The Ivory Coast
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
It is 1955 in Las Vegas. Sammy and Satchmo are headlining the big hotels - where the casino operators and the color bar say a black man can't buy a drink or a meal or a room. Until now. The Chicago mob man Mo Weiner is bankrolling ex-boxer Worthless Worthington Lee and the city's first all-black hotel-casino. The Ivory Coast is rising up from the dust, on the wrong side of town. And out of the shadows steps Deacon, a white horn player with a dark past and a genius for jazz. Mo mistakes him for a hitman. Worthless takes him for a friend. Anita, the mixed-race beauty he falls for, wants him for herself. And Haney, the corrupt and racist copy who runs this hot desert oasis of sin and sand, wants him rubbed out. Deacon is holding a dangerous hand, and a dangerous secret, spun inside a deadly web of deceit and double-crosses. The Ivory Coast is coming, rushing this sprawling drama toward the last Sunday in May, when the whole town will be black and white and blood-red all over...
A suspenseful first novel of remarkable imagination, scope and energy, The Ivory Coast is impossible to ignore and, once begun, impossible to resist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Something about the gaudy, vulgar, appalling milieu of Las Vegas seems to defeat filmmakers (except for the original Ocean's 11), and writers too, as this first novel by Fleming confirms. The sprawling narrative repels more than it fascinates, eventually falling victim to its own excesses. In 1955 Vegas, a talented white trumpeter named Deacon is asked by Mo "the Man" Weiner, owner of the Thunderbird casino, to do a hit job on a certain messenger from L.A. The messenger is carrying a suitcase containing something of vital importance to Thomas Haney, top cop on the Vegas strip, who'll do anything to get hold of it. Meanwhile, Worthless Worthington Jones, an ex-boxer, plans to open the first black casino, the Ivory Coast, with the help of silent partner Mo. The author has evoked a lost era of high living and conspicuous consumption with clarity and persuasiveness, so much so that you can choke on the unfiltered cigarette smoke wafting from the blaring, neon-lit town. What's more, he understands the psychology of its denizens: "When a real gambler starts losing real money, the money becomes unreal. First, losing the money loses significance, and then losing the money becomes the entire point." Alas, the book falls back on most of the old Vegas clich s, with name dropping aplenty (Sinatra, Dino, Satchmo, Ella, et al.). More regrettably, Fleming saturates the plot in violence, which erupts periodically and pointlessly, so that the novel, in spite of its epic pretensions, comes up snake eyes.
