The Last Match (Hard Case Crime)

Strange that the narrator of this story doesn’t speak French, but the narrative of the story is overwhelmingly filled with French words! Umm, how does that work? Would he understand what he wrote? I know that I sure didn’t…
This book is kind of a hot mess. Too many irons in too many fires to form one cohesive plot line. He’s a con man, then gigolo, cigarette smuggler, grifter, parolee, chauffeur, etc. With all of that, and all of the French vocabulary, I found little enjoyment in the story itself. A rare miss in the Hard Case series.

The Last Match is a tale about an American con-man, grifter, bunco artist, flim-flam man and details some years of his life. Unlike many con-man stories, this one does not focus on a single event or a single con. Rather, it focuses on the individual and how he drifts from one con to another and has difficulty adjusting to any kind of honest labor unless it also involves some form of a confidence game. The story opens up on the French Riviera where this grifter has latched onto an older woman who supports him while he squires her around and a wealthy British noblewoman who looks down upon his activities and calls him a "spiv." His various con-games and relationships in Tangiers and other North African ports are discussed as is his show more strange relationship with a woman who is trusting and innocent beyond imagination.

All in all, I found this book to be quite entertaining. It is written in an easy-to-read style. It details various events and adventures in the main character's life and is a worthwhile read. Dodge faithfully captures the spirit of the Riviera and Morocco in the fifties. I would say it is an unusual book for Hard Case Crime, but the publisher has put out a number of books that don't appear at first blush to fit within the hardboiled framework. show less

I read this book because I suddenly decided I wanted to read To Catch a Thief and could find a copy of it quickly. This book has a lot in common with what I remember of the movie To Catch a Thief. The French Riviera, crooks and cons, snooty upper-classes and opportunistic lower-classes (it abounds with stereo-types) It seems to be more of disjointed collection of reminisces than a story narrative. The most interesting part of the book was the Afterword by the author's daughter.

Ok, I suppose. I kept waiting for the "this is what happened in the past" section, and for the "real" story to begin. Plot seems more like disjointed short stories barely connected, and most of the story is told in a somewhat annoying, tension draining, "this is what happened, as I recall now many years after the fact" (though the years, or days, or hours of the "past action" was not actually clear during the story, only at end).

I really liked the other Dodge book that I read (Plunder of the Sun) but this ended up being one of the few books that I just gave up on partway through. It wasn't bad, per se, it just went nowhere.