Talk about writing what you know! That’s exactly what Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman did when they sourced third-generation Nevadan Karen Mack’s upbringing in a casino-owning family in Las Vegas during the time when gambling was a strictly family business.
The Kings of Las Vegas is a tale of greed, temptation, misogyny and murder with biblical and Shakespearean underpinnings.
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Nancie Clare: The Kings of Las Vegas is brimming with themes that are both biblical and Shakespearean.
Karen Mack: Absolutely. Family sagas!
NC: How did the story develop, and at what point did you decide— in your infinite wisdom—that The Kings of Las Vegas needed to be a crime fiction novel?
KM: Well, I grew up in Las Vegas and we were talking about growing up there in the 90s when it was still kind of a frontier town with a lot of crime. So much of the book is based on authentic people, authentic things that happened. I grew up with a guy across the street named Ice Pick Willie, and I thought that was a normal name! And Dave “The Man” Berman. I thought “The Man” was a normal middle name.
What do they say about Las Vegas? It’s a sunny place for shady people, but we didn’t think of it as crime fiction. We just told the story as I remember it.
NC: It wasn’t an “Oh, let’s write crime fiction” moment, it was a biographical “Let’s just tell the story?”
Jennifer Kaufman: It was like, what is it like to grow up in Vegas and be part of a casino family!
KM: [In Las Vegas] Casino families are kind of like the firemen and the policemen. Casinos are passed down from the grandfather to the father and usually to the son. We wanted to tell the story of a woman coming into that world—to a male dominated world that had a lot of violence.
JK: The crime part of it was that for families that own casinos, the wolves are always at the door. So, we did two things: We made the protagonist a woman; and we had her have a very violent background. And her character becomes more violent and tougher as things got rougher. We took the story from Karen’s experiences and just turned it into this family Shakespearean drama.
KM: It’s also a fish-out-of-water story because Josie King, our protagonist, was exiled when she was sixteen; her father wanted to get her out of the city. Coming back, it’s a world that she has been away from for a long time, but she remembers much of what went on.
But now she has a child of her own and she didn’t [think she] wanted to be a part of that world. And the way she rises to the occasion is being as tough and as sneaky and as aggressive as everyone else. But in the end, she wanted to protect her father and her grandfather’s….
JK: Legacy.
KM: I can remember when I was little and my grandfather would take me out in the desert and he’d go, “One day there’s going to be houses, there are going to be churches, there’s going to be all this.” These men were visionaries and Josie didn’t want to let their legacy be stolen. So that propelled her.
NC: We should mention the double entendre of the title, The Kings of Vegas—Josie’s last name is King. And there are many crime fiction elements: Financial shenanigans and guns and buckets of blood and booze and drugs and cigarettes.
But the first thing that struck me was the patrimony. In chapter two, there’s an observation about Josie who is driving to Las Vegas for her father’s funeral. You wrote,” She enjoyed being underestimated. It gave her an advantage.”
Josie is the prodigal daughter. This is where we get biblical from the distaff side. She was exiled as a teenager and she’s home to bury the King. She’s a woman going back to Vegas where women are fungible. It’s another wonderful word that you used, but there are sharp teeth in there. She’s definitely a Regan and I don’t mean Ronald.
KM: Josie is a math whiz; she could count cards at the age of 12. Growing up, all the family-owned casinos were run by men and the women, like a lot of the women in Vegas, were fungible. I remember sitting at a table with my father when he was running a casino and someone came up to him in front of me—like I wasn’t there, I was probably 12—and he said, “Can you get me some girls?” That’s women in Las Vegas and that guy was a famous guy.
NC: It’s both wonderful and rather frightening that you can channel this!
Josie’s father’s will essentially mandated her choice to move back to Vegas. It’s move back or lose out on her inheritance. Is that fate or is it free will?
KM: Well, it’s a shitload of money. That casino threw off $200 million a year, her share would be $10 million a year. Also, Josie never thought she would stay in LA. As difficult as he was, Josie adored her father. And she was shocked at the loss.
There’s a scene in the book, a recollection of she talks to him about being in this magazine with mobsters and he said, “I’m no angel.” You heard a lot of mob guys saying that. “I’m no angel and I didn’t always do the legal thing, but I did the right thing.” And that’s what she grew up with.
JK: But I think your point is well taken that it’s her definitely her fate. Her will was to get away from it, but it’s her fate to return and she can’t escape it. A part of her wanted to take charge. And she had a brother, Sam, who she was very close to, who was just too stoned all the time. He went…
KM: Off the rails. Vegas can be a dark place if you get in with the wrong crowd. And I think it’s hard running a casino that you don’t get tempted by all the temptations around you.
I grew up not gambling, by the way, not because I didn’t know how. You grow up thinking the house always wins in the end. But if you do have that temptation, you can get in a lot of trouble.
NC: Josie returns home to find something rotten in The Jackpot, her family’s casino. As a math whiz—and as a forensic accountant—she was definitely capable of sussing out what was going on. Take me through how you developed Josie as a character.
JK: I think it started with the one-night stand where she asked herself, “what was she thinking?” She’s unsure of how far to go and how much to investigate and how hard to push Frank, her other brother who is now CEO of The Jackpot, and how to go about saving this crumbling dynasty. And the more she does, the more she likes it and the more she likes it, the more she lies and cheats and murders and does all the things that were part of her life that she fled.
And the….
KM: More she cares. Living in L.A., she didn’t realize how much she cares. She loves Vegas. She loves the casino. She loves her father and her grandfather who used to take her out in the desert and horseback riding. I think the thought that [her legacy was going to be stolen] from her and her child. She gets…
JK: Her hands dirty.
KM: She was going to do whatever she needs to do. She grew up in the world of tough violence. I mean, her father would lie to her about what was going on, but all the kids knew the truth. They just wouldn’t talk about it. When you grow up with something, there’s a normality to it. There’s a famous casino owner named Benny Binion who said, “I never murdered anybody unless they deserved it.”
NC: Karen, you are essentially Las Vegas OG. But when you pitched the story, did New York publishers say things like, “Oh, Las Vegas. Isn’t that cute? But wouldn’t you like to move your organized crime story to Brooklyn?”
KM: The story is so Las Vegas! Las Vegas is a unique city in the world. I know it’s a mob story but it’s a very unique kind of mob story and it’s a very desert pioneer mentality. These are very different people. A lot of the guys from New York who came to Nevada became cowboys themselves. It’s just a different kind of mob.
JK: It’s also a sexy book! Vegas is Sin City and Josie, we made her very impulsive and we had her get into trouble with someone that she shouldn’t have been with and she makes the wrong decisions— and then she does it again.
KM: We did. We wanted to add a romantic side—you’ve got to make Vegas sexy! I mean, this book could be sold as a romance book kind of. Sort of, not really. [laughs]
NC: Well, yes, maybe we could call it alt romance.
KM: Yes.
NC: I’m sure you’ve been asked this question repeatedly, but I feel it’ll be conspicuous by its absence: can you explain your working partnership? Who writes what, when, and how?
JK: Well, we start with our joke about the Fertitta brothers….
KM: There’s a Las Vegas joke. There are two partners who are brothers in Las Vegas and they they have in their contract that if they get into a dispute, it will be settled by five minutes in the ring…we don’t do that!
But how we work together is really interesting, we usually sit side by side, which I know is not usual. When we first started, because I was out of screenplays and Jennifer was out of journalism, I used to write a lot of the dialogue and she wrote a lot of the description, but as time went by, we both write both. We do have different tendencies. I like the empty page. Jennifer says I’m like Dickens….
JK: And I’m like Henry James, who was terrified of the empty page.
KM: There’s not much ego between us. One person doesn’t get mad when the other says, “That’s terrible. I don’t like that.”
NC: Will there be more crime fiction novels for Mack and Kaufman? And if you can hear the plea in my voice, it’s sincere because you two are good at this.
KM: We loved the thriller part of it. We loved the intrigue and it was fun for us to create that kind of tension. So yeah, I mean, I would love to write…
JK: Another…
KM: One.
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