Episode 116--RISK OF RUIN by Arnold Snyder (see also Episode 51)-- Risk of Ruin is about Bart Black, a professional gambler-biker-tattoo-artist

Risk of Ruin is about Bart Black, a professional gambler-biker-tattoo-artist who becomes obsessed with an underage stripper who believes she's God.
It's a story of rebellion, crime, and passion that attempts to answer a question that has tormented gambling men since Adam placed an all-in bet on Eve: Is she worth the risk?

Arnold Snyder, more noted as an a professional gambler and author of numerous blackjack books (The Big Book of Blackjack and Blackbelt in Blackjack among them) as well as poker (The Poker Tournament Formula and The Poker Tournament Formula 2) and has ventured into the (under)world of topless clubs in Las Vegas. Titled Sin City Advisor's Topless Vegas (Episode 51).

Risk of Ruin is my first novel--or at least, the first novel I'm willing to put my name on. Years ago, I used to write pseudonymous and anonymous hack fiction--two cents a word stuff. Risk of Ruin is my apology to all the trees that have died through the years for the terrible books I used to write.

What I really wanted to do with this book was violate the common genre formulas I was once forced to adhere to, while at the same time creating a moving love story, a cop drama, a paranormal romance, a porno potboiler, and an adventure story. To accomplish this, I started by creating main characters that violate the requirements for the protagonists of any of the popular fiction genres.

Take Bart, my protagonist/hero. He's five-foot-two and always broke. He's dirty, in the sense of grimy. (He works part-time as a hack motorcycle mechanic, when he's not in Reno trying to make money on a professional blackjack team.) He's a high school dropout, uses crude language, has satanic tattoos up and down both arms and a Napoleonic superiority complex. He rides a chopped Harley. A fun night for Bart is going to a bar that has a wet t-shirt contest and spraying water on the women who are competing, because that's about as close as he's going to get to a relationship with a woman and he knows it. He's not a person you'd ever care to hang out with, and he definitely would not be cast in the role of protagonist/hero in any genre of novel that I know of.

As for Stacy, the love interest: When she meets Bart, she's sixteen years old (he's 43) and she's a runaway working as a dancer in a nude strip club, a job she got using fake ID. Her superiority complex is even greater than Bart's, as she believes she's God. Literally. Even though Stacy is leggy, blond and beautiful, there is no genre of novel that would have this character as the hero's love interest.

So, writing this book was a challenge. My task was to make Bart into a real hero, someone the reader would be rooting for, while making Stacy a person he could really love. Violating the norms of genre fiction forced me to create a story so compelling that the physical, emotional, psychological and social flaws of the characters become irrelevant.