“Right this way, you pitiful sap.”
Dead Guns Press’s new anthology, Hardboiled: Crime Scene, is now out and available on Amazon. Among others, the antho features my story, The Badger Game. This is the 19th-Century term for a short con that relies on the oldest inducement in the world for prying money out of suckers’ hands: sex. As in the illustration above, an affluent gentleman would be accosted on the street by a well-dressed young woman who was, in the parlance of the time, no better than she should be. In a short time, the mark would find himself following the woman to her apartment, too bedizened by the prospect of imminent rutting to notice the hulking brute hiding in the hall, just waiting for the chance to confront the mark, accuse him of trying to take advantage of a young, innocent girl, and then proceeding to skin the mark out of every last penny through a combination of threats and force.
The badger game was a highly favored American criminal dodge during the Civil War and afterwards. While the classical form of the game is probably no longer much utilized, the spirit lives on in the old prostitute trick: grab the cash and bolt out the door before the john realizes what you’re doing. This was how R&B/soul singer Sam Cooke got killed, by the way (look it up if you’re curious). The short story itself is excerpted from my Civil War crime novel, The Confessions Of Septimus P. Nasby. In the novel, sick of war and the military after being conscripted twice into the Confederate Army, the protagonist Nasby travels to New York City to hide from the draft and take his chances competing against the teeming hordes of vicious, cunning, unprincipled crooks and scoundrels that infested the Old Frog and Toe back in those days (this was the original nickname for NYC prior to the Big Apple sobriquet).
I’m delighted to see this story in print as part of a hard-boiled crime fiction anthology. My deepest thanks and gratitude to John Thompson, editor/publisher of Dead Guns Press, for picking this story for publication. I urge everyone who sees this blog post to seriously consider purchasing the Dead Guns antho. I know you won’t regret doing so.