The version of Las Vegas that pop culture broadcasts to the world is, for the most part, confined to a narrow slice of the city, a couple of miles of Las Vegas Boulevard known as the Strip. Sometimes the view stretches to include downtown Las Vegas, home to the oldest casinos. This doesn’t reflect what it’s like to live here – we have schools, and grocery stores, and jobs, and we don’t all live in hotels. Both versions of the city are real and inseparable. The reality supports the image, and vice versa.

Reaching for euphoric highs and wallowing in existential lows are equal parts of the popular appeal

The idea of Las Vegas is woven out of our personal histories and contradictory narratives – winning in Vegas makes a good story, but losing big here sometimes makes an even better one. It’s the perennial American boom-town, sustained by optimism, hit hard by the financial crisis, where empty acres of desert sit beside glamorous hotels with azure swimming pools and fountains on some of the most expensive commercial real estate in the country. Playing and losing here does not make you a loser: it just makes you a player. It’s a glitzy, exciting, unapologetic place devoted to conspicuous, even grotesque consumption. People come here to play hard, others to work just as hard. Reaching for euphoric highs and wallowing in existential lows are equal parts of the popular appeal, and visitors are encouraged to feel like they’re getting away with something – eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much, gambling too much. In the words of Hunter S Thompson, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:



When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies. The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized.”

Rumors of the riskiness and unlimited opportunity of Las Vegas are somewhat exaggerated, but that doesn’t change the feel of the place. The Strip, downtown, vintage neighborhoods, the suburbs – the whole city is an unlikely feat, an illusion, a cement mirage in the desert, and that tension of possibility is the point. “Vegas is a nice town – plain as a biscuit in the sunshine, pastel and haunted in the morning and in the evening when the glow of the sky matches the glow of the neon. Under the stars, it is the absolute, incarnate, dazzled heart of earthly promise,” writes art critic, essayist, certified MacArthur Foundation Genius and erstwhile longtime Las Vegan Dave Hickey in his recent book Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste. The words “earthly promise” sum up pretty well the tantalising charms of the Vegas construct.



The words “earthly promise” sum up pretty well the tantalizing charms of the Vegas construct

The late author Susan Berman (whose murder investigation, back in the public eye, now points to real estate heir Robert Durst) wrote about growing up on the Las Vegas strip, where her father, the mobster Davie Berman, ran the Flamingo Hotel after the murder of his infamous business partner, Bugsy Siegel. In Lady Las Vegas: The Inside Story Behind America’s Neon Oasis, she describes a vista of unlimited opportunity, in a city she saw as a rival for her father’s attention:

All things were possible when you were part of her; all risks were worth taking, because they turned out okay. It was right to be unstoppable: tenacity paid off; go for it! I didn’t know that my father and his friends were refugees from small, poor, cluttered cities; I didn’t know that Las Vegas opened a window for their claustrophobic souls and let in the first fresh air. This is all I have ever known: big, airy, open, unlimited, make your mark, stake your turf, don’t hold back!”

The history of how this desert outpost bloomed into the bright dreamscape of Sin City involves ambitious men with big personalities, and no shortage of vice and viciousness, corruption, ruthlessness, greed and violence. In The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, Sally Denton and Roger Morris reveal deep, sinister connections to Wall Street, the CIA and beyond, a network of corruption that makes Las Vegas seem inevitable as a product of capitalism. Doug J Swanson’s Blood Aces: The Wild Ride of Benny Binion, the Texas Gangster Who Created Vegas Poker is a fascinating look at the cowboy/murderer/philanthropist who invented the annual World Series of Poker (happening right now, incidentally). Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs and Binion’s World Series of Poker, by James McManus, began as an assignment from Harper’s Magazine to cover women poker players as well as the trial of the ex-stripper girlfriend accused of murdering Ted Binion, former host of the WSOP (a very Vegas assignment to begin with), but turned into a memoir of playing in the tournament just a block away from the courthouse as the trial unfolded. (Not all big Vegas personalities come to shocking ends: billionaire casino mogul Kirk Kerkorian, the son of Armenian immigrants, died earlier this month at age 98. He’s one of three contemporary tycoons profiled in Winner Takes All: Steve Wynn, Kirk Kerkorian, Gary Loveman and the Race to Own Las Vegas, by Christina Binkley.)

Visitors are encouraged to feel like they’re getting away with something – too much eating, drinking, spending, gambling

Works of fiction turn to other areas of the city, paradoxically closer to what real life is like here, where risk is a constant for anyone balancing the American dream of a bigger and better future with the consequences of cold reality. Vu Tran’s forthcoming novel, Dragonfish, is a haunting work of noir literary suspense about a cop blackmailed into trying to find his Vietnamese ex-wife after she goes missing from the home she shares with her abusive new husband in Las Vegas. The novel Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock, is an unrelentingly brutal look at the miseries and pressures of growing up in the suburbs, while Laura McBride’s We Are Called to Rise, based on the real-life shooting by a police officer of an Albanian immigrant woman who worked in an ice-cream truck, traces the effects of tragedy on people struggling to find peace in the aftermath.

The best Las Vegas stories – whether truth, fiction or something in between – reflect the paradoxical atmosphere of this city. Fortunes and livelihoods can and do rise and fall here, every day, meteorically and with apocalyptic effect, to nobody’s surprise. Half-meritocracy and half crap-shoot, Las Vegas is, as Dave Hickey has pointed out, the only city in America where the odds against you are all posted in plain sight, literally and metaphorically – which is why trusting to luck here is an act of such brazen and doomed optimism that it makes for a good story, even when you lose.