"Dead Man's Hand" review, part 3

I'll admit it: I'm a lot better at starting books than finishing them. My formal higher education (at least that's what they call it) lasted a sickening 11 years, and when it was over, I vowed that I would never again read a book I didn't want to read (because I was so tired of reading things that were required), and if I wasn't enjoying a book, I would feel no obligation to finish it. I've stuck by that, and it has meant abandoning a lot of them part-way through.

Back in January, I started reading Dead Man's Hand, a collection of poker-related, crime-genre short stories edited by Otto Penzler. You can access the first two things I wrote about the book with this tag. Then other reading priorities came along, and Penzler et al kind of got lost in the shuffle. This wasn't deliberately deciding not to finish it because it wasn't enjoyable--just slipped in priorities for a few weeks, and then basically got forgotten.

Well, the other day it popped up again, and I'm making another run at it. This afternoon I had a few hours to kill in the waiting room of Precision Tune while my car had some work done, and I took the book along.

So here's the next installment in my serial review.

The next story in the collection is "In the Eyes of Children," by Alexander McCall Smith. This is a stupid, forgettable story with one of those damnably ambiguous endings. It barely even involves poker. Some kids' schoolteacher gets humiliated in a poker game, no details of which are described, and that's their motivation for what they decide to do. That's the only poker connection there is. The whole thing is a waste of space.

Next up is Michael Connelly's "One-Dollar Jackpot." This is not a bad crime story. It involves the murder of a female poker player after she has left the casino with a lot of cash. Looks like a robbery-murder, but the detective quickly suspects the woman's husband is the real killer, having made it look like a robbery gone bad. The story boils down to a battle of wits between the detective and the suspect. A key point in this contest is a game of Liar's Poker.

I enjoyed the story just fine. But as with the story I wrote about in the previous part of this review back in January, there's a critical flaw in the poker part. (I realize that it's a stretch to include Liar's Poker as "poker," but let's give them that much.) A basic safeguard in playing Liar's Poker is that you have to use dollar bills that you know haven't been pre-selected by your opponent. For example, you might request them from the bartender's till. If you don't, it's like agreeing to play regular poker with a deck that your opponent has either stacked or marked.

The suspect here, a professional poker player, does not take this fundamental precaution, which is virtually unthinkable. For me it broke the spell of realism that the story otherwise had.

Next up is Joyce Carol Oates, with "Strip Poker." By no stretch of the imagination does this fit under the crime genre, but it is a first-rate piece of writing, as one would expect from Oates. It's a first-person recollection of a 14-year-old girl's harrowing encounter with some older, seedy men, alone in an isolated cabin in the back woods. Oates employs a nontraditional, sort of free-form writing style, with stream-of-consciousness sentences. Ingeniously, this effect gets more pronounced as the tension hightens, and the girl's head is increasingly swimming with fear and her first experience with the beer with which the men are plying her. The reader thus gets a vivid sense of the terror and confusion and panic she is experiencing. It's scary, scary stuff. As she finally gets a grip on herself and starts to reassert control over the situation, the writing gradually normalizes, and we see her smart, rational self emerge to worm her way out of danger.

Poker, which the men first teach the girl, then turn into a game of strip poker, is at the heart of the story:

But the cards don't come now. Or anyway, I can't make sense of them. Like adding
up a column of numbers in math class, you lose your way and have to begin again.
Like multiplying numbers, you can do it without thinking, but if you stop to
think, you can't. Staring at these new cards, nine of hearts, nine of clubs,
king of spades, queen of spades, four of diamonds. I get rid of the four of
diamonds and I'm excited, my replacement card is a jack of spades, but my eyes
are playing tricks on me, what looks like spades is actually clubs, after
raising my bet I see that it's clubs and I've made a mistake staring and
blinking at the cards in my hands that are kind of shaky like I have never seen
a poker hand before. Around the table the guys are playing like before, loud,
funny-rude, maybe there's some tension among them, I can't figure because I am
too distracted by the cards and how I am losing now, nothing I do is right now,
but why? When Croke wins the hand, Deek mutters, "Shi-it, you goddamn fuckin'
asshole," but smiling like this is a joke, a kindly intended remark like between
brothers. I'm trying to make sense of the hand: why'd Croke win? why's this a
"winning" hand? what's a "full house"? wondering if the guys are cheating on me,
how'd I know? The guys are laughing at me, saying, "Hey, babe, be a good sport,
this is poker."

I don't know how much of a poker player Oates is, but she certainly understands the core essence of the game, in a way that many players don't:

Doesn't it matter what your actual cards are, I ask Deek, if they are high
or low? Deek says sort of scornfully like this is a damn dumb question he will
answer because he likes me, "sure it matters, but not so much's how you play
what you're dealt. What you do with the fuckin' cards you are dealt, that's
poker."

At some level the narrator takes this message to heart, and it is the essence of how she turns her situation around. We learn a lot about her--she's been dealt a whole bunch of bad cards in her life, and this mess she has gotten herself into is only the latest of them. But she ends up playing what she has been dealt brilliantly. It's a masterful, chilling ending that I won't ruin by even hinting at it here.

Good, good stuff. Easily the best in the book so far, and darn near worth the cost all by itself.

More later.