Funny Money (Tony Valentine Novels)
by James Swain
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Book Summary Information
Author: James SwainEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-01
ISBN: 0345463447
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Funny Money (Tony Valentine Novels)
Book Review: Swain Spins a Winner
Summary: 4 Stars
1950s sitcom _I_Love_Lucy_'s eponymous screwball abets her attempt to author a roman à clef with a Wheel of Fortune-like contraption whose successive spins yield an array of amusingly-because-exasperatingly iconic characters, settings, and situations whence will be woven her yarn. _Funny_Money_, the series sophomore among James Swain's five (to date) casino-environed Tony Valentine mysteries, may tempt genre fans to impute to some similar source its own familiars: a world-weary and worldly-wise ex-cop detective, handily possessed of a sixth sense that reveals to him trees to which the forest blinds even the best of his peers and proficient in a combat skill (judo) that informs both his improbably routine triumph in mano a mano encounters over seemingly tougher and stronger and often outnumbering adversaries and an effortless self-confidence that equally improbably routinely entrances decades-younger women whose insistent attentions he refuses only long enough rationalize accepting, who, if liberated from bureaucratic constraints by a PI status that both bolsters and burdens any useful confederacy with officialdom, and freed by a strict and comprehensive code of conduct--acceptably violable by himself, however, when circumstance (or occasionally convenience) dictates or allows and angst and self-recrimination compensate--from most instances of indecision lesser men's situational ethics might provoke, does suffer his share of self-doubt over such personal problems as recent and still-raw widowerhood and a degenerate slacker son, but upon whom good fortune confers the (ultimately appropriately appreciated) assistance and often unsolicited advice of an untrained, but serendipitously and uncannily savvy female volunteer (his neighbor, Mabel) who, while pedestalizing Valentine beyond what's warranted, pulls no punches when opining upon any personal or professional misstep for which she imagines him poised.
Yet in Swain's capable hands execution trumps elementality and its formula's parametric clichés become his novel's strength. Indeed, the dialogic and descriptive wisps one detects of, for example, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich--faint enough to believe incidental but unmistakable enough acknowledge as masterfully intentional--proffer an atavistic feast to aficionados of a body of noir/pulp fiction whose 1930s-`50s heyday somewhat ironically barely overlaps what must have been sixty-something protagonist Valentine's own formative career years and long antedates the turn of the (twenty-first) century adventures this series recounts. Too, flashes of humor realized as bumblers among the baddies and/or bureaucrats conjure a kinship with such neo-noirists as Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and effectively rescue an expository mood that tends too much at times to pessimism. Unfortunately, nothing comparable counterbalances the almost infallible "grift sense" that imbues Valentine's detecting--and Swain's plotting--with an undermining deus ex machina aftertaste.
Swain does commendably manage in _Funny_Money_ to educate as he entertains. The seamy machinations within the film distribution industry that contexts Jim Thompson's 1949 _Nothing_More_Than_Murder_ reveal a trove of interesting arcana to readers untravelled within that milieu as does the unrestrainedly feral patronage-seeking among a barely-above-flophouse hotel's bellhops and other bootlickers in his 1954 _A_Swell-Looking_Babe_. If an effort of readerly will can for awhile set aside Swain's own undisguised endorsement of the preposterous notion that such odds-evening ploys/skills as unassisted card-counting or dice-scooting merit sympathy for house losses they effect or, at least before a murder or several up the ante, empathisably justify Valentine's hired outrage--for even Tony tacitly concedes that casinos are but dealers in Dulcamaran dreams against whom the only real crime is not cheating, but winning--the wealth of gaming esoterica Swain contrives to non-extraneously incorporate is truly fascinating (and upon more than one point of curiosity inspired this reviewer to consult supplementary nonfiction sources for further investigation).
My most praiseful statement regarding _Funny_Money_ must be that, had I begun my travels with Tony in series debut _Grift_Sense_, I'd likely have bid him adieu at its end. Instead, noting his considerable, if incomplete, emergence in the former from the off-puttingly dour self-absorption that mars the subsequently-read latter, I shall certainly accompany him at least as far as his ensuing outing in _Sucker_Bet_.
- Stan Hall :-)
Summary of Funny Money (Tony Valentine Novels)
Tony Valentine has a gift for grift: He can walk into a casino and spot a cheater across a crowded floor. A man who still uses pay phones and won?t spend more than a buck for coffee, Tony has protected Atlantic City gambling palaces for twenty years and learned every trick of the trade?until a new one blows him away.With his old partner murdered in a bomb blast, Tony returns to A.C. to retrace Doyle Flanagan?s last case. Investigating a six-million-dollar casino takedown, a square cop soon meets a whole lot of bent people, from a beautiful lady wrestler to some Manhattan mobsters; from a trio of beautiful casino ?consultants? to a team of Eurotrash blackjack card counters. But while everyone around Tony Valentine (including Tony?s own son) is playing some kind of angle, Tony is determined to find a killer who is playing for keeps. . . .
"I can sense when things aren't right on a casino floor and I just take it from there," says Tony Valentine, the cop turned casino consultant who--all boasting aside--finds himself stumped more often than not in Funny Money. James Swain's smartly plotted, often humorous sequel to Grift Sense sends the 62-year-old Valentine back to his hometown, Atlantic City, where his former police partner, Doyle Flanagan, has been blown up in his car at a McDonald's. Is this murder linked to Flanagan's investigation of a $6 million blackjack hustle at the city's giant Bombay casino, allegedly perpetrated by a gang of badly coifed Croatians? Meanwhile, Valentine will have to face down thugs who are putting the squeeze on his flaky son, try to appease the Bombay's much-despised owner, and win the help--and heart--of a no-nonsense woman wrestler with a nasty attitude.
Like his debut novel, Funny Money is distinguished by Swain's knowledge of gambling scams from card counting to the judicious application of a "monkey's paw" on a slot machine. Less even is this book's character development. Valentine is expertly drawn, and the relationship between him and his late-blooming son is both convincing and heartwarming. But some secondary players are about as thinly realized as a poker chip, and Swain's too-convenient use of violence as a plot propellant threatens to undermine his story's credibility. All in all, though, Funny Money is a safe bet. --J. Kingston Pierce
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