Paperbacks: The Ballad of a Small Player, Quiet Dell and The Sure Thing

 
The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne
William Leith23 April 2015

The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne (Vintage, £7.99)

A novel about an Englishman who commits a crime and escapes to Macau, where he reinvents himself as Lord Doyle. Actually, he’s a smalltime solicitor who has fleeced a widow in Haywards Heath. Now he’s gambling away the money. How much further can this guy fall? A lot, it turns out, as Lawrence Osborne rather brilliantly shows us. We get a powerful sense of what it must be like to be an addicted gambler: the doomed momentum, the moments of delusion. Doyle keeps losing, and somehow escaping disgrace. But then he crosses a line. This is a good, fast read about what it is to win, and what it is to lose.

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips (Vintage, £9.99)

In 1931 Asta Eicher, a woman from Chicago whose husband had died in an accident, answered a lonelyhearts ad. Eicher had two daughters and a son, and her money was running out. The man from the ad told her he’d pick her up and take her to see his property while somebody looked after her children. A week later he arrived back at her house, alone, and told the children to get into his car. All four of the Eichers disappeared. Jayne Anne Phillips has turned this true story into a novel. It’s creepy and compelling. We watch as our heroine, a female reporter, puts the story together. The details are beautifully drawn.

The Sure Thing by Nick Townsend (Arrow, £8.99)

If you’ve ever wondered about how the world of racing works, this book will give you a terrific picture. It’s about Barney Curley, a man who owns and trains racehorses, and who bets and sometimes wins huge amounts of money. He has, to say the least, an unusual mindset. “Here is a man,” writes Nick Townsend, “whose mind the best psychologists would find it difficult to penetrate.” In 1975, Curley outsmarted the bookies. He did it again in 2010. The stories are thrilling. Townsend manages to capture the essence of this world — the mix of pageantry and subterfuge, the rivalry between bookies and punters, and the race-day excitement.

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