The best Las Vegas-based crime novels featuring cons

This 1960 book by George Clayton Johnson, who wrote the scripts for The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and the sci-fi film Logan’s Run, was a tie-in for the original Ocean’s Eleven movie featuring the Rat Pack. It’s hard to find, but worth it as it contains all the elements of a classic Vegas con – the mob, the girlfriend, the complex relationships between the conmen and their marks. It delves into the characters more than either movie, although admittedly, it’s impossible to read the book without picturing the 2001 film and its star-studded cast. 

The tagline says it all – “Whoever says crime doesn’t pay isn’t doing it right.” Pubbed in 2015, this book is often compared to Ocean’s Eleven as it contains the same main elements: the con artist and his experienced crew, the girl, Vegas. What’s opposite is the focus – this book emphasizes plot over character. While I love this book’s complex con-within-a-con, Billy Cunningham is not particularly likable as a main character. If you enjoy Vegas’s dark side, this book and its two sequels, Bad Action and Super Con, are for you. 

If you’re burned out from all that darkness, this book takes a more lighthearted approach to the classic Vegas con novel and features another mainstay of Las Vegas entertainment – the magician. It’s not haute literature—it got mixed reviews– but it’s also a fast, fun read with a great audio version, if you prefer. It’s part of a globetrotting series with stops in Amsterdam, Paris, Venice, and Berlin, featuring thief/magician/crime novelist Charlie Howard and his literary agent, Victoria.

I hesitated to recommend this one because the book is gonzo, but one can’t discuss Vegas-based novels without at least mentioning it. It’s a classic, drug-soaked trip through the city – gross, appalling, yet altogether original. While not typically thought of as a crime or con novel, I’d argue it’s both - the main characters, a journalist on assignment and his attorney friend, do nothing but con their way through a drug-fueled haze, destroying cars and hotel rooms while somehow not managing to get arrested or kill themselves. I hated it, but I held my nose and read it anyway because it’s become a classic piece of American literature. I’ll let you decide if you think it should be on a “best of” list. 

Another outside-the-box pick, but hear me out: this epic novel is all about the human representations of good versus evil conning their respective followers into an epic showdown in New Vegas after a devastating plague. At over 1,000 pages long, my summary is definitely the cliff-notes version, but it works. There’s a reason King’s Randall Flagg chose Vegas as his new base of operations. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, right?