We couldn’t resist this one. A book set in Venice, California? As former residents, sign us up. In The Venetian Blonde, A.S. Fleischman tells us about a professional card cheat named Skelly whose sudden loss of the ability to deal cost his backer $125,000 during a high stakes poker game. He’s fled from Boston across the country to Venice, California to escape retribution, but in need of money becomes embroiled in a fake spiritualist scheme engineered by a femme fatale named Maggie Williams.
It’s one thing to scam a hundred dollars promising someone a chat with their dead relative. It’s another thing entirely promising to bring the relative back from the dead for a cool $150,000. That’s some trick, but Maggie has it all figured out. She isn’t the Venetian blonde of the title, though. That would be redemptive archetype Viola, wandering around a subplot and making Skelly think there’s a good future for him. Is there? Maybe, if he doesn’t end up in the great beyond himself.
The central scam in The Venetian Blonde is nearly impossible to buy, but Fleischman makes the book a good read by utilizing a jazzy style we don’t come across often enough in old fiction. Slang trips off Skelly’s tongue fast and funny. Being broke is “tap city” or “tapioca.” Cigarettes are “gaspers.” Dollars are “piastres,” as in the old Egyptian currency. He calls the entire medium con “fakus,” as in, “It really wasn’t my brand of fakus.” He says at one point, “Venice on a Sunday night was skid row with seaweed.”
Literary slang slingers are usually cynical, and Skelly is no exception. He’s unimpressed with Venice. He describes it as a tidepool, a backwater. It wasn’t when we lived there, and our personal connection to a bustling L.A. enclave depicted as a crumbling, dead-end resort is certainly a reason we liked the book, but in our opinion Fleischman’s work in The Venetian Blonde will also easily entertain readers who’ve never laid eyes on Venice. There’s no fakus in his writing. It’s concise, acerbic, colorful, and confident.
