What do you think?
Rate this book
Conman
Conman is the story of young Neil Martin, a kindly family man. A bit geeky, a bit nerdy. If you met him, you would assume he runs a failing comic memorabilia store in London’s Soho. Which he does. In order to bail himself out of a huge stock-ruining, poster sopping basement flood, he needs to make a claim on his insurance. Which he would do - if he’d remembered to pay his premium. Terrified of losing everything – his wife Jane, his daughter, his business, his home – and scared to appear the dumb, working-class pleb that Jane’s father always took him for, Neil reluctantly agrees to help Christopher - a passing confidence trickster - use his premises for a big sting. So the con is on and the trap is set. Neil meets Christopher’s crew and, as he introduces them to the world of the vintage comic collectable, he is introduced to the life of the grifter. The swaps, swindles and switcheroos. The colourful patter of marks, mitt fitters, cacklebladders, and cold pokes. But things are never as they seem in the twilight world of the confidence man. And when Christopher’s real target is revealed, Neil finds himself plotting, switching, swapping, and scamming for revenge, for redemption. And for his life.
- GenresFiction
416 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2008
6 people are currently reading
35 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 30, 2024
I'm giving up on this one. Made it 4/5th of the way through hoping it wouldn't be as predictable as it seemed like it was going to be, getting more and more disappointed. The main character, while relatable, is incredibly maddening in how he goes about literally everything. I've read the last page of the book and was not even a bit surprised by how it ended.
Would have given it two stars, but it's actually written incredibly well. Just the story is awful. I would only recommend it if you don't mind turning off your brain completely. If you're able to do that, the book is one to pick up.
Would have given it two stars, but it's actually written incredibly well. Just the story is awful. I would only recommend it if you don't mind turning off your brain completely. If you're able to do that, the book is one to pick up.
November 5, 2010
Major disappointment this one. Another one endorsed by Tony Parsons that didnt hit the spot for me.
I read Genes and T Shirts a few years ago and seem to remember enjoying it. This was a shorty snappy bloke lit book about relationships that had a fair few chucklesome moments.
This one has a decent enough premise - we know Neil Martin - a geeky comic store owner - is all sorts of trouble as he desperately pours out his heart to the man next to him in a pub in earls court.
We then go back in time and learn about his family (wife, daughter, father in law part of the aristocracy) and how he has lost his stock in a basement flood.
Then a number of strange men and women come into his life and his is subject of a number of cons / stings. This goes on for ever and eventually involves a femme fatale and his old college flat mate.
The plus side of the book are great sense of location and a very gentle english sense of humour. The characterisation is good, as is the sense of British class systems.
The book has three flaws. For a thriller is not thrilling enough. For a comedy, its not funny enough and most damning of all, its just too bloody long. After cross, double cross and triple cross you just dont care once you get past 300 pages. The last 100 were a real struggle and I couldnt wait to finish it and pop it back in the library letter box.
I read Genes and T Shirts a few years ago and seem to remember enjoying it. This was a shorty snappy bloke lit book about relationships that had a fair few chucklesome moments.
This one has a decent enough premise - we know Neil Martin - a geeky comic store owner - is all sorts of trouble as he desperately pours out his heart to the man next to him in a pub in earls court.
We then go back in time and learn about his family (wife, daughter, father in law part of the aristocracy) and how he has lost his stock in a basement flood.
Then a number of strange men and women come into his life and his is subject of a number of cons / stings. This goes on for ever and eventually involves a femme fatale and his old college flat mate.
The plus side of the book are great sense of location and a very gentle english sense of humour. The characterisation is good, as is the sense of British class systems.
The book has three flaws. For a thriller is not thrilling enough. For a comedy, its not funny enough and most damning of all, its just too bloody long. After cross, double cross and triple cross you just dont care once you get past 300 pages. The last 100 were a real struggle and I couldnt wait to finish it and pop it back in the library letter box.
January 20, 2016
I purchased this on the strength of having enjoyed 'T-shirt and Genes' by the same author, and for the first hundred pages I was enjoying this novel too.
Things unravelled after then, however. What started off as a witty funny bloke-lit sort of Nick Hornby / Tony Parsons story about an inept bloke getting conned because he doesn't want to disappoint his wife.. it then turned more into an overcomplicated multi-layed and convoluted heist thriller. Or something like that anyhow - I got so lost in the multiple twists and turns that I forgot who was good and bad, who was on what side, and even who had done/said what previously. The ending was a miserable quintuple-crossing of a fuck-up and I didn't understand what happened (and didn't care that I didn't - I just wanted it to end). Fans of this sort of thing might like it, but I lost patience in what felt like two or three stories shunted slightly untidily together into one.
So I was quite disappointed. The author IMHO does light funny witty and touching stuff about relationships and men a lot better than he does this sort of story.
Things unravelled after then, however. What started off as a witty funny bloke-lit sort of Nick Hornby / Tony Parsons story about an inept bloke getting conned because he doesn't want to disappoint his wife.. it then turned more into an overcomplicated multi-layed and convoluted heist thriller. Or something like that anyhow - I got so lost in the multiple twists and turns that I forgot who was good and bad, who was on what side, and even who had done/said what previously. The ending was a miserable quintuple-crossing of a fuck-up and I didn't understand what happened (and didn't care that I didn't - I just wanted it to end). Fans of this sort of thing might like it, but I lost patience in what felt like two or three stories shunted slightly untidily together into one.
So I was quite disappointed. The author IMHO does light funny witty and touching stuff about relationships and men a lot better than he does this sort of story.
February 17, 2015
Thanks to the success of the BBC TV show ''Hustle'', the art of the long con seems to be more popular than I ever recall. I've always liked the series, as it shows a battle of wits and there is so much that can go wrong the outcome is in doubt right until the end. Until Richard Asplin's ''Con Man'', I'd not read anything with quite the same level of intricacy, although Jeffery Deaver's ''The Vanished Man'' comes close.
Neil Martin runs a comic collector's store in London's Soho. Unfortunately, he's not very good at it and the business is rapidly failing. The large part of this is Neil's fault as he lost a lot of his own and a fellow collector's stock in a flood which, having neglected to write a cheque for the additional insurance, he can't claim for. He's dealing with his financial worries like many people, by throwing away or hiding bank statements and letters from solicitors and by dodging his father-in-law's financial advisor.
The knowledge that his father-in-law is a rich and titled gentleman who never felt Neil was good enough for his daughter is not helping his peace of mind. Having promised to care and provide for his wife and daughter and looking likely to fail miserably in this endeavour, when a man approaches him and offers to cut him in on a con whose profits will solve all his financial woes, he jumps at the chance. What Neil fails to realise is that when a con artists tells you the truth, it may not be the same truth as you think he's telling you.
''Con Man'' has all the outward appearances of being a great read, as it's decently paced with a great deal of story and there are more plot twists than you could shake a Marvel Comic at. Somehow these various pieces of the book didn't come together quite right, like when you've added just a touch too much salt to a meal. It's not something I can put a finger on exactly to explain where it all went wrong, but I expected to finish the book thinking how much I'd enjoyed it and it left me feeling slightly hollow. If you'd asked me at the end of the book whether I'd enjoyed it, I'd have been unsure how to answer and that's still the case.
The problem certainly isn't in the plot itself, which kept moving along at a decent pace and switched back more times than a Tour de France rider on an Alpine descent. However, by the end, it felt like the whole thing had been going on rather too long. The story was intriguing enough to make me want to keep reading it, but the plot was so elaborate, admittedly out of necessity, that there just seemed to be far too much of it. The same could be said for much of the back-story. I understand and accept that certain amounts of Neil's past and his current home life needed to be explored to help set up the story and show why he was so keen to accept the part he had to play in the con. But there did seem to be an awful lot of this and it felt as if Asplin was trying to ram the point home in places.
Unfortunately, these efforts were ultimately not entirely successful and the major issue I had with the book was with the characters. Admittedly, as a group of con artists, many of the major players have to remain slightly anonymous and neither Neil nor the reader would find out much about them, but Neil's character and those of his family also felt poorly drawn and two dimensional. This meant I felt nothing for him, even though his life was slowly falling to pieces around him and this badly lessened the impact of the story for me. I never felt involved or gripped by the story of Neil's misfortune and I reached the end painfully aware this was a work of fiction and feeling like an outsider looking in. There was little warmth in any of the characters and this was slightly off-putting. I really wanted to enjoy the story, but it felt as if the story itself was trying to prevent me from doing so.
I loved the basic idea behind ''Con Man'', as I always have done with ''Hustle''. It seemed to have everything required to be a gripping and exciting read, but turned out to be lifeless. It's worth reading for the story, which is a decent one and for the plot, which is interesting without ever being captivating. Sadly, however, the whole was let down by some of the parts and it's not worth reading for the overall experience, which I found unexpectedly disappointing and even with a lowest price of a penny at the Amazon Marketplace, the addition of postage costs will make it a poor value purchase.
This review may also appear, in whole or in part, under my name at any or all of www.ciao.co.uk, www.thebookbag.co.uk, www.goodreads.com, www.amazon.co.uk and www.dooyoo.co.uk
Neil Martin runs a comic collector's store in London's Soho. Unfortunately, he's not very good at it and the business is rapidly failing. The large part of this is Neil's fault as he lost a lot of his own and a fellow collector's stock in a flood which, having neglected to write a cheque for the additional insurance, he can't claim for. He's dealing with his financial worries like many people, by throwing away or hiding bank statements and letters from solicitors and by dodging his father-in-law's financial advisor.
The knowledge that his father-in-law is a rich and titled gentleman who never felt Neil was good enough for his daughter is not helping his peace of mind. Having promised to care and provide for his wife and daughter and looking likely to fail miserably in this endeavour, when a man approaches him and offers to cut him in on a con whose profits will solve all his financial woes, he jumps at the chance. What Neil fails to realise is that when a con artists tells you the truth, it may not be the same truth as you think he's telling you.
''Con Man'' has all the outward appearances of being a great read, as it's decently paced with a great deal of story and there are more plot twists than you could shake a Marvel Comic at. Somehow these various pieces of the book didn't come together quite right, like when you've added just a touch too much salt to a meal. It's not something I can put a finger on exactly to explain where it all went wrong, but I expected to finish the book thinking how much I'd enjoyed it and it left me feeling slightly hollow. If you'd asked me at the end of the book whether I'd enjoyed it, I'd have been unsure how to answer and that's still the case.
The problem certainly isn't in the plot itself, which kept moving along at a decent pace and switched back more times than a Tour de France rider on an Alpine descent. However, by the end, it felt like the whole thing had been going on rather too long. The story was intriguing enough to make me want to keep reading it, but the plot was so elaborate, admittedly out of necessity, that there just seemed to be far too much of it. The same could be said for much of the back-story. I understand and accept that certain amounts of Neil's past and his current home life needed to be explored to help set up the story and show why he was so keen to accept the part he had to play in the con. But there did seem to be an awful lot of this and it felt as if Asplin was trying to ram the point home in places.
Unfortunately, these efforts were ultimately not entirely successful and the major issue I had with the book was with the characters. Admittedly, as a group of con artists, many of the major players have to remain slightly anonymous and neither Neil nor the reader would find out much about them, but Neil's character and those of his family also felt poorly drawn and two dimensional. This meant I felt nothing for him, even though his life was slowly falling to pieces around him and this badly lessened the impact of the story for me. I never felt involved or gripped by the story of Neil's misfortune and I reached the end painfully aware this was a work of fiction and feeling like an outsider looking in. There was little warmth in any of the characters and this was slightly off-putting. I really wanted to enjoy the story, but it felt as if the story itself was trying to prevent me from doing so.
I loved the basic idea behind ''Con Man'', as I always have done with ''Hustle''. It seemed to have everything required to be a gripping and exciting read, but turned out to be lifeless. It's worth reading for the story, which is a decent one and for the plot, which is interesting without ever being captivating. Sadly, however, the whole was let down by some of the parts and it's not worth reading for the overall experience, which I found unexpectedly disappointing and even with a lowest price of a penny at the Amazon Marketplace, the addition of postage costs will make it a poor value purchase.
This review may also appear, in whole or in part, under my name at any or all of www.ciao.co.uk, www.thebookbag.co.uk, www.goodreads.com, www.amazon.co.uk and www.dooyoo.co.uk
December 28, 2010
It really takes a lot for me to give up and not bother finishing a book...which is why I read 200 pages of this one before I realized it wasn't gonna get any better! Now, it really wasn't so much of a bad story...it's just that the main character was so wishy-washy and indecisive I wanted to smack him...and the author didn't get to the POINT quickly enough for my taste. Ack!
P.S. For the record, I DID indeed finish the whole book after all...and the ending begged to be clever, I suppose...it just took too darn long to GET to the ending! LOL
P.S. For the record, I DID indeed finish the whole book after all...and the ending begged to be clever, I suppose...it just took too darn long to GET to the ending! LOL
April 6, 2012
This book quite frankly did my head in ... I stuck with it to the end and to be fair it rattles along at a fair old pace with no lulls or slow patches, but the ending was absurd and not what I'd been hoping for. You could see almost every twist coming from three miles away but the worst aspect was the way nobody ever finishes a sentence, I'm sure it's supposed to appear as an authentic conversation would but it becomes wearing very quickly and was distracting and irritating throughout .... the London setting is well-observed ...
April 3, 2011
Well it was OK, I was waiting for something to happen. Not sure if I would read any more of this author,well have to wait and see
November 1, 2012
a truly great read. gripping story, loads of twists and turns and an ending that I would never have guessed. a must read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews