... a deeply researched work focusing on the years between 1930-60, when Hot Springs served as the country's original Las Vegas with its one casino, full of organized crime, cons, bootleggers, and all kinds of other seedy characters you hope for in a colorful history book. A perfect conspiracy of capers that's ripe for summer reading.
The history is fascinating, but what makes The Vapors a compelling—and ultimately heartwrenching—book is the author’s account of his own family, who lived in Hot Springs during the casino heyday. His grandmother Hazel Hill landed there as a teen, drifted into casino work after leaving her violent, alcoholic husband and neglected her sons as she fell into her own sad addictions. Hill tells the hard truth of her life with compassion and context.
Aside from her relation to the author, Hazel Hill’s role in this triad is initially unclear. We wait for her story — a country ballad filled with no-good men, pills, whiskey, evictions and dodgy casino gigs — to intersect with those of Harris and Madden, but it never really does, not precisely, anyway. Yet Hazel’s story, as The Vapors progresses, provides the emotional ballast, the counterweight to all the good-timey glitz, the darkness behind the neon signs. It gives the book its heft, and its warmth. The mob, Hill writes, turned to gambling after Prohibition partly because it considered gambling, like alcohol, to be a 'victimless crime.' Hazel’s story — complex, turbulent, as haunting as a pedal steel solo — serves as a soft rebuttal to that idea, and is the wellspring of David Hill’s achievement here.
More than a simple crime story, this is a forgotten history of Arkansas in the mid-20th century. Recommended for readers interested in antiheroes, self-made men, and survivor stories.
All the elements are in place for a rip-roaring yard of epic proportions. Hill has a marvelous cast of characters with unique story arcs. At times his grandmother’s story feels like a Greek tragedy; at other times the story of Dane Harris, the liquor dealer turned Madden apprentice, plays like a slapstick farce, colored by the various crooked public officials who keep the Hot Springs vice business running ... Hill tells the story with varying success. At times the book feels like three different plot lines all vying for attention: the gangster superstar, the corrupt casino owner and his politician pals, and the woman who lives in the corrosion beneath the glamour. Hill just can’t maintain the frenetic energy of his prologue as he switches back and forth between his characters and their varying story threads. The Vapors is a new take on the familiar gangster history, but it needs just a little bit more cohesion to make it all fit together.
... fantastic ... Expertly interweaving family memoir, Arkansas politics, and Mafia lore, Hill packs the story full of colorful characters and hair-raising events. This novelistic history hits the jackpot.
The author offers up a huge cast of colorful, mostly sleazy characters ... Weaving their stories in and out, from 1931 to 1968, Hill unfolds an engrossing history of corruption at the highest levels ... In highly detailed, novelistic prose, Hill chronicles the rise of the power brokers and their ballot-stuffing control of local and state elections ... A captivating, shady story about massive, brazen corruption hiding in plain sight.
