Welcome To The Poker Club

 

by Ed Gorman

 Four white man lash a young black man to a tree then torture him before cutting his throat and burning him. A meth-crazed husband and wife break into a widow’s farmhouse and disembowel her. After designing and implanting an insurance scheme, five slick Wall Streeters flee to an island with no American extradition treaty with their forty million dollars. A young woman convinces her best friend to help her murder her mother.

If you watch any of the true crime shows on TV you see this theme repeated over and over. One or two people convince one or two others to do something criminal. If you think back on your childhood there was always the one kid—boy or girl—who seemed to hold sway over all others. If you wanted to be part of the group then you tended to do, however reluctantly, what this one boy or girl told you to do.

The novel The Poker Club began as a chapbook called “Out There In The Darkness.” Even though the novel and chapbook are different in many ways, the one thing they have in common is the idea that people behave differently in groups than they would individually. A lynch mob is comprised of cowards made brave by sheer numbers.

The novel gave me the opportunity to explore the characters in depth. I did something in it I rarely do—I wrote about a real person, someone I despise as much as I’ve ever despised anyone. I can’t say that in writing about him I came to like him at all but he gave the book some real fire and provided me with two or three of the best scenes.

I was also able to deal at length with the social backgrounds of the men in the novel as well. I was intrigued by the notion that four settled, middle-class men now had to deal with both the police and unknown killers who were picking them off one by one. I liked the tension created by the fact that none of them had ever walked the mean streets and were now forced to hunt their prey on them. The great French writer Simenon wrote several excellent novels about the intersection of the middle-class and the criminal class. I had these in mind when I wrote my own book.

Finally, I’d like to thank Rich Chizmar and Johnathon Schaech for turning a long, complicated novel into a sleek, suspenseful, singular nightmare. They fought to keep much of the novel intact and any serious changes they made they discussed with me at length. That kind of courtesy is not exactly a standard in Hollywood.

I’m glad to see the original story, the novel and the movie script available in the same volume. For readers and students alike this demonstrates how one form of storytelling feeds into another.

 

—Ed Gorman