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Van Patten, Vince and Robert J. Randisi. The Picasso Flop: A Texas Hold’em Mystery. NY: Mysterious Press, 2007.

Vince Van Patten of the show-biz family is the co-host of the WPT (World Poker Tour) tv show, and his role in writing this mystery (for which he gets top billing and larger letters on the cover) is to shill for the WPT. (The WPT logo even has a prominent spot on the dustjacket.) I have been reading mystery/crime novels for more than 50 years, and I never heard of Robert J. Randisi. When I googled him, the reason for my ignorance was clear. The guy has written a gazillion potboilers novels under a gazillion names.

Briefly, the amateur sleuth in this novel is one Jimmy Spain, an ex-con recently sprung after a ten-year stretch and a (former) poker pro. Shortly after his return to society after paying his dues (or at least some of them), he is summoned to the palatial home of a very rich fellow ex-con (think Enron guys and Martha Stewart). Mr. Very Rich and Formerly Somewhat Crooked offers Spain a whole bunch of money and a whole lot of perks to teach his Goth chick daughter to be a winning poker player and to smooth off some of her rough edges while he’s at it. Obviously an offer that can’t and won’t be refused. The only catch–Goth Chick must never know that Rich Daddy is pulling the strings. In any decent fairy tale this geis would turn out to be an important part of the plot, but here it’s part of a sub-plot that goes absolutely nowhere, like a lot of the rest of this novel.

Eventually Spain takes his Goth chick mentee to Vegas where they both buy in (with Rich Daddy’s money) to the WPT tournament at the Bellagio.This gives Vince Van Patten the opportunity to drop the name of every tv tournament pro from Dolly Brunson to Gus Hansen, from T.J. Cloutier to Jesus Ferguson. WPT stalwart Mike Sexton shows up on every other page, and we hear from Linda Johnson, too. Representing celebrity poker players, there’s mouth-running, jaw-flapping, trash-talking James Woods, with a nod on the side to Tobey Maguire. There’s even a shout-out to the Ol’ Poker Maven himself, although Goth Chick’s poker library consists of Super System II, Mike Caro, and Phil Hellmuth (of course). And the job of transforming Goth Chick into something more feminine and fashionable falls to Cloney Gowan and Evelyn Ng.

This is a murder mystery after all, and when a certain “fictional” character shows up, his real-life “inspiration” will be obvious to anyone even slightly in the poker gossip know, and no one will be surprised when said “fictional” character turns up dead. While the identity of the perp may or may not be a surprise, the perp’s motivation struck me as absolutely ludicrous. Knowing the history of the real-life prototype(s) of the victim(s), I can think of a number of reasons why someone might want such individuals dead, but, unless I know less about the nature of the Vegas gamblers’ world than I think I do (which is certainly possible), the motive the author(s) has/have chosen to give us is just, well, silly.

In the poker mystery I reviewed previously, Jackie Chance’s Death on the Flop, the sleuth was a completely clueless poker newbie who somehow manages to make herself the queen of the pokeristas. The Picasso Flop has not one, but two, hot (in various senses of the word) poker playing women. I am also reminded of Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch novels where Harry Bosch’s ex-wife and mother of his daughter shows up occasionally–in Vegas where she is a poker pro, grinding out a living for herself and her little girl. Is this a trend? Women infiltrating the “No gurrlz allowed” little poker-boys club? I imagine that books which spotlight female poker players aren’t going to sit too well with the kind of misogynist who got all over my son’s case when Edward had the nerve to use feminine pronouns referring to the hero in poker hand analyses–and expected me to support his misogynistic lunacy.

Seriously, The Picasso Flop is not a very good book, either as an example of the mystery genre or as a view into the poker world. As a mystery it is not well written. It’s got extraneous plot elements flapping around. The characters range from not particularly well developed or interesting to ridiculous caricatures. Compare this novel to those of James Lee Burke or Michael Connolly or Dennis Lehane (not to mention the Lady Brits Ruth Rendell and P.D. James), and you will see Randisi’s work has no depth, no texture. And its view of the poker world is no more than what the producers of the WPT want the reader to see.

Like the mystery novel itself, poker is a game of interpreting incomplete information. It’s a game of both chance and skill (yes, US Congress, skill), mathematics and psychology. It attracts the highly intelligent and the highly intuitive (and the best players pretty much have to be both), the risk-takers and the self-controlled (and the best players ought to be both, but all too often aren’t). It’s a game where large sums of money hang on the turn of a card, and everything is not always on the up and up. It’s deeply ingrained in American history, from its roots in New Orleans and on the riverboats that once paddled on the Mississippi to Wild Bill Hickok and his dead man’s hand in Deadwood, South Dakota, to Harry Truman and his famous home games (which once included Winston Churchill). If Dick Francis made a long career writing mysteries set in the world of horse-racing, surely someone with talent and grit can do the same for poker, a milieu filled with colorful characters from grifters to politicians, from movie stars to highschoolers on the computer in mama’s basement, from highly educated math whizzes to barely educated con artists, set in venues ranging from the backrooms of ramshackle roadhouses on the Texas plains to the glittering pleasure palaces of the Vegas Strip. But it ain’t happened yet.