2 out of 5

HCC-025

Holy haribo… Thank god im done reading this.

I quite enjoyed the previous HCC Dodge book I read, Plunder of the Sun, and if I had another life to spare I’d go back and read it now, for comparison, as the fittingly titled The Last Match – a low-level con involving picking up items, such as matches, to fool someone into being stuck with (sort of the operative term I was hinging ‘fittingly’ on) the last one –  is such an incredible slog at points that it would seem to be a different writer from afar.

But some context might be helpful.  Dodge, known as much for being a travelogue writer as a mystery writer, whisked his family around the world during his career, using their experiences as fodder for both non-fiction and fiction work.  He’d made a name for himself, but struck big with the Hitchcock adapted To Catch a Thief.  The Last Match was written at the end of an impressively extensive career, again plucking and choosing from the writer’s history, as well as from his own writing, as suggested in an afterword by the writer’s daughter; she offers that characters in Match are re-skinned variations on those in Thief.  The book, unpublished until many years later, was written in Dodge’s final year.  Perhaps this justifies its structure, which gives our lead, nameless conman the barest of motivations to travel from place to place, grift to grift, like a best-of of vignettes from the author’s ideas and memories.  But even accepting that, it doesn’t justify the lack of compelling narrative when stringing those bits together.

The author’s flash can be found in the percolation of mini-events throughout.  Informed details of boat-smuggling operations or prison life or small-stakes grifts are interesting in isolation, and every fifty pages or so percolates in a some type of momentarily thrilling outcome, with a couple of legitimate surprises – when Dodge remembers there’s a larger story to write – landing with fun shock while reading.  And a slight shift of making this directly about the conman’s life might’ve changed up expectations while reading, or even while writing, as the lead’s actions / inactions / brusqueness seem to vary in tone and snark in any given situation; it very much feels like this is because each con is just requisite buffer to extend the space between actual important -to-the plot sequences.  …Which makes a somewhat lampshaded “this is why we went through those extra steps!” explanation at story’s end more annoying then revelatory.

Our lead guy shacks up with an heiress who seems to want nothing to do with him but also won’t let him leave her company.  When he finally gets fed up with the uneven ROI, he breaks loose, only to find that she seems intent in turning him straight, and thus fights to keep him in tow.  Thus begins The Last Match’s lazy cat-and-mouse of conman conning from one locale to the next, bumping into – and then running from – the Honorable Regina Forbes each step along the way.  The cover copy – “Would Interpol get him first… Or would she?” – makes this seem much more thrilling than it ever is, because there are absolutely zero stakes otherwise, and once you’re keen on the separated nature of each con, you understand that there isn’t going to be much buildup along the way either.  There’s also a glaring problem with sexism in the book, something I’m glad Dodge’s daughter mentions in the afterword as well.  For better or worse, dames or dolls or fatales are often part of the genre, and they often get the “empowerment through equalization” approach and / or damseled in these tales.  I have no justification for this beyond the era in which some of these stories are written, but if you squint you can hopefully see some intentions of creating actual characters.  Dodge just chose all the most base elements for his females, though, making them in to ridiculous unbelievable cutouts; the book has a disgusting sense of fantasy fueling its female depictions, and that’s me reading that as a dick-carrying objectifier through and through, as my 8 girlfriends – I’m sorry, my 8 nameless whores – can attest, when I’m not shushing them while ogling their vaginas.

Woop woop and whatnot, and on to the next one.