Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman are the authors of the new novel The Kings of Vegas. Their other books include Freud's Mistress. They both live in Los Angeles.
Q: This is the fourth book you’ve cowritten--how would you describe your writing partnership?
A: Like most writers, we have good days and bad days. Bad days are challenging. When one of us tells the other “You’re killing the joke,” or “This sentence is flat” or “That makes me want die of boredom.” It feels as if we’re arguing like two mental patients.
And then there’s the Oscar Wilde quote, “It was a pretty good day, I spent the first half putting in a comma and the other half taking it out.” The way we actually work is we sit together at one desk with two computers, side by side, hour after hour. You could say we share the same sensibility. But not necessarily. In many ways, we’re actually the opposite. But somehow it seems to work for us. This is book 4.
Q: Karen, how did your family experiences factor into the plot of The Kings of Vegas?
Karen: What makes this book unique is the realistic view into the inner workings of the Las Vegas Casino culture from someone who lived and breathed it. That would be me. My family has lived in Las Vegas for three generations. My grandfather moved there in 1929 during the great depression when his still blew up in LA and he fled to Nevada.
The move was fortuitous. Boulder Dam was being built and there was an influx of workers who needed groceries, booze and someplace to blow off steam. My grandfather was happy to accommodate, opening a small ma and pa casino called The Jackpot.
This was back when cowboys used to ride horses down Fremont Street. It was a small town. Everyone knew everyone. As they say, a sunny place for shady people.
So when people ask me about early Las Vegas, I tell stories passed down from my grandfather and father about a city where opportunity and danger lived side by side.
The characters in our book are based on real people, composite pictures of the people I knew. Our next door neighbor was Ice-Pick Willie. I thought that was a normal name. I went to school with Dave “the man” Berman’s daughter. Likewise I used to think “the man” was a normal middle name.
As a kid, I would hang out at my father’s casino, climb up to the Eye in the Sky in the rafters and look down at the tourists gambling through one way mirrors–trying to catch the cheaters. I would visit the counting rooms where money flew around like cottonwood. Some went here, some went there, and some went in duffles to New Jersey or the Cayman Islands.
It was a male world with all the glitz and excess, violence and danger that people expect. This is the world I grew up in. And the world we created in this book.
All these fun stories are incorporated in our novel. The story captures the energy, risk, and layered social dynamics of the place, offering readers a window into a world where families like mine tried to lead a normal life in a place that was not at all normal. It was glamorous, dangerous, and unlike anywhere else on earth.
Q: How did you create your character Josie, and how would you describe her relationship with her family?
A: Josie’s character was created as a composite of girls Karen knew growing up in the casino world. Karen was a casino kid and casino families are like families of policemen, firemen and the military. Hometown joints run by grandfathers, fathers and sons. No daughters.
Josie was an example of the new generation of women who took over their family business. We created a complex and intelligent protagonist who shared her father’s character in every regard. We made her a formidable prodigy in a world where sexist attitudes about female players were ubiquitous.
By the way, she is also a rough version of King Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia. Banished from the casino at an early age, she returns as the most loyal and devoted sibling of all. In order to keep the King empire from crashing down, she must do whatever she needs to do, even if it means turning against her own family.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: We knew how the novel would end before we started it. But we didn’t realize that Josie’s moral behavior and agency would change so dramatically and she would become just as dangerous and manipulative as her father and her enemies.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We are now working on another thriller set in Las Vegas.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It’s true that Josie is a card-counting blackjack prodigy. And she pushes boundaries right from the start. At the beginning of the book, she encounters a man who is handsome, charming–every woman’ s fantasy—this passionate hookup resonates throughout the novel like a bad dream.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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