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Confidence tricks in literature |
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Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man.
Many of the crime novels of Jim Thompson involve confidence artists. Joyce Carol Oates's My Heart Laid Bare features a family of confidence artists. Neil Gaiman's American Gods uses a two-man con as a major plot element. O. Henry's collection The Gentle Grafter describes a variety of confidence tricks. Slippery Jim - the protagonist of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat trilogy - uses abundant schemes and frauds. The Big Con Judith Ivory's Untie My Heart Jenny Crusie's Faking It -- Features a family of confidence artists Children of Lieutenant Schmidt Society, a society of pretenders to be sons of Pyotr Schmidt Ostap Bender, the central character of Ilf and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf The Professor in Spider Robinson's Callahan Series John Constantine of DC Comics/Vertigo ongoing series, Hellblazer, created by Alan Moore uses confidence scams, trickery, and magick to outwit his opponents. Stephen J. Cannell's King Con features a confidence man who successfully performs many of the known tricks, as well as some very creative and impressive ones. Tim Krabbé's The Golden Egg (1984) features a chemistry teacher who employs confidence tricks for the purpose of kidnapping. Travis McGee in John D. MacDonald's series of novels frequently uses con games or has them tried against him. Delos D. Harriman of Robert H. Heinlein's novel The Man Who Sold the Moon could possibly be considered a con artist. The novella The Space Merchants by Frederic Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth is replete with con games practiced by corporations. |
