Tangled Web UK Review November 2007
Dead Man's Hand by
Otto Penzler(ed)
hbk out November 07
Published by Quercus
at £17.99
Short story anthologies are always a bit of a gamble. And this one more than most perhaps, when the relationship between fiction and the game of poker, the theme of Otto Penzler’s latest crime story collection for Quercus, has been so uncertain. Take your pick between the instructional approach of Herbert Yardley’s The Education of a Poker Player (1957) and, at the other extreme, Richard Jessup’s The Cincinnati Kid (1963) where the game becomes a metaphor for life. For the poker player the former is usually preferable, for the crime writer (and reader) the latter approach is more likely to pay off.
Three of the best stories here, in fact, follow the Jessup model. And, as female players feature ever more prominently amongst the game’s high-rollers, it is appropriate that all three feature female protagonists. In Joyce Carol Oates’s Strip Poker Annislee, Oates's marvellously rendered adolescent learns her first moves not only in poker but also in the perennial battle of the sexes. In Eric von Lustbader’s delicious The Uncertainty Principle another young woman finds herself on the cusp of a decision that will decide the course of her life. An empowered adolescent also features in Laura Lippman’s Hardly Knew Her. As it happens, it is her skills at football that first strengthen her hand, but it is her father’s (unsuccessful) devotion to poker that delivers those hard-earned lessons in life.
Poker players (or those more comfortable with the Yardley approach) will also enjoy the Lustbader, but otherwise should head straight for Sam Hill’s The Stake and Parnell Hall’s witty Deal Me In, all three stories slightly at odds (100-7 in The Stake) with preface-writer (and poker-pro) Howard “The Professor” Lederer’s dictum that the game is “more about the people you are playing with than the cards you are dealt”.
Hard-core crime fans will enjoy Bump, Jeffrey Deaver’s devious romp in the world of reality television, The Monks of the Abbey Victoria (not quite what it seems!) from Rupert Holmes and Walter Mosley’s stylish but somewhat far-fetched Mister In-Between. The contributions from Christopher Coake, John Lescroart and Lorenzo Carcaterra are also worthwhile.
Sadly the only busted flushes are the stories from Alexander McCall Smith, Peter Robinson and Michael Connelly – and not just because whilst poker is involved, the game might just as well have been bridge or high stakes Happy Families. The poker connection is also pretty tenuous in Sue DeNymme's brat-pack story Poker and Shooter, but its chilling protagonists linger longer in the mind than those of her non-pseudonymous colleagues.
Not quite a cinch hand then, but decidedly worth a punt.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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