Customer Reviews

Casino Moon

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4 star:		(7)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is about a guy whose father was killed by the mob, but who is then raised by another guy who's IN the mob. Then he marries the daughter of a local mob boss so for all intents and purposes he's in the mob himself.

But he doesn't wanna be.

But he is. And it's the obligation stuff that pounds away at his soul, that gnaws at him, that makes him nuts, and that ultimately leads to his downfall. He has two kids; he meets another woman; he tries to make money from boxing. The author, Peter Blauner, knows exactly how to handle his characters--how to give them dialogue that sounds exactly like they should be speaking to each other and how to have them do the things they would do to make the reader get grabbed by the story.

This has no happy ending, but I'm not spoiling anything by saying that. It's a really well written piece of work and makes the minutes fly by. Too bad it wasn't made into a film (my favorite medium). Too often, mob stories don't really bring out how corrupting an association with the mob can be to someone not really in the mob, yet in it by association. Here's one that does and that nails it, perfectly.

Highly recommended--nifty.

More than a gritty mob story, which it is, this is a novel--filled with tragedy, redemption, and visions of love and loyalty. Blauner's characterizations are excellent, with heroes and villains who share flawed personalities along with human qualities.

It's a thick book for Hard Case Crime loyalists, but breezes by like an off-shore wind from the Atlantic. The 1990's setting of Atlantic City hasn't changed much over the years... and certainly the excitement of this book hasn't dimished.

Casino Moon feels surprisingly epic for a Hard Case Crime selection, and, indeed, Casino Moon starts out like some sort of Tolkienian (or Martinesque) adventure. Our hero, Anthony Russo, is the prodigal son. His adopted father, Vin, is a sort of mid-level Mafia hood. Russo wants to go his own way. He sees the corruption and the grinding servitude of the mob life and he desires something better. Russo's ambitions are also overshadowed by memories of his real dad. Like any good fantasy novel, his true lineage is royalty. Michael Dillon was the prince of mobsters - a man with sharp suits, big dreams and, ultimately, a bullet in the face.

Swap bullet for sword and mob for throne and this really is the set-up of a fantasy doorstop. But that greatly oversimplifies the character of Anthony Russo. It rapidly becomes clear that Russo isn't disgusted with the mob life out of some moral principle. Russo crusades under one banner: Anthony Russo. He's crushed by debt to his kingpin uncle-in-law, his contracting business is rubbish, his wife and children are a stifling, unappreciative mess... Russo just wants out. He identifies with the "legitimate" casino tycoons of Atlantic City who saw their chances, took them, and now get to wear sharp suits and have great hair.

Russo's chance comes with Elijah Barton - an over-the-hill heavyweight boxer. Barton is savvy, angry ex-champion with the desperate need to prove himself one final time. Russo sees Barton's last chance as his own first step. Borrowing more money and throwing himself into the conniving world of boxing (and Russo thought the mob was dirty), he commits himself wholly to getting Barton the big fight. (And making himself rich out of it.)

Although Russo's ambition is strangely admirable, his methods are not. And the depths to which he'll sink in order to succeed soon have the reader questioning his motives as well. Is everyone around Russo really that awful? Is he really that trapped? Mr. Blauner further muddies the waters by populating the book with an admirable cast of dubious characters. Elijah Barton is perhaps the most straightforward, if only because he's distilled his entire life's ambition into a single physical, visceral goal. His success and failure rests wholly in his own (massive) hands - something that earns Russo's grudging admiration. But Russo's supposedly-stifling family - his step-father, Vin, and his uncle by marriage, Teddy - they're not purely malevolent figures in ill-fitting suits. They're murderous mobsters, sure, but they're also tough old men with their own health problems, financial struggles and growing insecurities. The author scatters the book with scenes that don't involve Russo at all, showing the reader that Vin and Teddy aren't the Machiavellian harpies that our protagonist thinks.

There's something of Hamlet in the family relationship, exacerbated when tales of Russo's (blood) father's murder suddenly resurface. Russo is utterly self-obsessed and blind to the consequences of his actions. Teddy and Vin are a generation away, starting to confess and regret their own immature actions, gradually learning to prioritise family over ambition. And Russo's poor wife, Carla, is the Ophelia of Atlantic City - adored by her uncle Teddy, abandoned by the relentlessly self-absorbed Russo.

I've always loved the Arthur Hailey school of fiction - stories that delvs into the microscopic detail of a organisation and then shows what happens when it collapses under extreme circumstances. Casino Moon has the feel of the final chapters of a Hailey novel - the dying days of the Atlantic City mob with a bit of boxing sprinkled in for verisimilitude. But Hailey's books were about isolated people, interconnected by an impersonal system. Mr. Blauner's is the reverse - positing that people are invariably, inescapably connected to one another, no matter where they are or what they do. It makes for a tough book, as the protagonist's primary goal - escape - is immediately recognisable as unachievable. Russo will never be free of his past and his family, and the more he struggles to escape them, the tighter his binds become.

I read this book a few months ago, and Blauner had me spellbound by the plot; I read it in one sitting.

Other reviewers talk about the family and loyalty themes in the book, but I think Blauner knowingly or not has given us a tale about the despair of contemporary poverty and the incredible struggle to raise onself into a better life. The havenots do not really stand a chance.

Blauner's style summons up the worst aspects of sports and gambling. The book is somewhat depressing, but definitely worth your time.

HCC has brought many great older and more contemporary crime stories to today's readers. This is just one more in their excellent series.

I hope Hard Case Crime will be around for a long time.

I'm not a huge fan of the modern reprints from HCC: I much prefer their reprints of stuff from the '60s (or earlier!). Partly because, as this novel demonstrates, there's an awful notion that unless there's a lot of foul language and gratuitous and loveless sex, it's not 'gritty' enough. Seems to me Spillane and Hammett did plenty of gritty without getting nasty. So, be warned if your ears are sensitive.

And as a New Jerseyite of Italian descent, I do get a little tired of the Italian goombah stereotype--it smacks of unoriginality.

However, this book redeems both of these objections. The story has multiple themes, including legacy, identity, family and corruption. The subplots are well-woven together, and there are incongruous touches of absurd humor (like everyone apparently crashing Rosemary's dressing room). Blauner could have taken the easy narrative road with all of these stereotypes and written an escape narrative, or one of family bonding. He chooses a harder narrative, and that elevates this story from plain ol' pulp into something resembling Greek tragedy. Though some of the characters (notably Teddy) never really come 'alive' in any psychological sense (he's a don's don with no other depth), they manage to work together to create a stiflingly realistic and dangerous environment--almost like a whirlpool trying to suck the poor protagonist down. Blauner's AC (which is the most realistic part of the story) is a filthy town populated by corrupt people, turning the American Dream on its head.

It's a good read, but not a wild and fun ride like I'm used to with my older pulps.

Among the various pulp-fictionish novels published by Hard Case Crime, Peter Blauner's Casino Moon stands out as a bit of an oddity. Most Hard Case Crime books are either re-releases of out-of-print stories from the 1950s and 1960s (typically early novels of famous writers) or original novels. Casino Moon fits in the middle, as it is actually only a decade-and-a-half old. It may be an atypical book, but it is still a good one.

The protagonist in Casino Moon is Anthony Russo, the stepson of a mobster. Anthony would like to live the legitimate life, but he lives in a world where living within the law is not that easy. His stepfather Vin not only looks down on the honest life, he's intent on getting Anthony "made". Anthony's wife, Carla, is also the niece of Vin's boss, Teddy. In an act of misguided paternal instinct, Vin makes it look like Anthony killed a man, which has Anthony also dealing with the man's vengeful son.

Fortunately, there is hope: Anthony gets a chance to manage a former boxing champion; a fight against the reigning champ could give Anthony enough money to buy his way to freedom. He will soon realize, however, that the boxing world is just as corrupt as the mob life, and every step that he takes towards his goal will also get him into more and more trouble.

Casino Moon is the literary equivalent of film noir, with a flawed hero who finds himself falling deeper and deeper into a pit of doom. It is not all darkness, however. Blauner does add bits of humor into the story, keeping things from getting too grim. Overall, this is a well-written crime novel that - despite being an odd duck in the Hard Case Crime aviary - will be enjoyed by fans of this series.

Author Peter Blauner's second novel Casino Moon is a bit of an anomaly in the Hard Case Crime line. Not only does it exceed 320 pages (only two others of the more than 50 novels in the line, The Last Match and Fifty-to-One, have gone that far over the 250-page median), but it is also barely 15 years old, having been first published in 1994 -- after Slow Motion Riot won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel but before Blauner's breakout thriller The Intruder became a national bestseller.

But even the author's original intentions seem to make it a perfect choice for reprinting in this way. As Blauner himself wryly states on his website, "[Casino Moon] was meant to be sort of a quick down-and-dirty pulp novel about a young man trying to get away from his mobbed-up family. So naturally, it ended up taking four years and dozens of painstaking rewrites to get it in shape."

Anthony Russo has always known the mob. After his real father, Mike Dillon, was murdered, Vincent Russo raised him as his own. In fact, the only thing stopping Anthony from being "made" is his lack of Sicilian blood -- well, that and the fact that Anthony hasn't killed anybody yet, despite Vincent continual attempts to make it easy for him. What Anthony really wants, though, is a chance to make his money legitimately, and funding former champion boxer Elijah Barton's comeback, against current champ Terrence Mulvehill, is the opportunity he's been looking for.

But, like Michael Corleone says in Godfather III, "Just when I thought I was out ... they pull me back in." (What? You expect me to review a mafia novel and not make a Godfather reference? Even Blauner does it, naming a restaurant "Andolini's" -- Andolini was the Corleone family's original surname before Ellis Island officials changed it.)

Anthony finds it difficult to actually do anything on his own. Among other things, Anthony owes people money and wants to support his wife and kids, but his wife's uncle Teddy, the capodecine, always takes half of any money made by his underlings. Other people want their piece of the pie, as well, including his girlfriend Rosemary (who has her own daughter to support).

As he is floundering, Anthony gets a view of the other side from Mulvehill's promoter Frank Diamond, who manages to get a portion of every fee possible through having his son be the manager, renting his own space out for training, and other entirely legal (though not necessarily ethical) means. Sitting in Diamond's $5,000-a-night suite, Anthony notices, "a gold jacuzzi over by the window ... and a bar stocked with 150-year-old bottles of wine. Still, five thousand a night seemed a little steep.... But it must be worth it, I figured, just to know that the guy downstairs only had 75-year-old wine." He soon realizes, "Growing up around wiseguys was the best preparation I could have had for the fight game."

Casino Moon is unnecessarily melodramatic at times (does Teddy really need to have a son who killed himself, a mentally retarded daughter, a wife addicted to downers, an eating disorder, and prostate cancer all in one book?), especially with the constant parent-child issues present and an ending seemingly designed to make men cry. Also, Blauner jumps from first person for Anthony's story to third person for everyone else, making it a little confusing in the beginning until I got used to the style.

But despite these complaints, Blauner kept the pages turning, if sometimes filling them with a little too much detail. His characters are richly drawn, and I can still see their faces clearly in my mind. I really felt Anthony's tension at all the hands pulling him in different directions -- and his struggles between his wife and his mistress make a strong case for fidelity. (One lesson: don't piss off a woman with no dignity left to lose.) Casino Moon is by no means a perfect novel, but Blauner tries hard and succeeds for the most part, particularly in making the mafia human.

This story, like many other Hard Case reprints, probably owes a debt to Night and the City - Criterion Collection (and its source material) for its basic plot-line. "Casino Moon", a reprint from 1994, is also an interesting omen for "The Sopranos", which was a little less than five years over the horizon.

The extended cast of characters will now look somewhat familiar to those who hung in for the "Sopranos"' nearly decade-long run. Anthony Russo, the nominal hero of the book, is the adopted son of a mid-level Atlantic City mobster. Anthony wants to get out of the business, even as his dad is trying to get him made, through an over-his-head attempt to manage a fading professional boxer. Meanwhile, Teddy, the mob boss, is getting squeezed by cancer on one side, and the greedy New York City families on the other. There's also a local cop who feels kinship with Anthony, and a variety of women suffering the consequences of long-ago life choices.

Author Peter Blauner has a lot of balls to juggle here, but he does so deftly. He executes a lengthy and satisfying climax which cuts in and around the prize fight depicted on the reprint cover. The book's longer and denser than most Hard Case reprints (due in fact to it being one of their newer titles), with a larger cast of characters. The writing style is also more edgy and graphic, with many characters meeting truly horrific ends. Two characters are given modestly happy endings, at least, and it's a nice tribute to Blauner's craft that you probably won't be able to guess at least one of those two beforehand.

There are good ideas here, but the author is too lazy to execute them. Just when we need a key scene to resolve some issue, he skips over it. I guess it was too hard for him to write. Amateurish - very very poorly done.