Stop fishing through the garbage for books about con artists, stupid Afflictor.

I gleaned a really nice book this morning just two brownstones away from my apartment. It’s a copy of The Big Con by David W. Mauer. The author was a linguist and academic with a taste for the raffish. In this book, originally published in 1940, he catalogued the lexicon of cons spoken by Americans with names like Slobbering Bob, The Hash House Kid and Lilly the Roper.

The classic, which was reissued in 1999, had somehow gone out of print for quite a while. The great Luc Sante wrote an intro for the new edition, in which he pointed out that Mauer studied “carnies, junkies, safe-crackers, forgers, pot smokers, faro-bank players, shell-game hustlers, race-track touts, pickpockets, moonshiners, prostitutes, and pimps, but his interest in the language of confidence men was a case apart.”

I think con men get too much of the glory. You can’t run a proper confidence game without a good pigeon. So I present an excerpt from a chapter called “The Mark”:

“People who read of good con touches in the newspaper are often wont to remark: ‘That bird must be stupid to fall for a game like that. Why, anybody should have known better than to do what he did…’ In other words, there is a widespread feeling among legitimate folk that anyone who is the victim of a confidence game is a numskull.

But it should not be assumed that the victims of confidence games are all blockheads. Very much to the contrary, the higher a mark’s intelligence, the quicker he sees through the deal to his own advantage. To expect a mark to enter into a con game, take the bait, and then, by sheer reason, analyze the situation and see it as a swindle is simply asking too much. The mark is thrown into an unreal world which very closely resembles real life, like the spectator regarding the life groups in a museum of natural history, he cannot tell where the real scene merges into the background.”