Lucky at Cards

by Lawrence Block

Book Overview

AT CARDS AND WITH WOMEN, BILL MAYNARD KNEW HOW TO CHEAT On the mend after getting run out of Chicago, professional cardsharp Bill Maynard is hungry for some action - but not nearly as hungry as Joyce... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0843957689
• ISBN13: 9780843957686
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Leisure Books
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

All aces

You know you're in the classic noir time zone when our protagonist is disgusted by the taste of nicotine on the fingers of the dentist working on his teeth. Bill, a professional card sharp, has lammed out of Chicago with a mouth full of broken teeth (guess why). A pause for dental repairs at some huckburg. An invitation to a poker game. At the game, one of the player's wives, Joyce, wanders in and, on the QT, let's Bill know she recognizes what he's doing. Bill and Joyce, being two of a kind, plot to take hubby's money.( Interestingly, it's not by killing him.) While Bill starts putting the set-up in place, he takes a job as cover. What do you know? He's good at this job! Then he meets a soulful school teacher, who digs him. Two paths. Which one? You may think you have it figured out, but Block pulls off a twist ending that will have you grinning and shaking your head. If you like your pulp high on wit and low on gunplay, this is your book.

The Card Cheat

Here is yet another gem from the Hard Case Crime series. This, the third re-issue of noir master Lawrence Block (others have been Grifter's Game (Hard Case Crime) and The Girl With the Long Green Heart (Hard Case Crime)), proves to be a minor classic of the genre. Block, more than just thrilling us with another tough-talking pot-boiler, presents us with a Psych 101 study of the fringe criminal mind. Bill Maynard, a small time card sharp, settles in a bucolic village 3 hours outside of NYC long enough to become entangled with the well-off, Friday night Poker playing, Country club set. He secures a good job in sales, meets a nice girl; and a not so nice broad. The intriguing part here is Bill's temptation, not by the dark side, but rather by the normal, everyday, boring, firmly anchored life of a successful salesman married to a devoted wife. Will Bill be drawn to the light side or will he finally have his marked cards and deal them too? Read Lucky At Cards, you won't feel cheated.

Great story still works

This is a fabulous reprint of a Lawrence Block title originally published in 1964 from the good folks at Hard Case Crime. I don't believe anything was altered to fit 2007. Esso gas is mentioned. The prices all sound like 1964's. I like that. This paperback is a pure gem. The card sharp is Bill Maynard who has breezed into town. After caught cheating and getting his thumbs busted, Bill beat it out of Chicago. He meets a vivacious Joyce Rogers who's married to a Murray Rogers, a wealthy tax lawyer. Sparks fly. Bill and Joyce soon scheme to rip off Murray and go off to live the good life. The poker and card-playing references give the tale its gritty realism. Bill with a conscience becomes a likeable protagonist. Marvelous twists and great minor characters, too.

Don't Miss This One

This is the best of Block's Hard Case Crime novels, though all three are superb. It's all that the reviewers say--vintage, pulpy noir with all the expected features and attachments. The interesting thing is that it's very different from the current Block style. Block's Scudder, Burglar, and Hit Man books are silky smooth, with economical plotting, perfect pacing, and effortless, but plausible endings. LUCKY AT CARDS is very different, and not just because of the differences in genre. For one thing, the book spends a lot of time on the mechanics of the card sharp's craft, the differences between cheating at gin and cheating at poker, the simplicity of cheating at bridge, etc. Second, the plotting is far more complex than Block's usual, with cuticle-chewing suspense and nasty double binds. The characters are straight out of the pulp noir genre, but they're still engaging and memorable. One of the first we meet is a dentist with a heavy nicotine addiction who sticks his fingers in the protagonist's mouth and annoys him with their taste. Yum. Welcome to pulpdom.

Another Block reprint

"They say every man has a weakness. They say that for every man there's a woman somewhere in the world who can make him jump through fiery hoops just by snapping her fingers. They say a man's lucky if he never meets that woman." -- from Lucky at Cards If your publishing imprint's best-selling novels were by a particular author, you'd keep putting out novels by that author, wouldn't you? Well, that must be what's going on over at Hard Case Crime, because Lucky at Cards is the third "lost" Lawrence Block classic they've come out with. Lucky for us, it's another doozy, but what else could you possibly expect from the master of the crime novel? Bill Maynard is an ex-magician who found his way into the card-sharp business. He upset the wrong people in his last town, so he's moved temporarily to New York, following an opportunity. But he's about to get very distracted by another, much more unexpected, opportunity -- one "with hooker's hips and queen-sized [...]," and one that's easily as dangerous as getting aces and eights. Lucky at Cards was originally released under the title The Sex Shuffle and the byline "Sheldon Lord," and it was published in 1964, the year before The Girl with the Long Green Heart, Block's previous Hard Case Crime outing. It shares a more optimistic tone with that novel that is a far cry from the much darker Grifter's Game (a.k.a. Mona) from just a couple of years before. This is apparently a huge coup for the Hard Case gang as Block has been notoriously shy when it comes to his early pseudonymous novels. Its brisk pacing is a big attraction, but Lawrence Block's forte has always been his wonderfully complex plots, especially in these early novels. The likable, relatable characters like Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr came later -- guys like Bill Maynard in Lucky at Cards are just slightly nonaverage Joes with very healthy imaginations. Hell, they think like novelists, with their convoluted scenarios involving multiple character roles and layers of deception requiring huge amounts of footwork and no discernible sleep. No real person could pull all this off. And while this may be a drawback for some readers, I get a lot of fun out of watching these unrealistic, but still somehow highly plausible, situations play out. As long as Hard Case Crime keeps discovering these gems, I'll keep reading them.