A card sharp gets into a friendly game between gigs, but soon sets his sights on the wife of one of the players; and when that happens in a Hard Case Crime novel, look out.
Lucky at Cards is an early hard-boiled novel from Lawrence Block, whose Matthew Scudder detective series I have followed for many years (with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes being one of my favorite mysteries of all time); but this is a reprint from Block's peanut-butter days, with one of those memorable Hard Case Crime covers. Hard Case Crime also reprinted Block's Grifter's Game, a decidedly downbeat slice of noir with similiar themes of luckless joes and man-hungry frails.
But Lucky at Cards is a bit more upbeat, and rockets along at an alarming clip as our tarnished hero first gets himself into a scheme to frame the husband and take his money, then finds himself in a frame that is pretty hard to get out of in return. Tension cranks up, and up, right to the end. This was definitely a pulp classic worth rediscovering, and welcome for fans of Lawrence Block.
I bought this one in a big lot of Hard Case crime books off of ebay, which I have been cooking through pretty steadily. I read this in about a day and a half over vacation.
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