Customer Reviews

Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon

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This is an intelligent compilation of Damon Runyon's short stories, dating from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. The stories are very funny, peppered with the catchy slang of Runyon's small-time con artists, racetrack touts, Broadway characters, and guys who are "just around." You don't have to be a Runyon fan to enjoy such stories as "Broadway Incident" (drama critic Ambrose Hammer goes nightclubbing), "Madame La Gimp" (hoodlums pass off a bag lady as a society matron), "A Piece of Pie" (the gang wants to bet on Nicely-Nicely Jones in an eating contest), "Delegates at Large" (Harry the Horse and his associates attend a political convention), "Hold 'Em, Yale" (the gang attends a "very large football game between the Harvards and the Yales"), and many more. "Most pleasant" reading for comedy fans.

Damon Runyon's collection of short stories was first published in the early 1930's - and lights up the seedy side of New York at that time. It is a world where all men seem to be shysters, gangsters, crooked lawyers, or somehow on the make - and all the women are Dolls.

Runyon has the most wonderful voice - it is disarmingly confessionaly, sort of like you would expect a poorly educated but street smart gangster to talk in front of judge. So for instance in "Blood Pressure" which I think is one of the best stories he writes - "..Charley opens a door and we step into a room where there is a pretty red-headed doll about knee hight to a flivver, who looks as if she may just get out of the hay, because her red hair is flying every which way on her head, and her eyes seem still gummed up with sleep. At first I think she is a very cute sight indeed, and then I see something in her eyes that tells me this doll, whoever she is, is feeling very hostile to one and all."

There are a great number of repeated characters that litter these tails, Nicely-Nicely, Regret, Dave the Dude - and everyone hangs around at Mindy's - a restaurant somewhere in New York.

Nice, funny reads - Runyon and Saki rate as the two top short story writers ever.

I am sitting around one night years ago and my sister comes into the room and hands me these short stories and says ' you gotta read em' cause they got characters in them like Little Augie and Nibsy and ' the Walking Encyclopedia of Baseball Knowledge' and ' Posey' and 'Itchie Samiof ' and all the guys we know from Richman's gambling joint. So I sit down and I begin to read and its like these people on the page are the very spitting image very spitting of those we are meeting every day just on our corner . And these characters are very much like those my Uncles Jack and Reddy are inviting in the house all the time to play pinochle only even more funny and almost as nasty .So I say this book comes out of American life and is the genuine article although someone else tells me a lot of these guys most of been reading Damon Runyan and so started acting and talking like his characters just to make it seem that they are bigshots which is of course what they all are-when they are not broke which is most of the time.
Well this has not been a very successful effort at parody or paraphrase or whatever is, but it is a way of saying you will really really enjoy reading about ' Nicely Nicely' and 'Nathan Detroit ' and all the other Runyan characters. Ring Lardner may have been a smarter guy but old Damon Runyan why he could almost make colloquial as good as old JD Salinger would a little later from a bit further uptown.
Try it , try it you'll really really like it.

Damon Runyans writing is very amusing. He is sort of the American P.G. Woodhouse without all the spondulucks. His shorts also remind me of Roald Dahls in their twisted endings.
I wish someone would hunt up and publish all his newspaper columns and war correspondence.
Read his stories and you will be amazed at how often you recognize his plots in film. He was one of the great American writers and belongs in the same sentence as Twain Hemmingway Steinbeck and London.

Before reading this book, all I knew of Damon Runyon came from the movies that had been inspired by his short stories: Guys and Dolls, Little Miss Marker, The Lemondrop Kid, Pocketful of Miracles, and such. So I picked this book up more out of curiosity than anything else, but I have to say that I now know Damon Runyon to be one of the absolute masters of the short story, one of the most unique world-builders who ever put pen to paper, and the creator of one of the most uniquely American narrative voices. His "citizens" and "characters" are the denizens of Broadway, as you can see in "Delegates at Large":

"Sometimes you can see very prominent citizens sitting with me on the bank steps, including such as Regret, the horse player, and old Sorrowful, the bookie, and Doc Daro and Professor D and Johnny Oakley and The Greek..."
"Well, one night I am sitting on the bank steps with Big Nig, the crap shooter, and a guy by the name of Skyrocket, who is nobody much, when all of a sudden I notice three guys standing on the sidwalk taking a very good long gander at me, and who are these guys but certain characters from Brooklyn by the name of Harry the Horse, and Spanish John and Little Isadore, and they are very hard characters indeed."
"In fact, these characters are so hard that I am glad that none of the depositors of the bank can see them standing there, as such a scene is just naturally bound to make any depositor nervous. In fact, it makes me more nervous than somewhat, and I am by no means a depositor."

The language, as the above shows, is one of the greatest delights of reading Runyon. His narrative voice is unlike any other with a cadence and grammar that truly draw you in to his world. This bit in particular from "Johnny One-Eye" is a good example of Runyon-speak:

"So Rudolph decides to go on a journey but then he gets to thinking that maybe Freddy will remember a little matter that Rudolph long ago since dismisses from his mind and does not wish to have recalled again, which is the time he and Freddy do a job on a guy by the name of The Icelander in Troy years ago and he drops around to Freddy's house to remind him to be sure not to remember this."
"But it seems that Freddy, who is an imporant guy in business organization work himself, though in a different part of the city than Rudolph, mistakes the purpose of Rudolph's visit and starts to out with this rooty-toot-toot and in order to protect himself it is necessary for Rudolph to take his Betsy and give Freddy a little tattooing. In fact, Rudolph practically crockets his monogram on Freddy's chest and leaves him exceptionally deceased."

Many of the stories take place in the Broadway of the 1920's, 30's and 40's, but Runyon often delights in taking his citizens and characters out of New York and into the most improbable settings and situations: in "Delegates at Large", a gangster attends a political convention to impress a doll; in "Butch Minds the Baby", a safe-cracker takes his baby son along on a job; in "So You Won't Talk!", a parrot is kept as the only witness to a murder; in "The Melancholy Dane", a Broadway actor meets his worst critic on a battlefield in North Africa; in "Hold 'em, Yale!" a group of petty criminals end up defending the goal-posts at a Harvard-Yale game; and in "Johnny One-Eye", an injured kitten becomes the last companion of a wounded gunman.

There are thirty-two stories in this collection, and of those thirty-two I would rate at least seventeen as classics that will stay with you forever. Most people when they think of Runyon know only of the comic humor that shows up in the movie versions of his stories, but in the stories you will see the real Runyon, an equal at the very least of O. Henry as a true master of the foibles of human nature and of the unexpected turns and twists of fate on his characters' lives. I cannot recommend this book highly enough; if you love stories that will touch you, that will make you laugh at and/or weep for the people you meet in them, and that will linger in your mind long after you're done, then this is a true must-read.

In a way, the reviews that talk about how colorful and how much fun it is to read these stories are shortchanging the book.

As a great actor will act "against part", ie play tragedy as if it were comedy and vice versa ... so will a great author. Look at Shakespeare. A well performed "Romeo and Juliet" is a laugh a minute, except for the fact that characters you care about keep dying or living hopelessly.

Runyan is like that. Under each of these very funny stories is a lost soul surviving in a lost civilization. Even more to the point, I read these stories and I know these people ... I see myself and my friends in here, surviving inches above the gutter, ignoring the despair that lurks so near.

This is colorful, brilliant comedy and, like all great comedy, has great tragedy at its heart.

I enjoyed most of this collection. I was reading it to help prepare for my role in an upcoming community theater production of "Guys and Dolls". I thought it might be helpful to see where the characters came from. So, I immediately skipped to "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure", as they were the basis for the musical. Both stories were good, the latter better, but still neither was the best.

Those expecting the lightheartedness of the musical may be in for a bit of a surprise. There are certainly comical characters (Nicely-Nicely Jones, for example), moments, and even entire stories. But many are gritty with tough-as-nails characters who are desperate, down on their luck and apt to kill you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The thing about Runyon is that he writes entirely in first person *present*. And while it is interesting at first, after a while it does become "more than somewhat" tiring, to use a phrase of his. In fact, I ripped through the first 200 pages loving the slang and weird colloquial nuances, only to grow a little sick of it until, by the last few stories, I just wanted to read something else. Not that the stories at the end are any less good. Maybe it's best not to try to read the whole thing all at once...

Don't get me wrong, though. I really liked it, but I can only take so many short stories in a row. Most short stories in general seem so hackneyed to me, anyway. Like there has to be some big twist ending that is right out of the "O. Henry manual on short story writing". These are no different except that maybe they are a little more clever than average.

A fun read (especially for anyone who's ever been in the show), but best taken in small doses. Oh yeah, and Adelaide is nowhere to be found...even though the back of the book mentions her name!

This is an excellent night-stand book. A collection of short stories,typical Damon Runyan. Most of its short stories can be read in twenty minutes or less. Some I found uninteresting, others delightful. My favorites are the "Lemon Drop Kid" and the baby sitting bank robber. A fun book for teen-agers also.W. Dannenmaier

Every working class neighborhood produces, if those that I have lived in are indicative, its fair share of drifters, grifters, lamsters, short moneymen, wise guys and just plain big talkers. In classical Marxist speak this element is called the lumpen proletariat and in political terms is a drag on the class struggle and the feeding grounds for fueling reactionary and counter-revolutionary movements. In short, bad news.

I am willing to bet, and make that bet 6/5, that any interested reader looking at this review to get the skinny on Damon Runyon's short stories probably did not bargain for the above analysis. Fair enough. Okay, we will suspend disbelief about the true nature of these types for as long as it takes to get through this collection. Damon Runyon has taken that collection of drifters, grifters and con artists and their `dolls' and headquartered them, mainly in one place, New York's Broadway, the Great White Way of the 1920's and 1930's and given us some very memorable stories about the some time hilarious trials and tribulations of this motley crew.

Runyon's great art is to have an ear for the kind of dialogue that those on the hustle would produce if such a rogue's gallery of lumpen types as the Hot Horse Herbies, Skys, Sam the Gonolphs, Bookie Bobbies and the rest of the cock-eyed tribe every had time to talk to each other. It is no secret that every little sub-culture has its own mores, language and sense of what passes for honor. Runyon takes this and exaggerates the effect but also in many cases puts an edge on it. Some stories are just straight out funny like A Story Goes With It, with its improbable ending in the omnipresent world of the race track; some are tragic-comic like Lily of St. Pierre, a vignette of the seamy side of lumpen existence for those on the run; and others are just plain tear jerkers like Little Miss Marker.

Some commentators have argued that Runyon was just a cynic and had contempt for his characters (or for the real life characters that he based them on). Maybe, so. But if you want several hours of enjoyable reading about a time and place that never really existed except as caricature then this is your stop. By the way- Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Damon's writings are unique to New York City and represent those wonderful times in the 40s and 50s. It is an education home run for today's youth who think of NYC as a dirty, corrupt city. It's beautiful if you know the history and Damon was the historian.