The Art of Mystery

James Swain
At the Intersection of Magic & Mystery

By Margo Hammond
Posted on July 11, 2023

Question
What do you get when you mix mystery and magic?

Answer
James Swain.

A best-selling Florida writer, James Swain has earned a slew of awards for his mysteries. His series (he has six of them) follow the exploits of a magician (Vincent Hardare), an ex-cop from Palm Harbor turned private eye (Tony Valentine), an ex-cop from South Florida turned child rescuer (Jack Carpenter), a psychic who sees the future and helps prevents crimes (Peter Warlock), a scammer (Billy Cunningham) and, in his latest, an ex–Navy SEAL who teams up with a FBI agent to find missing persons (Jon Lancaster and Beth Daniels).

Swain is also a magician. For the past nine years (except during pandemic lockdown) he has driven from Odessa, where he lives with his wife Laura, to St. Petersburg to offers free magic shows a the Hollander Hotel on 4th Avenue N. You’ll find him there every Thursday from 7-9 pm – just look for the plaque that says Magic Jim on a table in the Tap Room.

This evening I’ve come to the Hollander an hour before his show to talk to Swain about this double life as a magician and a mystery writer. We are seated on a couch side by side, just beyond the bustle of the Tap Room.

The cozy spot reminds me of The Study from the game of Clue, with flames from a fireplace lighting up a chandelier overhead. As we talk, I half expect a man smoking a pipe and wearing a trench coat to emerge from the old-fashioned telephone booth a few feet away.

Mysteries and magic, it turns out, have constantly overlapped in Swain’s life.

“An awful lot of people who come to the Hollander to see my magic show have read my books and that’s a lot of fun,” says Swain who still has the boyish grin I remember when I first met him after the publication of his first mystery in 2001. “They come here and I talk to them about my books. People pull lines from books that I’ve totally forgotten about.”

He’s written, after all, 24 of them – including a book on magic.

*Image courtesy of James Swain – photo by Tony Bock/Toronto Star via Getty Images*

His readers may come at first to meet James Swain, the writer. But, like me, they leave magic aficionados, blown away by his eye-popping show. As Colette Bancroft, the book editor of the Tampa Bay Times once told Swain, “You must be the most accessible writer out there.”

Swain specializes in what is known as close-up magic, a sleight-of-hand performance for a handful of people seated at a small table. During his shows Swain keeps up a constant banter, weaving tales and telling jokes as he asks you to pick a card, any card.

Then he dazzles you with a mind-bending trick involving the disappearance and reappearance of that card, leaving you slack-jawed. On occasion, he even makes baseballs vanish and reappear before your very eyes.

“When I started to do magic, a professional magician said to me, ‘You’re a storyteller. All of your routines tell a story,’” says Swain who began telling stories as a child to overcome his shyness.

“Mysteries prey on preconceived notions,” says Swain. “Magic does that, too. I do it all the time in my show. Writers do it all the time in writing. You take what people have as a certain order of things and you turn it upside-down.”

Now you see the card, now you don’t. Oh, there it is under the magic cup. How did he do that?

Like with a good mystery, it was right there in front of me and yet I didn’t see it. Both mysteries and magic involve a certain degree of distraction, but we want it to be artful distraction. We enjoy being thrown off by red herrings in a mystery and are delighted by the reverses that Swain pulls off in his tricks, but we want the twists to be earned.

“There’s an expression — it’s fun to be fooled,” says Swain. “No it’s not. It’s not fun to be fooled. It’s fun to be entertained.”

For Swain, which came first, the magic or the mysteries? “The magic,” says Swain without hesitation.

“I was doing magic when I was ten. I started performing magic for money with my brother when I was 13, I think, and Tom was 16. We’d go to magic conventions together. Once Tom won the senior competition and I won the junior competition, pretty much doing an identical act – sleight of hand – but he was left-handed and I was right-handed so they looked very similar but they knew it wasn’t the same guy.

“We got these big bowling trophy awards. We were getting some renown as magicians, making good money.”

Then Tom went off to college and left magic behind. Swain, on the other hand, really “jumped into” it. And magic eventually fueled his career as a mystery writer.

“To me, I wouldn’t have one without the other,” he says.

Thanks to magic, he became an expert in casino scams and cheating, a subject that would inspire his early mysteries. “In the ’70s when I was living in New York, the cheats would come into the magic shops and I’d meet them. Because of my prowess with sleight of hand, I would show them something and fool them and then we’d start talking.”

He also learned about scams from fellow magicians like Darwin Ortiz, who worked as a consultant for casinos to prevent cheating there. “I knew Darwin very well. I stayed with him one week during a train strike. He let me stay in his home out in Brooklyn. And that’s all we talked about.” In 1984 Ortiz wrote Gambling Scams, the first book on cheating in casinos.

Casino scams became Swain’s first writing “hook.”

“With writing, you have to have a hook. You better have a hook. Now I had a hook,” says Swain. “So I wrote this book called Grift Sense. I had heard about this thing where people in the casino industry could spot a scam by smelling that something wasn’t quite right about the way people were behaving. A lot of it was little stuff.”

Like the time a casino detective caught a man on tape celebrating immediately after he won a slot machine jackpot. That, it turns out, is a sure tell.

“When people win a jackpot there’s normally a six- or seven-second delay because they’re so used to losing,” explains Swain. “They’ve played thousands and thousands of times so the win doesn’t register at first. But this guy reacted right away.” A cheater nailed.

Stories like that made their way into Swain’s first successful mystery series starring Tony Valentine, an ex-cop who is hired by the Las Vegas casinos to catch cheaters (Atlantic City casinos were his beat as a cop). Published in 2001 to great acclaim, Grift Sense put Swain on the mystery writer’s map.

Swain wrote eight more Valentine books, one every year, with the last two (Jackpot and Wild Card) appearing in 2010 as e-books. Wild Card is actually a prequel to the whole series.

In 2015 Swain launched another series involving casino scams, this time featuring a protagonist who was not trying to catch casino scams, but was pulling them off. Introducing master grifter Billy Cunningham from Providence, Rhode Island, who lived by a “cheater’s moral code,” the series began with Take Down, followed by Bad Action (2016) and Super Con (2017). A fourth Billy Cunningham book is currently in the works, says Swain.

Not all Swain’s series have involved casino scams. He eventually found other “hooks.” In his latest series, set in Florida, ex-Navy SEAL Jon Lancaster teams up with FBI agent Beth Daniels to hunt down missing persons.

For Daniels, the hunt is personal – she was abducted as a child herself. For Swain, the series is personal. His mother was abducted when she was seven — by her own mother. Her parents were divorced. She was living with her dad on Long Island in a little schoolhouse at the height of the depression in the 1930s when suddenly her mother showed up and took her to New York.

She didn’t see her father or her brother or her friends for several years. Then just as abruptly her mother sent her back.

“I didn’t know this history until I went up to see my folks and we drove down to Stonybrook which is where this all took place,” he says. “My mom was in her 70s – I was in my late 30s, early 40s.”

Swain’s mother also was the inspiration for Mabel, Tony Valentine’s feisty Palm Harbor neighbor, one of my favorite Swain characters. “She’s got an opinion about everything, kinda based on my mom,” says Swain.

As a child, Swain was a voracious reader. At age 7 he read a series of biographies written for elementary school kids. “George Washington Carver. Teddy Roosevelt. By the time I graduated from elementary school I’d read every book in the library,” chuckles Swain, who was born in Huntington, Long Island.

In junior high, he read true crime books like The Valachi Papers by Peter Maas. “We had a lot of mafioso on Long Island. They ran things there. They were part of the fabric.”

No surprise, the first book of fiction that really hooked him was The Godfather — written by Mario Puzo in his Long Island basement.

It was his mom who was responsible for Swain meeting Puzo. When the author was invited to speak at her book club, she gave her son her ticket.

“I remember Puzo saying that the best books were really about something else,” Swain recalls, “and when someone from the audience asked him what The Godfather was about, he said that it was about a boy taking over his father’s business.”

Well, yeah – and a few other things, too, of course. Still, Puzo’s advice makes sense. Those of us obsessed with mysteries know the best ones are not only about plot, but about something else. Like casinos.

“I had a lot of great mentors,” says Swain who started writing short stories in high school. His teacher there was Kitty Lindsey, a published novelist. Later he joined the creative writing program at Hofstra University on Long Island, run by Arthur Gregor, a published poet and editor of Random House, and Sam Toperoff.

“Professional writers would come out and speak to us and Toperoff, who lived in Huntington, had me interview them for the Hofstra paper. I think it was called the Chronicle,” says Swain. “I met Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gerold Frank the biographer who wrote books on Judy Garland and Zsa Zsa Gabor, Cynthia Ozick, E.L. Doctorow and John Gardner.

I’ll never forget that Vonnegut and Heller were both asked the same question — What advice do you give to aspiring writers? And they both gave the same answer – Make sure your first novel sells. This is how this business works. If you start a loser, you’re dead.”

Actually, Swain’s first published novel, a story based on the life of Houdini’s nephew which came out in 1989, didn’t do so well. “It lasted about an hour,” he laughs, “but I don’t count that one.”

In addition to those cheats who bent Swain’s ear in that New York magic shop, Swain also credits a number of fellow mystery writers for kickstarting his mystery career back in the early ’80s. “I was living in South Florida, going to Books & Books and reading all these great books,” he remembers. One of them was Jim Hall’s Under Cover of Daylight.

“I read it in one sitting, couldn’t stop reading it, and then I started reading the guy who wrote Miami Blues, Charles Williford. He had the greatest title of any mystery ever, New Hope for the Dead. I know a lot of writers who were really influenced by that book and him.

“Then I started reading James Crumley — Michael Connelly dedicates a book to Crumley. I was living with my now wife Laura. Crime was everywhere. You picked up the paper and read that down the street they found a head in a bucket. Odd crimes, non-definable crimes.”

With material like that, who wouldn’t become a crime writer?

Writing hasn’t paid all the bills though. With his wife, Swain created a highly successful advertising business (one of his clients was a Puerto Rico casino that banned him from the site when he called them out for cheating – they didn’t drop the account though).

Now at 67 he and Laura are retired. He continues to write, publishing his books on his own terms now, often issuing them as e-books. Laura is still his first reader. “She’s the best editor,” says Swain. “She writes ‘Bullshit’ in the margins and tells me what works and what doesn’t.”

It was Laura who convinced him to put the character of Tony Valentine front and center in his first book (Valentine wasn’t even his name when she read his first draft).

One of Swain’s early mentors was a magician named Bob Elliott. When Elliott died in San Diego County in 2011, the San Diego Union-Tribune ran a glowing obituary of this ” amateur magician,” quoting a friend – “He never accepted money for performing. His favorite line was ‘Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.’ He was a teacher, a giver, he just wanted to spread the joy and the magic.”

Sounds a lot like Swain. As a kid he dreamed of making a living as a magician. Now he does magic not just for money but because he loves it. A magician’s magician, he knows hundreds of magic tricks but he also enjoys inventing his own.

Once he created a card trick called Capitulating Queens and gave it away to a friend whose magic shop was struggling. His friend sold ten thousand of them.

During the pandemic Swain had time to invent more routines and streamline some of his old ones. He Zoomed and talked regularly with magicians across the country, including David Copperfield. “We grew up together,” says Swain. “We started talking a lot about our childhoods, how important our parents were to where we are now. Copperfield has a residency in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand, but during the pandemic his show was dark and I wasn’t working, so we talked a lot.”

During one of their conversations, Copperfield gave Swain some helpful advice on how to decide which tricks to do. “It’s not up to you,” Copperfield told him. “The audience will tell you.”

It’s now seven o’clock, time for Swain’s next show at the Hollander Hotel – time for him to try new and old tricks on his next audience (the baseball, which he has been doing for 50 years, is the most popular, he admits).

“When I came here nine years ago and met the owner, I knew it was the perfect place to do magic. It’s unique. People try to hire me all the time to do magic, but the magic’s here.”

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New books by James Swain and Cheryl Hollon are set around Tampa Bay

Bad things happen in familiar places.

By Colette Bancroft
Published Nov. 3, 2019

It’s always a bonus to read a mystery set in a place you know well. Imagining the action unfolding on streets that you’ve walked and at landmarks you’ve visited makes the reading experience even more vivid.

For Tampa Bay area readers, two of the festival authors have mysteries that offer that extra something.

James Swain, a longtime resident of Odessa, has used Florida settings in many of his earlier bestsellers. The award-winning author’s 21st book, No Good Deed, is set entirely around Tampa Bay.

It’s the second in Swain’s series about Jon Lancaster, a former Navy SEAL and police detective turned private investigator, and Beth Daniels, a steely FBI agent. The first book, King Tide, saw them racing to stop a dangerous abduction scheme in Miami.

This time, Lancaster arrives to investigate the murder of 70-year-old Elsie Tanner and the abduction of her teenage granddaughter, Skye, in Keystone. Lancaster often works with Team Adam, an anti-abduction task force, and this case seems to fit in some ways with a number of recent kidnappings of women around Florida.

Everyone assumes young Skye was the target, but Lancaster quickly realizes Ellie was supposed to be the one abducted. She died because she put up a fight — something she was long known for as an opponent of suburban sprawl in her rural neighborhood.

When Daniels appears, they team up, despite their prickly personal relationship. The case quickly becomes more complicated, not least because Lancaster’s ex-convict brother, whom he hasn’t seen in decades, seems to be involved.

Swain delivers his usual fast pace, surprising plot and colorful characters in No Good Deed. Lancaster and Daniels chase the case all over the Tampa Bay area, from a shooting on Nebraska Avenue to a body fished out of the water off Tarpon Springs to an Outlaws motorcycle gang headquarters in St. Petersburg and beyond. There’s even a fictional Tampa Bay Times reporter, Lauren Gamble, who alternately helps and annoys Lancaster, and a Polk County sheriff named Homer Morcroft who posts his press conferences on YouTube and blames Skye’s kidnapping on a demonic cult. The truth is much stranger.

…

No Good Deed

By James Swain

Thomas Mercer, 323 pages, $15.95

James Swain will be a featured author at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading on Nov. 9 at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He will speak at noon in the Fish & Wildlife Research Institute auditorium. Free. festivalofreading.com.

Read the article on the Tampa Bay Times site here.

Tampa Bay Times: Review: James Swain’s ‘The King Tides’ a swift Florida mystery

By Colette Bancroft
Published August 15, 2018

“Swain builds a dark mystery in The King Tides that becomes more bizarre with each twist, but he anchors it in assured storytelling and believable details. And in Lancaster and Daniels, he gives us characters we want to meet again.”

Most parents of pretty teenage daughters are prepared to see boys mooning over their girls.

But the parents of Nicki Pearl are not prepared for the growing number of adult men — all of them strangers — who seem to be stalking their daughter in the three months since they moved to Fort Lauderdale. When a pair of men armed with chloroform and a wheelchair try to abduct her during a shopping trip to the mall, the Pearls know they need help.

The local police suggest they hire a bodyguard for Nicki, which leads them to interview a lone-wolf investigator named Jon Lancaster. Money is no object for the family, but they’re underwhelmed by their first impression of Lancaster, a short, blunt-spoken guy with a potbelly and a Jimmy Buffett T-shirt. It won’t take long for the case to escalate dramatically — and for the Pearls to realize Lancaster is the man they need.

James Swain, who lives in Odessa, has written 20 mystery novels, including series about gambling investigator Tony Valentine and magician Peter Warlock. (Swain himself is a skilled magician and expert on gambling crime.)

In his latest novel, The King Tides, Swain introduces Lancaster, a former Navy SEAL and police officer with exceptional skills and fierce determination. After a video of his risky but successful rescue of a kidnapped child went viral, bringing him fame and some fortune, he left the force and became a private investigator.

The Pearls might be sniffy about Lancaster’s appearance — he was working undercover on another case and didn’t have time to change before he met them — but they aren’t imagining the danger their daughter is in. While they’re interviewing him at their waterfront home, Nicki, who’s sunbathing in the back yard, is abducted by two men in a boat, who speed for open water. Lancaster’s crack shooting and the teen’s own initiative save her, but he’s convinced the stalkers are deadly serious.

Lancaster uses an array of high-tech tools in his work, and, having been a viral sensation himself, he suspects Nicki’s plight might have something to do with the internet, and possibly with online pornography. Her protective parents insist that can’t be true, and Nicki herself seems like a genuine innocent.

What Lancaster discovers as he pursues the case seems contradictory: It appears unlikely Nicki did anything to ignite her stalkers’ interest, yet growing evidence points to the men’s common involvement in child porn. Things take an even more sinister turn as he uncovers connections to a serial killer case.

Lancaster, Swain writes, "had dealt with serial killers before. What always surprised him was their ordinariness. They were not cannibals who wore flesh masks and danced naked beneath the full moon. They went to ball games, ate fast food, and wore regular clothes. They were as dull as dirt, except when that inner alarm clock in their heads went off, telling them to kill again. Then the monsters came out."

To catch such monsters, Lancaster doesn’t hesitate to bend the law. He soon joins forces with an FBI agent, Beth Daniels, who has her own surprising connections both to Nicki and to the stalkers — and who is obsessed, perhaps dangerously so, with solving the case.

Swain’s style in The King Tides (named for the exceptionally high tides that often flood South Florida streets) is pared down, his pacing swift. The plot turns on an engrossing combination of Lancaster’s technological skills and his aggressive personality, which is moderated by his deep empathy with victims.

Florida plays an important role in the book, as Lancaster travels from the Pearls’ posh neighborhood to some of South Florida’s ugliest slums, with stops in the region’s trademark traffic jams. (Swain also includes some shoutouts to other Florida crime fiction writers.)

Swain builds a dark mystery in The King Tides that becomes more bizarre with each twist, but he anchors it in assured storytelling and believable details. And in Lancaster and Daniels, he gives us characters we want to meet again.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.

Read the article on the Tampa Bay Times site here.

Tampa Bay Times: James Swain deals a new novel about casino scams, 'Take Down'

“It’s a hold-your-breath recounting of Billy’s spectacular, complex scheme to rip off a sleazy casino owner and his sadistic wife for millions of dollars while trying to catch another crew of scammers. It’s all based on the real-life crew’s exploits, Swain says, and there’s more where that came from. “The final chapter leaves the swinging door open for them to come back.””

On a recent Tuesday evening in the Tap Room, the cozy restaurant in the Hollander Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg, a young boy watched a man pour a deck of cards between his hands like water, pluck from the deck eight different cards chosen by onlookers, and drop a tiny red ball into a silver cup — and pull out a baseball.

"Whoa! How did you do that?" the boy gasped.

Good question, and pretty much the same question that led the magician, James Swain, to write his latest book.

Swain, 58, who lives in Odessa with his wife, Laura, has three careers. He has worked for years in advertising, shifting lately into "nothing but digital," he says. He is also an internationally respected magician who has published books about the art and craft of magic. He hadn't performed for a while and recently started doing the weekly gig at the Hollander because, he says, "I practice an hour, an hour and a half every day, but it's not like performing."

And then there's his third career: novelist. Swain has just published his 17th book of crime fiction. His earlier books, many of them bestsellers, include a series about Tony Valentine, a casino security consultant; another series about Jack Carpenter, an ex-cop who investigates abductions; a couple of books about magician Peter Warlock; and several stand-alones.

His new book, Take Down, is different. It's a fast-paced caper that focuses not on the people who solve crimes, but the ones who commit them. Its main character, Billy Cunningham, is a bright, charming young man who leads a seven-person crew that scams Las Vegas casinos for a living — a very good living indeed. Just take a gander at Billy's penthouse in the Turnberry Towers and his Maserati, if you need proof.

Swain has long had an interest in gambling and gambling scams, both of which have elements in common with magic: deft card handling, diverting the attention of observers, staying one step ahead. That last, Swain says, is a key trait for successful grifters: "They're always thinking ahead, they always have a plan B."

Take Down grew out of his acquaintance with a real-life crew of casino scammers he met in 2008. He has interviewed many professional cheaters over the years for his books, but these people operated on another level, he says. "They just blew me away. I'd never seen anybody like them."

Swain had gone to Las Vegas on assignment for Men's Journal magazine to write a story about poker hustlers. "Cheating at poker is easy," he says with a slight eye roll, nothing to get a guy like him excited.

But after he was introduced to the crew, they invited him to watch them scam a casino craps table. It's an operation that is depicted in the second chapter of Take Down, and Swain says he was flabbergasted by the skill and cool required to pull it off.

"I was watching the whole thing from the bar," he says, "and I was sure they were going to get caught, and I'd get arrested just for being there. I had my alibi all ready."

Ah, thinking ahead. The alibi? "I was just watching those beautiful women."

The women are two essential members of the seven-person crew, in the book and in real life, Swain says. Not only are they beautiful; their prior experience as performers in porn films means they really know how to flaunt it, making them irresistible distractions. And they know how to act.

One move in the craps scam involves a crew member, called the mechanic for his skill at handling cards and dice, pretending to accidentally carom a die off the table while actually pocketing it so it can be taken out of the casino and altered.

The women's role is to act as if the die has glanced off them in its flight. So convincing was their acting that, Swain says, "I knew just what they were doing, but I would swear I saw that die fly off the table."

Swain didn't get arrested, and neither did the crew. The writer was so intrigued he asked their permission to write a novel about them. Sure, they said — if he didn't mind waiting for five years. By then, they expected to have made enough money to retire (lavishly) and leave the country, which, Swain says, is just what they've done.

"They're not doing this stuff anymore. They're teaching other people how to do it. You can get arrested for scamming, but it's not a crime to teach someone else how to do it."

Swain is something of a teacher himself. At the Tap Room, two members of his audience are professional magicians, Geoff Williams of St. Pete Beach and British "comedy magic" performer Martin Cox. Swain "has such great skills," Cox says, noting this is his second visit to see him perform during his own U.S. tour. "He's a true artist."

Swain began doing magic as a kid; when he was 12, he and David Copperfield had the same magic teacher. Swain began writing almost as early, at 15, and studied the craft at New York University, where his teachers included Ralph Ellison and Anatole Broyard.

Take Down is a fine example of his skills in that realm. It's a hold-your-breath recounting of Billy's spectacular, complex scheme to rip off a sleazy casino owner and his sadistic wife for millions of dollars while trying to catch another crew of scammers. It's all based on the real-life crew's exploits, Swain says, and there's more where that came from. "The final chapter leaves the swinging door open for them to come back."

Read the article on the Tampa Bay Times site here.

An Interview with Lee Child

Lee Child and James Swain discuss Bad Action. Lee Child is the internationally bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series.

Lee Child: I’ll start with an obvious question. Have you ever cheated a casino?
Jim Swain: Only in my dreams.

LC: Then how do you get the material for your books?
JS: I’ve had a lifelong interest in con men and scam artists that dates back to when I was learning magic in New York. On Saturday afternoons, the local magicians would gather in the back room of a Chinese restaurant and perform tricks for each other. Occasionally card hustlers would join us and be persuaded to perform. I caught the bug then.

LC: Were the hustlers you saw good?
JS: Phenomenal. They had to be. If they got caught cheating, they’d get hurt.

LC:My first exposure to your work was the Tony Valentine series, which also dealt with con men and hustlers. What was the inspiration for these new books?
JS: In 2008 I was hired by a men’s magazine to write a story about cheating at poker. While in Las Vegas doing research, I became friendly with a crew of grifters that were ripping off the casinos. They let me go into a casino and watch them scam a craps game for thirty grand. It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Afterwards, I begged them to let me write a series of books about them.

LC: What made the scam amazing? Outside of the fact that they got away with it.
JS: Casino employees are inherently suspicious. The crew convinced the employees working the craps game that they were suckers. When the employees’ guard came down, the crew switched the dice in the game and ripped the place off.

LC: How does that work?
JS: It’s a well orchestrated act. The crew practices playing Iggys, or ignorant tourists, until they have their roles down. They video-tape themselves and critique their performances the way actors would. When it comes to the con, the first impression is everything. I liken it to the dead possum my dogs found in the backyard. After I herded the dogs into my house, I went outside to bury the possum, only to discover it was gone.

LC: Which is where the expression playing possum comes from.
JS: Exactly. I still laugh when I think about it.

LC: Are you fooled by these scams?
JS: All the time.

LC: I’m interested to hear how you got the crew to confide in you. Was it because of your background in sleight-of-hand magic?
JS: I think so. I did some card magic for them and they liked what they saw. Sleight-of-hand magic and cheating have quite a bit in common.

LC: There’s a family of hustlers in this book called the Gypsies. Where did you draw your inspiration for them?
JS: Years ago I got a phone call from a blackjack dealer who’d been recruited by a family of cheats to rip off a casino. We talked for hours about how the family operated and the code of ethics they lived by. They were my inspiration for the Gypsies.

LC: In the story, your main character helps another cheat who’s gotten himself in hot water because the Thieves Code requires him to do so. Do people who steal from casinos really have a set of rules they live by?
JS: Believe it or not, they do.

LC: I know you, yet have never seen you do a trick. Is that on purpose?
JS: No. The next time we get together, I’ll show you something.
LC: Looking forward to it already. If it’s amazing, I’ll rip it off and put it in a Reacher book.

The Sunshine Tax

While inquiring on what winning casinos to play, a Canadian couple is swindled by a Nevada rest-stop attendant. Writer/Director: Brett Hill DOP: Vlad Horodinca Editor: Brett Hill Actor: Jade Proulx-Chartier Actor: Gordon Masten Actor: Frederic Lemay Author: James Swain Producer: Brett Hill Producer: Ramez El-Hajj Funder: BravoFACT

Phil Jason Book Review

Casino scam thriller offers high stakes suspense

Take Down, by James Swain. Thomas & Mercer. 430 pages. Trade paperback $15.95.

In his latest novel, James Swain is back to painting the milieu in which he has no peers: the gambling scene. Set in Las Vegas and focused on a new casino hotel that serves as a money laundering front for a big drug operation, this novel has all the thrills, chills, and insider information one could ever hope for. Billy Cunningham, a thirty year old professional cheater, becomes a strange kind of moral pillar in a ruthless world where the only moral code involves scoring big money and staying alive.

For people like Billy Cunningham, and his one-time flame Maggie Flynn, the enemy is the gaming board, a group empowered to protect the public and the gaming industry from scammers and thieves. However, the gaming board agents whom we meet in this tale are always ready to abuse their power and might just as well be the subjects of investigations for their own corruption. It seems that at times that this powerful board colludes with the worst elements in the industry.

Should the owner of the Galaxy, a big-time narcotic distributor, be the recipient of the gaming board’s protection or the subject of an investigation?

The board makes deals to pursue its priority cases. It lessens or drops criminal penalties in exchange for evidence leading to the successful prosecution of bigger fish.

The set-up of the story goes like this: Billy has a fantastic, convoluted plan to duplicate the gold-colored, high denomination chips used in the Galaxy casino and then manage to cash them in. This would result in a huge, multi-million dollar “take down.” At the same time, he is in on the Galaxy payroll – checking their security and promising to foil the upcoming scam of another slick team of scoundrels known as the Gypsies.

In fact, Billy hopes to use the cover of the commotion regarding the Gypsy “wedding scam,” which is that group’s own cover for a slot machine payoff manipulation, to cover his own counterfeit gold chip operation.

As readers watch Billy prepare his team for its biggest trick, they get to meet a fascinating group of characters who must use their skills and play their roles with precision or the scam will collapse – as will their outlaw careers. For Billy, loyalty is the ultimate necessity for smooth functioning; therefore is very generous in buying that loyalty from his team members. Beyond that, he really cares about them and shows it in many additional ways. . . .

Read the article on Phil Jason's Book Review here.

The Ed Bernstein Show—Interview with James Swain

Interview with author James Swain. James Swain is an American crime fiction author and magician.

Chop Cup

from "Miracles: The Magic of James Swain" Volume 3

Miracles—The Magic of James Swain

For years, Jim Swain's name has been associated with some of the finest cheating material and classical magic in the industry. He doesn't do conventions, and he rarely surfaces on the scene. Yet he did, for one historic weekend, record all his finest material in four volumes that are now available for instant download.