Review: Grifter's Game

Grifter's Game by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading Block as long as I’ve been reading noir, which is close to thirty years now. I’ve enjoyed his Scudder novels – which my father recommended to me as far back as the late 1980s – as well as the Bernie Rhodenbar and Hit Man novels. He may well be the king of the detective series; others have strong ones, but three? That may be unbeatable.

So I am predisposed to like and admire anything he does, and, when Ken Bruen dropped a reference to enjoying Block and I found a copy of this in a great used book store in Ithaca, NY, I decided to give it a shot.

I didn’t realize when I picked this up that it was from 1961. I wouldn’t have guessed Block was old enough to be writing back then, but it turns out he is almost a missing link between the James L. Cain school and the more contemporary series-focused star. I’m not going to call him better than Elmore Leonard, but I’m also not going to say that he’d be embarrassed by the comparison. Even back that far, closing in on 60 years ago, Block was a pro’s pro.

Put differently, this is a conventional femme fatale/just-better-than-stupid male patsy story, but it’s so expertly done that it could serve as a textbook. (I’ve heard of apprentice writers who sometimes write out models of their hoped-for genre by hand, trying to unpack what makes an admirable work function. If I ever try that, this will be one candidate.) When I say I remember little of the early parts of this, it’s not an insult. This one is like a literary equivalent of a roller coaster. You know it’s headed somewhere, and you know you’re on board. You don’t have to think much, but it will thrill you all the same.

As a [SPOILER] this has a memorable and disturbing conclusion, though, one I imagine I’ll remember for a long time. Near the end, Joe goes to a Hitchcock film and realizes how much of it turns on coincidence. As a viewer, he forgives it because the direction is so crisp, so distracting in its skill. He starts to realize the same may be true of Mona, who might have been leading him along so he’d kill her wealthy heroin-dealing husband.

Joe considers that Mona may have been distracting him from coincidence, and Block runs the risk of making the same claim for himself. And it works; it’s only when I look back at the coincidence of Joe stealing just the right luggage and then falling for the owner’s wife that it bothers me. Block implicitly compares himself to Hitchcock, and, again, he doesn’t embarrass himself with the claim.

When Joe does see through it, though, he realizes he can’t imagine killing Mona, but he also can’t imagine living with her. She’d leave him eventually, and she’s got all the money. He wants her, but he wants to be able to control her.

So [DOUBLE SPOILER] in one of the most sadistic moves I can remember from fiction, he gets her hooked on heroin. It’s brutal and blunt, but he keeps her in a hotel room, shooting her up every several hours for a week, and then he has her, or at least a shell of her. He fell in love with her beauty, but also her independence. The drug steals it from her, he steals it from her, and the novel ends with the likelihood that he’ll get himself hooked as well, less out of guilt than a burning desire to follow her and be with her even in her drugged state.

I’ve thought a lot over the last several years about the nature of the femme fatale. I incline toward the argument that she is a proto-feminist figure, a woman who, lacking options in a world where only men can have true economic, cultural, or political power, uses her sexuality to break the bonds of convention.

In such a light, Mona is a classic femme fatale. Her ultimate comeuppance marks her defeat, but it does so in a way that acknowledges her allure. Joe was frightened of her power, but he realizes in the end that he loved her for it. In the world they share – a world where World War II vets still dominate society – there’s no place for such power, and that eventually means there’s no place for either of them.

This is genre done with real skill by a guy who’s an old master today, but who was a young star just figuring it out when he did this one.


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