Cut Numbers : A Novel

by Nick Tosches

This Mafia thriller is familiar with the darkest chambers of the human heart, with a wildly elastic prose style. It unravels the Mafia that only insiders know--the messy day-to-day business of violent crime, pornography, gambling, and extortion.

Genres: Fiction, Crime

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Nick Tosches was an American journalist, novelist, biographer, and poet. His 1982 biography of Jerry Lee Lewis, Hellfire, was praised by Rolling Stone magazine as "the best rock and roll biography ever written."

Reviews

[Still · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've loved Nick Tosches' numerous books on music and pop-culture icons for decades dating back to his records reviews in Rolling Stone and Creem Magazine, many gathered in The Nick Tosches Reader.

Tosches published so many great books from Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis story and The Devil and Sonny Liston to Dino and Where Dead Voices Gather that it's hard to pick just one as a stand-out.

Tosches died earlier this year - one the greater losses in the literary world.

This is a novel about a kind, gentle shylock -which is about as believable a character as a whore with a heart of gold- an easy touch. So easy a touch that he has fallen far from harvesting the earnings he'd anticipated six years earlier.

The book swirls with magnificent low-lifes: drunks, dope fiends, gambling addicts, pornographers, prostitutes, kindhearted bartenders and hired assassins.

There is a beautiful chapter near the end of the novel where the main character Louie, goes on a bender to end all benders, almost landing in the gutter for the count but comes out of seven, maybe nine nights not-quite edging into delirium tremens and comes up with the most ingenious way to beat the odds playing the numbers.

It involves a one panel comic strip from the Daily News featuring a character named "Ching Chow" spouting aphorisms and a slow read of the daily stock market index in the Wall Street Journal:

"Suddenly, palpitations of brainless panic shook him, as it occurred to his sickly mind that 315 was a cut number. Then he remembered: There were no black curtains on the windows of the Chicago Board Options Exchange."

The crowd was two-deep at the bar, jostling and weaving and hollering and crying and fighting and laughing. Louie, pouring four drinks at a time, glanced down the end of the bar and smiled to see Goo-Goo sitting there aloof and dignified amid the turbulence. Beside him, the famous actor slept, still as stone, as the jukebox behind him blared the noise of somebody even more famous than he.

"Don't you just love Springsteen?"

Louie turned. The girl who had spoken to him was moving her shoulders to the sound of the blare. She was barely twenty, he surmised, not old enough to drink in any legal joints. She had short brown hair and big, ripe breasts that shook as she moved her shoulders. Louie did not know her from Eve, but he remembered making her the Kahlua-and-cream she held in her hand.

"Yeah," he said. "Good old Bruce. I got all his records. Usually I wear the little rag around the head like him and everything. These days, with Liberace dead and all, Bruce is all that's left."

Magnificent reading.
More a character study than a crime thriller, so don't go mistaking paradise...

[Bert Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking for a short book to read before I leave for the warmth of Miami I pulled from my shelf this book by the late Nick Tosches. Many years ago, I had read his book, The Devil and Sonny Liston, which I still consider one of the two best boxing books ever written (the other being David Remnick's, The King of the World, about Muhamad Ali).

Cut Numbers reads like a Martin Scorsese screenplay - think Mean Streets. The story depicts NYC tough guys looking for the next con, a parade of marks willing to pay outrageous vigs, doomed to a lifetime of debts and degradations, Louie feeds off their troubles like a bottom fisher hooking flounders out of Gravesend Bay. Taking place in dark bars whether it be day or night, reeking with the smell of stale beer, cheap colognes and Al Martino playing on the jukebox. One of Louie's customers is a gambler and pornographer who runs a slut magazine shop on 42nd Street with a newfangled scheme running an ad offering movie fantasies for $500:

"Dreams, Inc., thrived. There seemed to be no end to the innumerable mutations of concupiscence that slithered forth like monstrous silverfish from the dank and odious broom closets of men's minds."

Seeing a good thing Louie takes a piece of the action hoping this will be his payday but also in the background his uncle, an old-time hood who once fixed the numbers daily take, spins a last payday involving a hitman and a mob boss.

Tosches is a real master depicting this world of hoods and losers and it moves quickly easily digested in a few sittings. It was as entertaining as any mob movie you might see and a great example of his writing chops.

He also appears well known for his music stories having worked for Rolling Stone Magazine and authored books on Jerry Lee Lewis, Hall and Oates and the great Dino-Dean Martin.

[N.K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although known more for his non-fiction, this was an interesting read. Not so much for the plot (although interesting) or necessarily because of the characters (what you would expect from a mob-type of work of fiction) but because of the writing. IF you are a fan of gritty, street level stories written in a very fluid, literate style with on-fire verbiage....then you will enjoy Tosches. It's as if someone somewhere mixed the DNA of Chandler, Jim Thompson and James Ellroy and came up with a very skilled author. Then they let him be raised by a yellow-eyed hag on the Streets of Sorrow. Tosches can go back and forth between beautiful prose and lines that hit like a sucker punch from a wet leather covered fist.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first novel from one of my favorite writers. A quick, fun Mafia read. You can tell Tosches really knows these guys. The gangster's hunt for the mythical big score. Also recently finished his "Where Dead Voices Gather," which is an amazing tale of musical love and research (and the true birth of rock and roll?).

[Benjamin Parra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, but didn't engage me like his non-fiction works have.

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been on a Tosches tear of late and this book is so frustrating. Tosches is ALMOST there so many times in telling a cohesive story. There's a loan shark named Louie who transforms into the very embodiment of 1980s Wall Street greed and hubris. There's a scheme to fix the lottery. There's a lot of atmosphere and color and grit -- including an "artsy" porn shoot with that classic Tosches embracing of the vulgarity. But the dialogue ranges from being on-the-nose to utterly preposterous film noir cliches. For those of us who love Tosches, it's obviously of interest. But for others, it's probably better skipped.

[Dan Gabree · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not like reading this book but enjoyed the ending. Parts of the story were a bit too raw for me and all in all it seemed to take a lot of words to say very little. The ending however was a nice surprise that leaves me glad to have fought my way to the end.

[KentAllard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid organized crime novel. Probably would have rated it higher if I wasn't a bit tired of Mafia novels.

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

New York numbers racket guys were good at math. And raunchiness. And sleaze. And murder.

[David DeLuca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ranks right up there with The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Serpico.

[Rusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tosches tells a parallel story of two characters. Both are hard men living on the fringes of crime. They know the big hitters in the crime world, but live and work in the margins. One is Louis, a shylock, handing out loans and collecting payments every week. The other is Joe Brusher, a killer. Their two stories run separately, and involve some of the same supporting players, but they never meet.

Each man is approaching middle-age, feeling the years of effort, and the lack of success. Both welcome a chance to make their fortunes. Louis especially can barely make a living, fights with his girlfriend, and feels the effects of a gangster mid-life crisis.

The novel is rich in colorful, realistic characters, gritty dialogue, and believable detail on the life of low - level crooks. Joe makes a good menacing figure, and we do get some of his point of view. But it is Louie who is the main character. We spend more time with him, get most of the story through his eyes. He is not always a likable character, but Tosches makes him a sympathetic one.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dug this book, even though it overstepped itself a few times, especially in the sex scenes. When it was great was when it stuck to the day-to-day flailings of its loan sharks, hit men, and mob bosses, transforming their dive bar musings and half-assed machinations into pure tough guy poetry. The nominal plot, about a scheme to fix the New York lottery, is secondary to the various character studies and beautiful descriptive writing. You also get a street-level history of the numbers racket, which in itself is worth the price of admission. This book is some kind of classic in its own weird way.

[Walt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Like most fiction books on the mob, this was poor and not recommended. Centered around the concept of a rigged policy racket, Tosches, who is usually not a bad author, seems to lack familiarity with gangster personalities and the rackets. He has difficulty explaining how the policy racket was rigged in this novel. Overall, it just does not feel like a realistic gangster story.

[Edward Bocchino · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably his best if you enjoy gangsterisms - much better than the virtually unreadable venice book

[Mike Mckeon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite. It felt like he was trying too hard to create noir rather then tell the rather simple story he was telling