No House Limit

Bello, “the greatest gambler of them all”! And he is given four hundred thousand dollars to go up against ten million!

I could hear the slot machines jangling and smell the cigarettes and cheap perfume. And there is a ton of information about gambling and casino operations in this book, circa 1958. Very colorful and descriptive!

My issue is with the main battle of the story - gambler vs. casino. Bello is trying to break the casino, and Joe Martin, the owner, just watches him. He doesn't stop him, close the table, or close the casino itself. It is explained with a reference to 'losing face' in the gambling casino and looking weak, or some such thing. I don't know if that was/is a real thing or not. I just know that if a man comes in to show more play craps and put me out of business, I'd stop him from playing in my casino. But then again, that would be a short story and not a book. show less

Joe Martin owns the biggest independent casino in 1958 Las Vegas. And the syndicate, aka the mob, wants him out, so they hire a master gambler to ruin Martin, in a long master craps game. The author wrote some fine movies, as it says on the back, and I Wake Up Screaming. All good stuff.

This book was enjoyable, with some good twists and characters. The background on casino gambling in the 50s was good, but craps isn't that interesting a game to me, never has been, and this book doesn't really make it more so. I also felt that a couple times the author sort of cheated by not telling you some stuff about some characters.

That said, it's still an engaging, fast read, and the portrait of Vegas in the 50s, written at the time, is compelling.

I guess the first question many would ask is why bother read these old pulp fiction novels. Nostalgia, plot, setting, voyeurism, writing style, pictures of busty blonds on the cover; all of these I suppose. For lack of a better reason, I guess it would be the same reason why some people watch football. They provide easy, often thoughtless, entertainment.

That being said, Hard Case Crime, reissued a whole series of novels from the fifties and early sixties, most of which might be defined as noir, or representing the underbelly of American culture.

No House Limit portrays Joe Martin, owner of an independent, i.e., not controlled by the syndicate, casino in Las Vegas. The syndicate has vowed to shut him down and their approach is to hire a show more well-known gambler, Bello, to gamble him out of existence. An implausible scenario, certainly. What makes the reader want to continue is the atmosphere, the ambiance, the recreation of what we think a fifties casino might be like. Note I suggested it’s what we imagine it might be like. Whether it was or not, is really irrelevant to me. It’s a story and an intriguing one that allows the reader to lose himself in another world.

Written by Steve Fisher who, according to a postscript by his son wrote close to one hundred novels in the fifties. It has a very archaic flavor with stock characters straight out of the movies for which Fisher wrote many scripts.

Bello was patterned after the infamous Nick the Greek, a rather pathetic gambler who was introduced to Michael Fisher by his father. Nick once said he had won and lost close to $500 million in his lifetime and what really made him pathetic in Michael’s eyes were the boxes of letters Nick kept in his garage from people who might enclose $5 or $10 and ask Nick to gamble it for them in hopes he would strike it rich for them to help pay their medical bills or save their home.

I certainly learned a lot about craps. show less

Interesting because it's set/was originally written during the early days of Vegas, so the author takes pains to explain things that the modern reader takes for granted--like what chips are and what they look like. Not as good as the other HCC titles I've read, but still pretty damn entertaining. (I like to think of "HCC" as "Hard Case Candy," the way I go through these.) When we read these reprints, we have to remember that what may seem like tired tropes now weren't necessarily so at the time they were written. I still didn't think the "types" were too tedious.

Awesome and entertaining read!! Great background of Vegas or at least the way vegas used to be. Reads like the Bogart movie that never got made!! Fast paced and exciting!!