bloodygranuaile

 Covering gambling news on the day-to-day, I sometimes feel like the industry doesn't change nearly fast enough. It's been almost seven years since Black Friday, and only three U.S. states — Nevada, New Jersey and Delaware — offer regulated online poker. (Soon to be four, thanks to Pennsylvania, but not soon enough.) Some states, like California, seem to bang their head against the same wall every year and get nowhere. And of course, we're all biting our nails waiting to see what the Supreme Court decides about PASPA, and when they'll get around to deciding if legalized sports betting could actually become reality in the U.S.

But, despite all of the above, it's actually quite a rapidly changing industry. It's worth it, every now and again, to look back at how we got where we are and appreciate just how much batty stuff has happened over the course of gambling's establishment as a legitimate entertainment industry.

Enter David Clary's Gangsters to Governors: The New Bosses of Gambling in America, which was published in October from Rutgers University Press. Clocking in at about 250 pages (plus a lot of notes), this new history of American gambling focuses first on how gaming fell under the control of crime syndicates, and then on how the state drove those elements out, turning control of the industry over to "clean" private corporations, Indian nations and the states themselves. Clary also provides a nuanced, even-handed analysis of the pros and cons of states' use of gaming revenues to balance their budgets.

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I posted a book review over at the day job. 

The latest from the Books By Cool People I Met At Readercon files: I just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, the first book in the Gentlemen Bastards series, the third book of which releases in October. I have plans to attend a book signing for it in Cambridge with my writing group, so I figured it was imperative I read this series in a timely manner.

The author, Scott Lynch, was a thoroughly entertaining and informative speaker; I saw him on a panel called “The Xanatos Gambit,” which was about schemes and conspiracies and such. He is dating the infamously hilarious Elizabeth Bear, whose books I will also be reading as soon as they arrive. *eyes mailbox impatiently* He also has very nice hair.

The Lies of Locke Lamora takes place in a semi-Renaissance-y city called Camorr, which seems to be largely based on Venice, but with more sharks. Which is extra awesome and scary since Venice, and thereby Camorr, mostly has canals instead of roads. So there are SHARKS EVERYWHERE. Shark-fighting is, in fact, one of Camorr’s premier entertainments; by Camorran custom, only women can fight sharks.

Camorr is ruled by a Duke named Duke Nicovante, who nobody really cares about, and Camorr’s gangs are all ruled by a guy named Capa Barsavi, who consolidated all the gangs and developed a “Secret Peace” with the legitimate establishment that basically means that the gangs can steal and murder and stuff as long as they don’t steal from (a) policemen or (b) nobles. If you think this is a really fucked up and classist Secret Peace, you are right! And you will probably like our heroes, who pretend to hold with the Secret Peace but really don’t.

Now, this is not particularly an Issues Book, and the Gentlemen Bastards only do half the Robin Hood thing. They steal from the rich… because the rich have the most money, so they are the ones that you can steal the most money from! They don’t really give to the poor, though; mostly they just chuck all the money in a vault and take from it if they need to buy equipment for a scam. It’s actually kind of adorable.

The Gentlemen Bastards consists of:
LOCKE LAMORA: Locke Lamora has been a genius thief since he was first found by the Thiefmaker of Camorr (a Fagin-esque character who picks up orphans and trains the in pickpocketing so he can sell them to gangs later). The Thiefmaker sold him to a con man in record time because it was near impossible to stop baby Locke from trying out schemes that were clever, but way beyond the Thiefmaker’s pay grade in terms of fallout that Locke, being five, had not thought about. As an adult, Locke is a shortish, unassuming-looking dude, skinny, neither attractive nor unattractive; a master of disguise, who pretends to be a regular cat burglar in Capa Barsavi’s employ, but is actually a master swindler who has bilked enough of Camorr’s nobles out of enough thousands of crowns that he’s known as the Thorn of Camorr.
JEAN TANNEN: Jean is a big, fat, ugly motherfucker who is the bruiser of the gang. He carries a pair of hatchets called the Wicked Sisters, although he can probably kill you with pretty much anything he gets his hands on, or just with his hands, in a pinch. From the highest-class background among the Bastards, he also likes reading poetry and classic romances. The main relationship in this book is Jean and Locke’s bromance, which is truly bromantic.
CALO AND GALDO SANZA: Identical twins, known for being handsome (if with somewhat large noses), spending a lot of time at brothels, finishing each other’s sentences, and being outrageously skilled card sharks. (Nobody in Camorr says “card sharks” though because there are too many sharks around already.)
BUG: The Bastards’ teenage apprentice.
SABETHA: The lone female Gentlemen Bastard, she is off somewhere on a mysterious Mission or something, so we do not meet her during this book. Locke is rather hopelessly in love with her. Apparently she is a redhead. Scott Lynch appears to have felt that going on too much about the Lone Female Bastard Who Is Also The Love Interest And Is Apparently A Feisty Redhead would be somewhat cliché, so for now the Gentlemen Bastards is functionally all gentlemen.

The main antagonist is a fellow called the Grey King, who is killing off a bunch of Capa Barsavi’s garristas, meaning the heads of his gangs. This worries Locke, since, while he is careful to not be very important, he is officially the head of one of Capa Barsavi’s gangs.

Once I figured out that this was a story where the hero was a dude, his core group o’ buddies were all dudes, and the villain was a dude, I was somewhat prepared to be disappointed at this story being a Wall o’ Dude and there being no ladies, except maybe one Token Awesome Lady Who Is Awesome Because She’s The Only Lady And Is Not Like the Other Ladies. This turns out to have been a radically incorrect assumption on my part. Other dude authors who wish to write about dude heroes and their dude friends, please take note: You can, in fact, write a story about a dude hero and his best dude friends without leaving out the women entirely or reducing them to one-dimensional caricatures! The Lies of Locke Lamora has a lot of female secondary and tertiary characters, many of whom are flat-out AWESOME and have quite a bit of agency, and the rest of whom at least help the book avoid the weird Tolkien thing where the General Populace just seems to be all men. So we have some lady shark-fighters, as previously mentioned; a slew of female priestesses, alchemists, prison guards (!), gang members, pickpockets, merchants, and general random people; a batty old noblewoman who is not nearly as batty as she seems because she is actually the Duke’s spymaster; a beautiful young doña who, while her involvement in the story begins because she and her husband are a mark for one of the Bastards’ schemes, is also a highly accomplished botanical alchemist (I kind of want to be best friends with Doña Sofia, actually; she grows oranges infused with liquor); and, possibly one of my favorite characters of all time, Nazca Barsavi.

People who know me will understand why Nazca Barsavi is everything I want in a character. She is the daughter of Capa Barsavi, and she’s actually heavily involved in running the family business, making her a high-ranking mafiosa in her own right and quite likely to become the next Capa of Camorr if they can find a way to make her meathead older brothers deal with it. She wears steel-toed boots, because steel-toed boots are awesome, and she also wears glasses (er, optics). I had not even realized what an extreme shortage of kickass ladies who WEAR GLASSES there is in pretty much all storytelling ever. More of this, please! She is also friends with Locke! Actual, straight-up, honest-to-goodness friends, where they talk about stuff and clearly care about each other and when Capa Barsavi decides that they should get married, they are both all like “No offense, but together we are clever enough to find a way out of this stupid plan, right?” and then they agree to PLOT and SCHEME and BE AWESOME until they figure out a way to NOT marry each other without pissing off the Capa. She is also super bossy in flashback to when she was seven, and it is adorable. Basically, she is THE GREATEST. I would read an entire series just about Nazca Barsavi.

So you can understand how amazingly upset I was when the Gray King FRIDGED HER.

I specifically say the Gray King fridged her because honestly, Scott Lynch/the story in general didn’t. Lynch seems to be a member of the George R. R. Martin School of Killing Off Characters Right When You Are Really Excited To See What They’re Going To Do Next, so she’s not particularly singled out here (unfortunately for the readers’ feels). She also isn’t tortured or mutilated graphically or sexually molested or anything gratuitous like that. Her death was not a cheap plot point to engender manpain in our hero because otherwise the plot was sagging. Rather, the Gray King killed her specifically to show her father, Capa Barsavi, (who is emphatically not our hero) that he could get to him, and to upset Barsavi out of hiding. The text shines a pretty bright and unsubtle spotlight on how totally fucked up that sort of thing is by having all the characters whose “side” we are more or less on explicitly state that THAT IS REALLY FUCKED UP, LIKE A LOT and also berate Capa Barsavi for getting all vengeful because DUDE THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED YOU TO DO ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING. So honestly I cannot really fault it from a storytelling point of view as being anywhere near as lazy as the usual Hero’s Girlfriend Is Killed Horribly, Vengeful Rampage Ensues. BUT I CAN BE MAD THAT THERE WAS NO MORE AWESOMENESS WITH NAZCA AFTER THAT POINT. And I am. Maybe if more books had characters like Nazca I would be less stuck on this.

Anyway. So Scott Lynch has proven that you actually CAN write a nonsexist book even with dude main characters, and also that we need more kickass ladies with glasses. Take note, people.

On a less sociologically-oriented note, the scams, cons, chases, and general conniving fuckery in this book is SO MUCH FUN. There is crossing and double-crossing and fake double-crossing, multiple layers of false identities, a disguised Locke getting punched in the face while the puncher explains “And that’s from Locke Lamora,” cursing, fire, pretty costumes, and, of course, more sharks. There is also some really amazing-sounding food. Overall the book ends up being a weird but highly addicting mishmash of “all the fun fluff!” and “very serious feels-punching.” Lynch particularly seems to enjoy putting Locke through a lot of physical abuse, causing long periods of suffering, which is a nice change from the Cartoon Biology that affects so many fantasy books (and its even more widespread Hollywood cousin, Cartoon Physics, which seems to have utterly taken over every live-action movie with a budget of more than about ten dollars).

Overall, I am very excited to read the second book, and also for the release of the third book, and also the author signing for the third book so I can tell Mr. Lynch to his face that just because I’m buying his books does NOT mean I forgive him for killing off Nazca.

So, way back when in April, I read White Cat, the first book in Holly Black's Curse Workers series. In October, I bought the second book, Red Glove, at the Boston Book Festival and got it signed (*cue fangirly squeeing*). And this week, I actually got around to reading the damn thing!

It only takes so long because I am drowning in awesome books, not because there is anything less than totally great about this book that would justify me having put it off for so long.

In this one, Lila, who used to be a cat in the last book, is now not a cat, so Cassel can stop feeling guilty about thinking he'd killed her, and go back to his lifelong habit of having a mopey intimidated crush on her and feeling inferior. Except he can't! Because Cassel's mother, who, while not actually in any particular crime family, is a criminal of the "magically seduce old guys and take all their money" sort, decided to do Cassel what she probably honestly thinks is a big fat favor, and magicked Lila to be hopelessly in love with him. Cassel, being a con man and a sometimes assassin but not a rapist, is Not Okay with this and goes off to be angry and mopey and run his private school's illegal gambling operations and live off of coffee, as he does. But his plans to get distracted by screwed-up family bullshit and fail French and physics are further complicated when Lila enrolls at Wallingford until the curse wears off because being away from him was making her physically ill. So there's that going on.

This isn't even entirely the main plot, because the main plot involves Cassel being unwillingly recruited by some douchebaggy Feds to try and figure out who killed his brother Philip, and some other dudes,but it was actually Cassel who killed the other dudes, although he's not about to tell the Feds that. Cassel's mother and his older brother Barron, who may or may not eventually figure out that Cassel forged a whole bunch of his memories back in the first book, pop up now and again to throw whatever wrenches into Cassel's plans Holly Black can possibly think up. Also, there's some political stuff going on about mandatory testing for curse workers, which provides many additional excuses for Cassel to get arrested, beat up, thrown around, dirty, unfed for days at a time, and generally put through the wringer. Then he drinks a lot of coffee and cons some people, and hates on himself, and it is all very dark and broody and sexy, but in a much more action-packed way than you find in a lot of dark broody sexy teen novels.

It is kind of odd to read in that the book is first-person POV from Cassel, and Cassel (a) hates himself (b) is too busy with issues of life and death and mafias and getting beat up to think overmuch about his appearance other than "am I covered in blood today" and (c) apparently sleeps like once a week and lives off of coffee and vodka, but at the same time you get the feeling of the author behind the book being all like "CASSEL'S A HOTTIE, LOOKIT THAT HOTTIE CON PEOPLE, PUT HIM IN A LEATHER JACKET AND A SHINY BLACK BENZ RIGHT NOW". But it all works, I think.

The last one is supposedly going to be called Black Heart, although for April Fool's last year she announced that they would be changing it to Green Money, which I think could make a pretty hilarious companion piece.