King Con

King Con was TV producer/writer Stephen J. Cannell's third novel, published in 1998. Cannell had created shows like The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Wiseguy, and Hunter, but by this point in his career his output was mostly TV movies from older series. His only ongoing series still on the air in 1998 was Silk Stalkings, which would be canceled the next year, and neither it nor his then-recently canceled Renegade measured up to the quality of his earlier output.

But Cannell had started in television as a writer, and so he began to turn his hand to novels. The Plan is a pretty heavy organized crime tale, and second novel Final Victim concerns a pretty gross set of serial killings. In King Con, though, the Cannell who brought the wry to the front of Jim Rockford's life and times is at work.

Beano X. Bates, the best con man of a widespread clan of con-artists who's known unofficially as "King Con," pulls a poker scam on the wrong man. Mobster Joe Rina retrieves his money and beats Beano nearly to death in the process. Beano's cousin Carol claims to have witnessed the beating and is ready to testify for prosecutor Victoria Hart, but things go bad. Beano wants revenge on Joe and his brother Tommy, but he and the Bates clan will get it their way, with a con game -- except that Victoria feels responsible for what happened to her witness and she will shut Beano down if he leaves her out.

It's all sly and not a little silly, but fun most of the way through. Cannell wrote novels not much different than his TV shows, although with more blood, sex and swearing. He knew better than most how to keep a story rolling, even if the story itself was a lightweight caper tale with some stock characters and owes more of a debt to the 1973 movie The Sting than it might like to admit. There are some sloggy points, mostly when Beano explains the technical details of his scam, but they don't last long and we soon get back on track.

Anyone who enjoyed Cannell's best shows -- and even his not-so-best shows -- for the fun little diversions that they were should have a good time with King Con. But the reader should keep a careful hand on his or her money anyway -- Cannell claims Beano is fiction, but the guy is slippery. You never know.