4 out of 5

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A laid-back and professional con by a pro in the genre, Block’s “Girl With the Long Green Heart” doesn’t really drop any too surprising moves on the reader, but it does twiddle with expectations just to the right point before dropping the curtain for the reveal.  And while the path provided is one of the few possibilities for anyone familiar with pulp tropes, the realism that Block brings to his characters’ conclusions is up to his usual high standards, making it worth the trip from start to finish.

Johnny Hayden: outta’ jail, working a job to pay for his dream, trying to keep his head straight and not think about the grifter lifestyle that landed him in Quentin for too many years.  In walks youngster Doug Rance with a pitch for a long con, a land swindle with just enough twists to be a new deal, and a pretty good sounding one at that.  But Johnny knows better.  But he also knows he’s being sold on the job by Doug, is more and more aware that his ‘dream’ will take at least another decade of scraping dollars together to make happen… and if this One Last Job can net him the capital he needs right away…  Block’s tale doesn’t start in new territory by any means, but it’s not supposed to.  It’s giving us the pitch of the con, Johnny and Doug trading grifting lingo without much context for the reader, Hayden’s bitterness over jail-time and Doug’s polished naivety not coming across as forced archetypes – these guys are the real deal.  Whether or not this world we often read of in pulp novels exists or not, who knows, but the way Block writes it, it sure as shit does.  There’s no justification or over-manliness or dropping cute lines about the life, it’s just two dudes using their charm and their wits to find the easy way out.

John agrees to the deal, and we get about 100 pages of setup, details lovingly strung out for us and yet smoothly worked into the narrative without missing a beat.  The vibe is legit – John and Doug are pros, they know that to make the deal happen, a certain amount of trust has to be there.  So while we know something’s going to go wrong, we trust that it’s not going to be so last-minute 180 from a source who should know better.

And in walks the girl.  Whom we know is trouble.  But how?  Because she woos John while she’s supposed to be the femme for the mark?  Because Doug has a thing for her too?  And yet everything seems to keep going well.  Y’know, until it doesn’t.  Block has a great line in here, delivered by Johnny, regarding how the con is either about being likeable or being trustworthy, and the rest just falls into place.  And the narration follows the same rules.  A lot of these books – and I love these books – play their cards close in one way or another, and you can sniff out under which carpet the stench is probably coming from.  It’s part of the genre, it’s part of the fun.  But for the most part, Block knows we know these rules and so he plays it fairly straight.  And as was the case with ‘Grifter’s Game,’ the previous HCC book of the author’s work, it ends up not so much being a story about the grift or the crime (though we learn so much about the process here just by reading about how these dudes set up their operation), but the cost that can take on someone, even when things don’t blow up in your face.

Block has earned the ability to write books like this.  It’s not trying to wow your socks off, it’s just trying – and succeeding – to explore the same ol’ dames and dudes stories from new angles.  And it doesn’t miss a single beat.