The True Story of Titanic Thompson | Kevin Cook

‘Taylor, I dreamt of your lecture last night,’ the polar explorer Captain Scott was once heard to exclaim, after sitting through a paper on icebergs by the expedition physiographer, Griffith Taylor, that had reduced even its author to the edge of catalepsy: ‘How could I live so long in the world and not know something of so fascinating a subject!’

The True Story of Titanic Thompson is not going to be everyone’s book, but for those who can get beyond the child-brides and casual killings, Kevin Cook’s biography of a great American hustler might well provoke the same sense of wonderment. A certain degree of anonymity is, of course, a crucial element of any conman’s success, and yet no amount of wilful obscurity can begin to explain how 30-odd years after his death a name that ought to be as familiar as Minnesota Fats or John Dillinger is about as well known as ‘Griff’ Taylor’s work on Antarctic glaciers.

Born in Arkansas in 1892, Ti Thompson grew up in a world of rain-makers, bible-peddlers, fair-ground shooters, itinerant revivalists and card sharps, for which he was uniquely well-equipped. There may have been the odd hustler who could match his skills at poker or on the pool table, but nobody has ever brought to the conman’s art the austere self-discipline or meticulous planning that Thompson did. As a ‘propositionist’ he was unrivalled for the simple reason that he only bet on challenges he had already made into near certainties. When he said he could flick 52 cards of a pack into a bowl at 25 feet he had hundreds of lonely hours of practice in Mid-West hotel rooms to back his money. If he bet on the number of greys they would pass on the train ride out to Aqueduct he could stake big because he had gone to the trouble of putting them there the day before. If he wagered that at least two of the next 30 people he met in Times Square would share the same birthday that was because he had taken lessons in probability from a Columbia professor of mathematics.