The Vapors

Starred review from April 20, 2020
Journalist Hill’s fantastic debut blends true crime and Southern history to chronicle the transformation of Hot Springs, Ark., from a spa town into a hotbed of horse racing, prostitution, and illegal gambling between the 1930s and 1960s. Hill tracks the history through the lives of three central figures: Owney Madden, Dane Harris, and Hazel Hill (the author’s grandmother). Madden, an Irish-American gangster and owner of the Cotton Club in Harlem, moved to Hot Springs in 1935 to avoid enemies he’d made in the Manhattan underworld. He teamed with local hustlers, including bootlegger Harris, to turn the town’s existing vice district into a strip of high-end resorts that drew professional athletes and film stars. Harris and Madden also opened the Vapors, the grandest of the city’s resorts, where Hazel Hill worked as a “shill player,” betting with house money “to keep the tourists interested and the games going,” while struggling to raise three children on her own after leaving their abusive, alcoholic father. 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. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

May 1, 2020
The history of a small town in Arkansas that once rivaled Las Vegas in gambling, booze, and prostitution. For most Americans, Hot Springs, Arkansas, doesn't raise an eyebrow, but folks who lived in the state from the 1930s to the '60s knew the place as "the most sinful little city in the world." In his first book, Hill, a Brooklyn-based journalist from Hot Springs, tells a juicy tale of how such a place was born and stayed in business for so long as the "sin city of the Bible Belt." Due to the Vapors, therapeutic, thermal springs offering relief to those in pain, the area "was the first park to be managed by the federal government." The author offers up a huge cast of colorful, mostly sleazy characters, but he focuses on three key players: Hazel Hill, the author's grandmother; gangster Dane Harris, boss gambler and the "most powerful man in Hot Springs"; and Owney "The Killer" Madden, who was sent to the town in 1931 by Meyer Lansky to be the "mob's ambassador." Weaving their stories in and out, from 1931 to 1968, Hill unfolds an engrossing history of corruption at the highest levels. During World War II, Hot Springs and its excellent hospital became a refuge for soldiers seeking much-needed R&R, enjoying the illegal booze, and gambling. Madden consolidated power, teaming up with Harris. Struggling to raise her family of three sons, including Jimmy, the author's father, Hazel moved from Ohio back to Hot Springs in 1951 and got a job as a barmaid and, later, a "shill player" at a casino, gambling with the house's money. In highly detailed, novelistic prose, Hill chronicles the rise of the power brokers and their ballot-stuffing control of local and state elections. In 1965, J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert Kennedy finally shut it all down. A captivating, shady story about massive, brazen corruption hiding in plain sight. (8 pages of b/w illustrations)

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May 22, 2020

The city of Hot Springs, AR, once possessed naturally hot spring water feeding local bath houses that visitors believed held medicinal properties able to cure various ailments. The real magic of the springs, however, was in converting those beliefs of healing into profitable revenue. Journalist Hill tells the stories of a number of the city's contemporaries, whose hopes, dreams, and paths crossed during the period of 1931-68 as they tried to will Hot Springs into becoming the Las Vegas of the Midwest. In the process, he describes a tourist destination forced to accept political corruption, crime, and mob interest concomitant with the only industry that could prosper there: gambling. The account centers on mobster Owney Madden and his prot�g� Dane Harris, as they build the Vapors into the city's pleasure palace. Hill acknowledges that his exhaustively researched account is interpretive, yet his focus on individuals who engage in greed leaves little room for sympathy, as he portrays a vicious cycle of bribes, payoffs, and investigations. VERDICT 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.--Ricardo Laskaris, York Univ. Lib., Toronto

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