite regression problem, for any author you name as the ‘first crime writer’ there will always be another writer who preceded him or her as a crime writer of sorts. However, many crime fiction and biblical scholars have named several stories appended to the Book of Daniel as the first crime stories, and it’s difficult to go back much further than biblical literature. The stories of ‘Bel and the Dragon’ and ‘Susanna’ are often regarded as more specifically crime narratives than other Bible stories such as Cain and Abel.
The first section of ‘Bel and the Dragon’ has been cited as the first locked room mystery. (The second section concerning the Dragon is a companion narrative very similar in style.) King Cyrus asks Daniel (a court favourite) whether he regards the Babylonian God Bel to be a living deity, citing that the idol of Bel in the temple consumes the food offerings made to it daily. Daniel responds that Bel is made of clay and bronze and therefore cannot eat. Cyrus demands that the priests prove that Bel eats the offerings. If they can prove Bel does eat the offerings, Daniel will be killed, if they cannot prove it, the priests will be killed. The offerings are left for Bel and the temple is sealed so no one can get in and out. Sensing foul play, Daniel, in the presence of the King, scatters ashes around the whole perimeter of the temple. The next day the perimeter of ashes has clearly been broken by the priests who have entered the temple through a secret door and taken the offerings for themselves. The priests and their entire families are put to death.
Aside from being a text that ridicules the worship of idols, ‘Bel and the Dragon’ is also an ancestor to the locked room mystery in that the
action is confined to a small setting wherein the crime takes place and from which the solution must come. Daniel plays detective determined to find a rational answer to the mystery as opposed to a superstitious one. The story is only part of the Catholic and Orthodox Biblical canon. In addition to the apocryphal stories connected to Daniel containing crime fiction elements, there are more parallels with crime fiction in the Book of Daniel taken as a whole (it is significant that E L Doctorow’s historical crime novel of the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg is titled The Book of Daniel). Other moments in the Book of Daniel that are reminiscent of crime fiction narrartives include the heroic protagonists surviving the elaborate death-traps of the fiery furnace and the lion’s den, and the villains of the piece receiving poetic justice when they are submitted to the fire and lions. Also, there are Daniel’s closing apocalyptic prophecies which deal with intrigue and take a rather cynical view of the inevitability of political corruption. Themes which still serve crime writers well to this day.
George S Schuyler and Crime Fiction
George S Schuyler
Schuyler’s most famous work is Black No More (1931), a science fiction satire in which an African-American scientist devises a process which can transform blacks into caucasians. As more and more black people undergo this change, the racial and economic inequality in the United States becomes increasingly apparent and problematic. Aside from this seminal fantasy novel, Schuyler’s reputation in crime fiction lies in a series of stories he penned using the pseudonym ‘Samuel I. Brooks’ and were originally serialised in the African-American newspaper Pittsburgh Courier from 1936 to 1938 and latterly published as the novel Black Empire. In Black Empire, Schuyler demonstrates his skill at interweaving both political ideas and literary styles. The plot is somewhat sketchy and takes secondplace to rather elaborate action scenes (most scholars believe Schuyler invented the story as it was being serialised and did not know where it was going) but tells the story of Carl Slater, a black journalist for the ‘Harlem Blade’ who witnesses the murder of a white woman by the debonair Dr Belsidus. Forced to choose between death at the hands of Belsidus or to join his mysterious organisation, the Black Internationale, Slater chooses to join Belsidus and soon becomes part of his fiendishly ingenious scheme to achieve pan-Africanism and subjugate the white colonial powers to a new black superpower. The plot is outlandish, the diabolical but suave Belsidus seems inspired by Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, the style sometimes comes across as Golden Age, but the prose often exudes hard-boiled sensibilities, such as the newspaper headlines which form the titles of every episode:
Carl and Tom Repair Plane, Return to Desert Camp and Take Off with Pat, Della; But Gas Gives Out and Party Is Captured by Cannibals
As this headline suggests, Slater finds himself in many death-defying scenarios, and with cannibals, armies of plague-carrying rats, bizarre religions, spies and weapons of mass destruction featuring heavily in the plot, Schuyler is a writer clearly at home with action scenes. And yet the first-person prose gives Schuyler’s protagonist Slater plenty of opportunities to wax eloquent:
We have to become conditioned to our changed environment almost over night, historically speaking. Physically, we live in the Twentieth Century; psychologically, we live many thousands of years ago. We come into this world made for a life as a huntsman or herdsman and find ourselves in an environment of whirling machines, confusion upon confusion for the sake of order, complications and responsibilities and temptations that try the hardiest souls and often leave them balanced precariously on the precipice of insanity. Life has been made too complex, and man was intended to live a life of simplicity.
When reading Black Empire, there are constant reminders of what an enigma Schuyler was as a writer. The tone can be flippant and then eloquent, over- the- top but still quite prophetic about the looming Second World War. And the narrative reveals the shifting political views of Schuyler at the time. In the twenties and thirties Schuyler was considered a left-wing radical: he had joined the Socialist party in 1921. However, Schuyler was unorthodox amongst left-wingers in his admiration for capitalism, and Black Empire features overt criticisms of Black American culture such as the Harlem Renaissance and Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. Schuyler was scathing in his condemnation of white racism and the Jim Crow laws, but he was increasingly identified as a conservative and became a staunch opponent of the Civil Rights movement. The complexity of Schuyler’s political views is ever-present in his contribution to crime fiction and Black Empire, a novel so outrageous, polemical, unpredictable, thrilling and yet profound.
A friend recently tipped me off to a series of videos posted on YouTube under the title Marble Hornets. Marble Hornets is a form of internet vérité horror similar in style and perhaps inspired by the Louise Paxton videos. The plot is not easy to explain but here goes: our main protagonist is Jay who begins this story somewhere in the middle of events explaining to the viewer how he volunteered on a student film, titled ‘Marble Hornets’, directed by his friend Alex Kralie, and how Alex began to behave very oddly during the production– abruptly abandoning the project and disappearing off the scene. Jay slowly goes through the footage of the film, trying to piece together what was happening to Alex, and by extension he begins to experience the same frightening journey himself. What follows is a gripping and suspenseful examination of the supernatural, the metaphysical and of human paranoia, and by telling the story through short episodic YouTube videos, Marble Hornets is part of a new form of internet horror genre. Here is the link to Marble Hornets Youtube page where you can view all of the videos released thus far.
Marble Hornets is not quite as good as the Louise Paxton hoax, it is a tad too pretentious for a start. The Louise Paxton videos benefitted from a certain simplicity in the storyline and a stunning central performance from Zoe Richards. But Marble Hornets is a sprawling ambitious horror saga (with more videos still to come), lovingly made with real creativity and imagination. To appreciate Marble Hornets to its fullest extent I would recommend watching two or three videos at a time over the course of several days. Once you have familiarised yourself with the story, these links might prove helpful: a wiki page with lots of information and theories on the story, and the YouTube page of the mysterious Totheark.
Absurdism in the Works of Joseph Wambaugh
Joseph Wambaugh
James Ellroy once described police officer turned novelist Joseph Wambaugh as ‘a right-wing absurdist and how many right-wing absurdists have you run into?’ Wambaugh’s novels may not be as overtly absurd (or as critically acclaimed) as the work of Paul Auster or James Sallis, but his stories certainly contain many bizarre moments. Wambaugh was in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1957 and joined the LAPD in 1960, so from personal experience he learned how rigidly structured, discipline-driven state institutions work. Wambaugh had ten years experience in the LAPD when his debut novel The New Centurions (1970) was released. The novel charts the first five years in the careers of three very different policemen and contains faint elements of what would later make Wambaugh’s work so controversial and gripping, such as the portrayal of police work being encumbered by the suspicion that judges, lawyers, social workers and citizen activists had of the police. While some would view suspicion as vital for maintaining police accountability, in The New Centurions it is portrayed merely as farcical. But Wambaugh is not wholly uncritical of the LAPD: the novel aroused controversy when LAPD Police Chief Ed Davis tried to get alterations made to the manuscript as it detailed the ‘Policeman’s Discount’, wherein police officers could get free meals, cigarettes and liquor at local stops throughout the city. Both Wambaugh and the publishers refused to back down and the manuscript went unchanged. Perhaps this was the beginning of the end of Wambaugh’s police career, as he would resign from the LAPD four years later on account that his literary celebrity was interfering with his police work. With his resignation, however, his portrayal of police work became increasingly cynical. Whereas The New Centurions displayed a certain degree of police idealism that gradually declined as individuals became hardened over the years, in Wambaugh’s most famous novel The Choirboys (1975) all idealism seems to have disappeared from the outset and policemen are more concerned with pursuing hedonistic pleasures than upholding the law. Gradually Wambaugh blurred the line between the police station being symbolic of a disciplined state institution and the society it is meant to oversee, which had suffered a complete collapse of laws and values. But if critics thought they would be able to pin down Wambaugh merely as a police or crime writer, he would continue to defy them. In the late 1980’s Wambaugh moved from LA to San Diego, and his novel settings also shifted locations. From that point Wambaugh’s police did not have to contend with the hellish urban problems of LA but with their own boredom in the suburban bliss of San Diego and uber-rich Palm Springs. Later works moved away from black comedy to more outre farce, and the main text was often preceded by quirky character synopses, such as this one from The Secrets of Harry Bright (1985):
SGT. SIDNEY “BLACK SID” BLACKPOOL – an L.A.P.D. homicide detective with a staggering Johnny Walker habit. Involved in a dead-end murder investigation that strikes closer to home than he can bear.
Aside from the abrupt changes in writing style, Wambaugh has also mastered seamless transitions between fiction and factual work and back again. Inspired by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), Wambaugh became if not the most distinguished practitioner of the non-fiction novel then certainly the most prolific and diverse. Wambaugh knew Capote personally, and In Cold Blood was a significant influence on Wambaugh’s first non-fiction work The Onion Field (1973), an account of the kidnapping and murder of LAPD officer Ian James Campbell by two criminals. The Onion Field plays to Wambaugh’s greatest strengths as a writer: it is heart-poundingly tense when fellow policeman Karl Hettinger is escaping from the two killers who have just murdered his partner, and it is also scathingly critical of the absurdities of the legal system which prolonged the subsequent trial for several years. In the true crime genre, controversy is never far behind, and Wambaugh’s career is no exception. Wambaugh’s Echoes in the Darkness (1987) deals with the murder of Susan Reinert and her two children and the subsequent trial and conviction for the crimes of Jay C. Smith who was Principal of Upper Merion Area High School in Pennsylvania where Ms. Reinert worked as an English teacher. Wambaugh allegedly paid police investigators on the case $50,000 on the condition that Smith be arrested. Without an arrest and a conviction in the case they are portraying, true crime authors are often denied a contract by publishers and Wambaugh later admitted, ‘I didn’t think the book would work until something happened to Smith’ (Capote was faced with a similar problem waiting for the two killers to be executed when he was writing In Cold Blood). Smith was found guilty and sentenced to death. After spending six years on Death Row, his conviction was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for prosecutorial misconduct. The controversy surrounding Echoes in the Darkness is a murky affair from which Wambaugh emerges with little credit.
Wambaugh had previously handled another true crime case with sound judgement. In the late 1970’s Wambaugh was contacted by convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald was a former Army medical doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters. MacDonald protested his innocence (and still does to this day) and wanted Wambaugh to write his story. Wambaugh declined MacDonald’s offer and wrote back to him:
You should understand that I would not think of writing your story. It would be my story. Just as The Onion Field was my story and In Cold Blood is Capote’s story.
True crime authors have their own concept of narrative which may not always conform to how things actually happened or how the subjects of the books see things. MacDonald was almost certainly not innocent as his defence was flimsy (although some commentators have their doubts that he’s the killer), and Wambaugh didn’t want to be put in a position of defending him in print. This refusal proved especially prophetic as the writer Joe McGuinness, who eventually agreed to write MacDonald’s story, depicted MacDonald unfavourably as a lurid and pitiful psychopath in the bestselling true crime book Fatal Vision (1984). Subsequently, when MacDonald sued McGuinness, it was found that the author had feigned deep sympathy with the convicted killer during research for the book, even writing letters saying his conviction was unjust and condoning his adultery.
When Wambaugh returned to fiction with his Hollywood Station series of novels, it might have seemed at first like he was looking to avoid controversy, but he used the novel format to once again to defend his conservative views on law and order, as the series is highly critical of restrictions placed upon the LAPD in the aftermath of the Rampart scandal. Now in his seventh decade with almost two dozen books to his name, Wambaugh has still not achieved the critical distinction which has been bestowed upon some of his fellow crime writers, but his books stands as unique, and at turns surreal and bizarre, portrayals of police work. And although Wambaugh is cynical about many aspects of the justice system, his moving depiction of weary policemen forced to operate in a fallen, absurdist world has always struck me as making them appear more heroic and admirable than a more idealised portrayal ever would.
Edward Bunker on Poker
Day after day, ten hours of each of them, I watched the game through the bars. D’Arcy sat to Sampsell’s left, right by the corner of my cell, and he began to flash his cards to me. He showed me if he bluffed (not often) and got away with it. The bluff, he told me, was really an advertisement to promote getting called when he had a powerhouse hand. It was nice to bluff successfully, but getting caught was also useful. If you never bluffed, you never got called when you had a good hand. More than any other poker game, how one plays a hand depends on their position relative to the dealer. Raised bets and re-raises are frequent before the draw, and although there is a wager after the draw, and sometimes it is raised, an axiom of lowball is that all the action is before the draw. D’Arcy gave me another axiom: be easy to bluff, for it is far cheaper to make a mistake and throw a hand away, than to “keep someone honest” and call.
Bunker also expounds on how to cheat at poker, but adds the caveat that this should not be practised:
An old dope fiend confidence man taught me how to hand muck (palm cards) and deal from the bottom of the deck. Over the years I found that when I could cheat, I didn’t need to because I was a better poker player than that. When the other players were so good that cheating would have helped, they were also so good that they, too, knew the moves. Nothing illegal is seen, but there are telltale ways of holding one’s hand, or framing the deck. The primary thing was being able to spot a card mechanic. When I did I would give him the signal known to con men around the world, a clenched fist on the table. It signals he must play it on the up and up. A flat palm means go ahead and work. There are also standard signals for con men who play the match and strap, and for boosters and till tappers and other members of the vanishing breed of professional thieves who go back at least as far as Elizabethan England.
The Venetian Vase 