Even a Street Dog

Beneath the Las Vegas that America sees on the Travel Channel— nightclubs, famous chefs, rambunctious gambling, celebrities at play—there’s an older, stranger, harder city. A place whose citizens often gamble with more than just money, where you’d better be able to see what’s coming before it arrives, where what happens there stays there because it can’t go anywhere else. Jasper Lamar Crabbe is a stubborn, cagey survivor of this Las Vegas. Your guide through this purgatorial city, Jasper has seen it all and he knows everyone worth knowing—The Professor, The Duke, the Marino Brothers, Ginger and the Twins … plus a few people who weren’t so adept at surviving.
These are Las Vegas stories told from the street level, by a narrator who could only have been created by a first-rate author who’s left a lot of shoe leather on those streets, who’s actually talked to their denizens. One of the city’s most-beloved newspapermen, John L. Smith has poured a lifetime of hard-won, backroom knowledge, whispered tales and pure Vegas mojo into these short stories—stories that take you deep into a Vegas no one else can show you.