The Last Match by David Dodge

“The USA in my experience has a larger saturation of easy marks per square 

acre than any other country in the world. Perhaps this is so because Americans tend to believe what they see in print until it’s proved to be demonstrably false, whereas Europeans among others know damn well it’s all a pack of lies 

even when it’s proved to be demonstrably true.”

The scene on the cover (art by William George) conveys an actual scene from the book,
so extra points for that. 

From the author of To Catch a Thief comes HCC-25, the never before published The Last Match, found among the author's papers after his death. 

As always in these reviews, I'll avoid spoilers, but here's a plot summary:

"Curly begins his life of crime in the playground of the rich and famous-the casinos and hotels of Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. He becomes involved in a cigarette-smuggling scheme with a French hotel-bartender named Jean-Pierre and a couple of Corsican gangstaires, nicknamed The Boar and The Plank. The experience promptly lands him in jail in Marseilles. He is paroled to a beautiful British heiress, Regina “Reggie” Forbes-Jones, who disapproves of his chosen profession and is determined to reform him.

In order to escape her—and another potential jail sentence—Curly leaves France and moves to Tangier, where he “inherits” a job and a girl from another American. The job is writing come-on letters to American suckers for a phony Moroccan bank and the girl is Boda, “as flawless a piece of Danish pastry as has ever been perpetrated.” From there Curly returns to the U.S. before shipping out for South America and landing in Lima, Peru.

Escaping Lima just one step ahead of the Peruvian cops, Curly boards an Amazonian riverboat in Iquitos and ends up with an 18-month jail sentence in Brazil. Shortly after his release he is reunited—and reconciled—with Reggie. They return to the Côte d’Azur and set up housekeeping in a hillside villa near Mougins. The Boar returns for a tense showdown."

This was my first time reading David Dodge, and I didn't realize he was the To Catch a Thief author until I got about halfway through The Last Match and googled him, having decided by that point in the reading that I loved what I was reading and wanted to know more about its author. That led me to the site aforelinked (all quoted material besides the italicized quotes from the book itself are from this site) which appears to be the home of all Dodge-related links, photos, and info on the web.

I enjoyed this one so much that I instantly ordered his other HCC book, To Plunder the Sun, so a review of that will show up sooner or later. I'm trying not to do that with this Hard Case Crime project, as the whole idea was to make my way through the ones already on my shelf  and not accumulate more. But knowing myself I figured I figured I'd make an exception here and there. That I'm doing so here so early in the project doesn't bode well for my powers of restraint, but the plan is still to do this as sparingly as possible.

I've a dearth of Last Match-related photos so we'll make do with some pictures of his other books.

“One gray Sunday morning I found myself on the Baltimore waterfront, for no particular reason. Baltimore is a depressing town at best, even when the weather isn’t gloomy. Mooching along the wharves wrapped up in my private cloud of gloom, I breathed the salt-oil-paint-slush-garbage odor of the harbor and was suddenly hit with this overwhelming saudade for – something. I still didn’t know what the something was but I craved it. I had to have it. Saudade is a Portuguese word I didn’t know then but learned later. The word doesn’t translate exactly, but it’s close to nostalgia, homesickness, mal du pays, cafard, all those except that you can also have saudade for a plate of ham and eggs or a dill pickle. You can even have saudade for Baltimore and the pedestrian life I had been leading. I was in a trap, and I wanted out."

I wasn't sure as I was reading this one whether it was just a loose collection of vignettes or if it was all actually leading somewhere. I can lose interest in loose collection of vignettes, at least when presented to me as a novel, but I'd already decided I'd make an exception in this case as I was enjoying the scenery and pacing so much. Then it all came full circle in the last hundred pages or so. Nicely done. Although Randal Brandt (caretaker of the Dodge website and the man we have to thank for being able to read The Last Match in the first place) felt it was not his most polished work, “it is definitely his most personal novel, and it has all of the characteristics that make his novels great: crisp, witty dialogue, memorable, sharply drawn characters, exotic locales, and tight plotting.”

There is an afterword from the author's daughter which is quite lovely. She mentions the characters' antecedents from other works or family biography and adds this: "The nameless hero? The crook who tells the story? Oh, he’s just David Dodge, I think, dreaming of long cons. My father – the most scrupulously honest man I’ve ever known – loved the whole world of con men and buncho rackets and professional card sharks and worked them into his books over and over again.”

 

She goes on to talk about how the work is “appallingly sexist.” This is where I always part ways from a whole school of critical thought, that of calling the work/ author sexist (or any -ist) rather than the world it depicts or any particular character. I think it’s an honest enough disagreement about how texts are constructed, so I’ll leave it at that. Kendal Dodge, though, sees the relationships between the protagonist and the many female characters of the novel as “profoundly bogus.” I’d like to know more about what she meant by that, as I did not.

They are disturbing, certainly, and this is of course the tale of a scoundrel. One redeemed at the end, for sure, (spoilers I guess, but the whole tale is told past-tense from the main character, so outside of the details you know the general direction of things) and written from his own romantic POV. For example, the lady on the cover is perhaps (the novel is unclear but suggestive on this point) simple-minded to the point of mental retardation. I can't think of any other way of explaining it. I hope sensitive readers will forgive me for pointing it out. But, much like Charlize Theron's character in that one season of Arrested Development, no one notices because of her foreign accent and because she's such a nympho knockout. 

Is this sexist? I don't know that it is. I think it's sexist to suggest this is the existential state of womanhood or anything like that. Is the character? Certainly the character's attitudes and behaviors would be seen as machismo / sexist to the point of suffocation nowadays. (I'd like to point out: being judged any-which-way by the standards of 2020 is hardly cause for confidence.) Is the author? I don't think so. Don't women like this exist? And do they even need to? Is Pussy Galore a sexist character, or does James Bond live and operate in a different world than I/most mortal men do? Is he (Dodge) confessing some dalliance? Who the hell knows. 

 

Anyway: I wouldn't be making my way through Hard Case Crime novels to begin with nor have a shelf-ful of Richard Blade books if my tolerance level for this sort of thing wasn't very high. The world is populated with many different types of people, and even the best people have moral failings or contradictions. Lord knows reading about enlightened wokescolds is of absolutely no interest whatsoever. But moreover I think any 'redemption of a scoundrel' narrative isn't worth much if we don't see the scoundrel part.

“People will even con themselves if you give them the right mouthful of words to do it with. The words don’t have to mean anything in particular. Just so long as they sound good.”

~

The Hard Case Crime Chronicles will continue with...

Joyland by Stephen King.

Appearing sooner or later. See you then.