Trick Baby

Description

Trick Baby charts the rise of White Folks, a white Negro who uses his colour as a trump card in the tough game of the Con. Blue-eyed, light-haired and white-skinned, White Folks is the most incredible con man the ghetto ever spawned, a hustler in the jungle of Southside Chicago where only the sharpest survive. With his partner Blue, an old hand who teaches him the tricks of the trade, White Folks rises to the top of his profession. The cons he pulls off get more and more lucrative and dangerous until one day they go too far.

Robert Beck, who used the moniker Iceberg Slim, was a major-league pimp who enjoyed serious success during the 1940s and 1950s. He decided to leave the pimping game after serving his third and final stretch in jail. He moved to Los Angeles where he straightened out and began a career as a writer. Trick Baby, originally published in 1967, is his second book.

* One of the most honest and original writers to emerge from the last century, Slim fully earns his place in the canon of America's greatest. -- Helen Walsh * Trick Baby is an American classic. Publishing News * Slim always told it as it was, without compromise. -- Irvine Welsh * His prose is almost Shakespearean in its inventiveness and his dialogue hums with ghetto jive. Scotsman * Slim belongs to the knuckle-duster-in-the-face school of storytelling. Sunday Times * Iceberg Slim always kept it real. So he will always be relevant. -- Ice T