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WORK TITLE: Abracadabra
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1937
WEBSITE: http://davidkranes.com/
CITY: Salt Lake City
STATE: UT
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Phone: 801.364.3437
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1937.
EDUCATION:Yale University, D.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, academic, and dramaturge. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, professor emeritus; Sundance Playwrights Lab, artistic director, worked for fourteen years; Sawtooth Writers Conference, cofounder. Consultant to casinos.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize nominee; Utah Governor’s Award in the Arts; CBS Playwrights Award; National Repertory Play Contest winner; Wrangler Award, for Best Short Story Collection, for Low Tide in the Desert.
WRITINGS
Casino Executive, columnist; Indian Gaming, contributing editor.
SIDELIGHTS
David Kranes is a writer, academic, and dramaturge. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Utah and served for fourteen years as an artistic director for the Sundance Playwrights Lab. Kranes writes stories and plays that are frequently set in the West and populated with characters that are restless and emotionally unstable. He is the cofounder of the Sawtooth Writers Conference.
Hunters in the Snow and Low Tide in the Desert
In 1980 Kranes published Hunters in the Snow. The stories in this collection explore themes of human needs and restless cravings. In “Hunt,” a painter goes looking for his wife after she disappears on a snowy day, ultimately coming to a better understanding of the connection between his life and art. With “Dealer,” a loser finds his luck by becoming an ace card player. With “Cordials,” a woman gives birth and discards her baby in favor of her unending sexual desire.
Reviewing the book in Hollins Critic, Allen Sawyer-Long reasoned that regardless if “his stories are taking place in New York City or in one of his surreal landscapes of snow or stone, Kranes is compelling and convincing.”
Kranes published the short story collection Low Tide in the Desert in 1996. The eleven stories in this collection are set in Nevada with many of them centering on casino culture. In “The Black Friar of Fremont Street,” a man becomes addicted to gambling when his flight detours in Las Vegas. In “Slot Queen,” a woman finds that she has that magic touch on the casino floor. Meanwhile, “The Phantom Mercury of Nevada” delves into the state’s connection with UFOs.
A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that “many of his passages are spare, powerful Chandler-esque gems. Others are imaginative and poetic.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews commented that “the the bold themes … need more explication,” adding that Low Tide in the Desert “would have been better served as a novel.” The same Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “an uneven and somewhat awkward collection” before conceding that “Kranes working at his best is very good indeed.”
The Legend’s Daughter
In 2013 Kranes published the short story collection The Legend’s Daughter. The collection of ten short stories are set in and around Idaho. In “Where I Am … Where I’ve Been,” two friends on a fishing trip agree to explore their feminine selves. In “The Man Who Might Have Been My Father,” a young boy contemplates what it means to have a father. In “Angel of Death,” by contrast, a young man struggles between sentiments of revenge and reconciliation with his father.
Writing in Foreword Reviews, Chris Henning stated: “There’s something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What’s remarkable about David Kranes’s writing and” the stories in The Legend’s Daughter, “though, is that each story stands out on its own merit.”
Abracadabra
Kranes published the mystery novel Abracadabra in 2017. Former professional football player Elko Wells runs two businesses from his home in Las Vegas: a missing persons’ bureau and an agency for celebrity impersonators. He takes on the case of forty-year-old Eagle Scout Mark Goodson who never reappeared after stepping into magician’s box during a performance. Wells relies on his network of casino cocktail waitresses and a Shaquille O’Neal impersonator to collect leads for his cases. Wells attempts to retrace Goodson’s life and what problems he may have had while also struggling with the science behind the magic trick.
A Publishers Weekly contributor observed that Kranes presents “a gritty, glossy, sometimes glamorous, and always witty view of Las Vegas and its inhabitants.” A contributor to the It’s a Mystery Blog lauded: “I love a book with a strong setting and Abracadabra has setting in spades.” The same It’s a Mystery Blog reviewer suggested that “Abracadabra would be a good choice for readers who love Las Vegas. It is also for those who want a fast-paced mystery with a noir spin.” Writing in the Southwest Book Review, Mary Sojourner noticed that “Kranes’ respect for casino workers shines throughout this novel.” Sojourner concluded that “Abracadabra is, in the long run—and, for a gambler, the long run is what counts—a love letter to a city few truly understand, and its workers, who few visitors bother to really get to know.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Hollins Critic, June 1, 1980, Allen Sawyer-Long, review of Hunters in the Snow, p. 17.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1996, review of Low Tide in the Desert.
Publishers Weekly, August 26, 1996, review of Low Tide in the Desert, p. 90; September 11, 2017, review of Abracadabra, p. 44.
ONLINE
David Kranes Website, http://davidkranes.com (May 3, 2018).
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (June 22, 2013), Chris Henning, review of The Legend’s Daughter.
It’s a Mystery Blog, http://blog.robertagibsonwrites.com/ (February 18, 2018), review of Abracadabra.
Southwest Book Review, http://knau.org/ (January 26, 2018), Mary Sojourner, review of Abracadabra.
David Kranes
_DSC8444David Kranes writes about magicians, gamblers, hit men, painters, casino workers. His characters are frequently displaced seekers with volatile emotions—but always human. He writes about the West. And his characters struggle and love in its surreal landscapes of Las Vegas casinos, Utah deserts, and Montana towns. He exposes the magic in the mundane, the surreal in the simple, and the bizarre in the banal. His work superbly balances the fantastical with the raw.
As artistic director of Robert Redford’s Sundance Playwrights Lab for 14 years, David Kranes served as dramaturg and mentor for many now celebrated works in American theatre, including Pulitzer Prize winners Angels In America (Tony Kushner) and The Kentucky Cycle (Robert Schenkkan). He also worked with other renown playwrights including Donald Marguiles, Milcha Sanchez Scott, and Philip Gotanda, and actors Kathy Bates, John Malkovich, J.T. Walsh, and theatre artist Julie Taymor.
David has been writing stories and essays about casinos for 20+ years. And he has become arguably the country’s leading expert on new directions in casino design. He writes and presents visionary ideas—consulting with eminent hotel casinos including Circus Circus, Fitzgerald’s, Rainforest Café, Merv Griffin’s Resorts, and Grand Casinos. He currently works for Raving Consulting as an associate in space and design. He also is a columnist for Casino Executive Magazine and contributing editor for Indian Gaming Magazine.
With many stories anthologized, David Kranes is a Pushcart Prize nominee for “Blue Motel”; Pushcart winner for “Cordials” (1996)—this story appearing also in Best of Pushcart Anthology (2004); recipient of the Utah Governor’s Award in the Arts, CBS Playwrights Award, National Repertory Play Contest, and Wrangler Award for “Best Short Story Collection” for Low Tide In The Desert. His plays have been produced nationwide including major US theatres Manhattan Theatre Club, Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the Mark Taper Forum. David taught at the Univ. of Utah as an award-winning teacher and has taught writing workshops throughout the US and Europe. He co-founded the Sawtooth Writers Conference and is a DFA graduate of Yale School of Drama.
Abracadabra
Publishers Weekly.
264.37 (Sept. 11, 2017): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Abracadabra
David Kranes. Univ. of Nevada, $19.95 trade
paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-943859-44-3
Sprightly yet elegant prose propels this first-rate debut mystery from Kranes (Making the Ghost Dance).
Elko Wells, a former professional football player who retired from the game after a head injury, now owns a
missing persons' bureau and an agency for celebrity impersonators in Las Vegas, Nev. When Mark
Goodson, a 42-year-old former Eagle Scout with a problematic marriage, steps into a magician's box during
a performance an
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Low Tide in the Desert
Publishers Weekly.
243.35 (Aug. 26, 1996): p90.
COPYRIGHT 1996 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
David Kranes. Univ. of Nevada, $15 (186p) ISBN 0-87417-287-X
The problem with Low Tide in the Desert is all the sandbars that strand most of the 11 stories. Kranes relies
too on the surreal, but the fantastic needs the support of an underlying idea--which is often not here. The
most magical story is "Salvage:' which concerns the resurrection of an ancient ship and its treasure, found
buried in the desert. The stories are set in Nevada, many with connections to Las Vegas and casino life. Just
as Las Vegas overwhelms with it illusory promise of instant riches, by the time stories such as "Who I Am
Is" or "The Last Las Vegas Story" end, the narrative has evaporated like a mirage. Maybe this is the effect
Kranes wanted. He can write. Many of his passages are spare, powerful Chandler-esque gems. Others are
imaginative and poetic. Planes rise and fall like ashes. Expectations stack up like thunderheads. But since
these images never seem to go anywhere, they are just so much curiously shaped driftwood. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Low Tide in the Desert." Publishers Weekly, 26 Aug. 1996, p. 90. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A18616590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c9fa71a2.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18616590
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Hunters in the Snow
Allen Sawyer-Long
Hollins Critic.
17.3 (June 1980): p17+.
COPYRIGHT 1980 The Hollins Critic
http://www.hollins.edu/grad/eng_writing/critic/critic.htm
Full Text:
Hunters in the Snow, by David Kranes. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, $12.00 (cloth), $6.00 (pa.)
All the characters in this well-crafted collection of stories exploring human need are searching for
something. Some of them, quite literally, are hunting in the snow. In the centerpiece, "Hunt," a painter
whose marriage is dissolving, searches for his depressed wife after she vanishes in a snowy landscape
resembling "a negative of death." His search leads him to a subtle understanding of his life and art.
"Dealer" is a story about a loser who becomes an uncannily successful--and ruthless--card dealer. He is able
to confront his painful past only when he rides his horse through snow, where he imagines "brightly colored
birds, frozen, falling through unwinded air onto a place like seacoast, shattering." When a man and women
intentionally strip him of his icy reserve, he shatters like one of his imagined birds.
In "Cordials," the collection's most intense story, a pregnant woman's sexual need allows her to deliver her
baby and calmly place it in a wastebasket seconds before a lover, who is unaware of her pregnancy, makes
love to her.
Kranes' stories are poignant and, for the most part, pleasingly subtle. Six of the ten pieces deal with children
or adolescents drifting into adulthood. Some make the journey by imitating adults. Others make discoveries
about themselves through sexual encounters. Some resort to heroin, and there are even those who fall victim
to a haunted car. Whether his stories are taking place in New York City or in one of his surreal landscapes
of snow or stone, Kranes is compelling and convincing.
Sawyer-Long, Allen
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sawyer-Long, Allen. "Hunters in the Snow." Hollins Critic, vol. 17, no. 3, 1980, p. 17+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A133025565/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6e4225c0.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133025565
The Magic of Abracadabra by David Kranes
02/18/2018 / ROBERTA / 0 COMMENTS
Time to take a look at a new mystery, Abracadabra by David Kranes, published by University of Nevada Press (November 1, 2017).
Elko Wells can find things that no one else can. His amazing ability surfaced after he received a severe head injury as a professional football player.
When apparently normal, decent guy Mark Goodson fails to reappear on stage while serving as a volunteer during a magic act, Goodson’s wife hires Wells to track him down. Wading through the chaos that is Las Vegas at its liveliest, with the help of celebrity look-alikes and cocktail waitress sleuths, Wells follows the missing man’s trail.
Described as written in the noir tradition, this novel blasts along at a frenetic pace. David Kranes’s dialogue is whip fast and authentic. For example, you can sense the sparks in this exchange between Mark Goodson and his wife Lena (who wants to go to the Rhino):
“Can we still go to Picasso?”
“I thought we could go to…what was it called? The Rhino.”
“I want to go to Picasso.”
“Even though he cuts people up?”
“That makes one of us an accomplice.”
In case you didn’t know, the Rhino refers to an actual strip club or “gentlemen’s club.” Picasso is a Las Vegas restaurant.
Public domain photograph by Jean Beaufort
Setting
I love a book with a strong setting and Abracadabra has setting in spades (sorry, I couldn’t resist). David Kranes lives in Salt Lake City, Utah where he is a professor emeritus at the University of Utah. It would appear, however, that he has spent a great deal of time in Las Vegas. He knows the different casinos, the games, the restaurants, and the people with the precision of an insider who has spent hours observing in real life.
For example, when protagonist Elko Wells isn’t finding people, he runs a celebrity look-alike service. When he spots someone who resembles Martin Sheen, Elko follows him to see if the man has potential as an employee. Kranes’s description of the scene could only come from someone who knows his way around Las Vegas casinos:
Martin Sheen sits down and Elko does the same thing, a stool away. The possible Sheen orders a Dewar’s and water, slips in his club card, glides a hundred into a multigame validator and starts playing Double Double Bonus.
Apparently he is talking about some kind of slot machines.
The Bottom Line
Abracadabra would be a good choice for readers who love Las Vegas. It is also for those who want a fast-paced mystery with a noir spin.
See (and listen to) a review of Abracadabra by Mary Sojourner at KNAU
Disclosure: This book was provided for review purposes by the publisher. I am an affiliate with Amazon so I can provide you with cover images and links to more information about books and products. If you click through the highlighted title link and purchase a product, I will receive a small commission at not extra cost to you. Any proceeds help defray the costs of hosting and maintaining this website.
Southwest Book Review: 'Abracadabra' by David Kranes
By MARY SOJOURNER • JAN 26, 2018
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“Abracadabra” is the latest novel by Southwestern writer David Kranes. Set in Las Vegas in the noir tradition of writing, the story begins with the mysterious magic show disappearance of an unassuming character named Mark Goodson. From there, the plot unfolds in twists and turns, mistaken identities, celebrity impersonators and all around chaos. “Abracadabra” is the focus of this month’s Southwest Book Review by Mary Sojourner.
Listen Listening...2:56
David Kranes is an accomplished author, playwright and screen-writer; he founded and served for fourteen years as the director of the Sundance Playwright's Lab. His academic credentials are impeccable. He is also—and just as powerfully—a man who knows the voracious casinos and backstreet shadows of Las Vegas. In “Abracadabra,” he writes that the city which promises to hold your secrets, can also complicate a visitor whether or not they want to be complicated.
Vegas takes hold of Mark Goodson—a decent husband, loyal worker and all-round Boy Scout of a good guy. He disappears in the middle of one of Lance Burton's illusions in the showroom of the Monte Carlo Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. His wife, Lena, watches him enter a big black box, and never return. She hires private eye, Elko Wells, to find him. With that, the labyrinth that is the not-so-secret side of Vegas opens.
Kranes' touch is so deft that the reader never gets lost in the multiple twists and turns that follow. He impeccably balances Goodson and Lena; Elko Wells and his associates—one of whom might or might not be Shaquille O'Neal; and the hapless Billy Spence, impersonator and identity thief who finds himself trapped by just how good he is at his act—and how careless. Reading “Abracadabra” is like hurtling through a beautifully designed, sometimes scary, but always intriguing carnival fun house ride. Sights and sounds change paragraph after paragraph. Patsy Cline's “Crazy” plays over the same casino sound system on which the names of slot winners are bellowed. Jittering rainbow light plays over a lover's face.
Mark, Elko and Billy dash from the Mirage to the Bellagio to the Monte Carlo, double-back, lose their ways—and always are helped along by the casino staff. Kranes' respect for casino workers shines throughout this novel. He is not dazzled by the glitter that will turn out in the hard dawn, to be nothing but tricks of neon. He knows how hard the dealer, the croupier, the desk clerk and the cleaning men and women work. He is not impressed by the "whales," the high rollers who never really seem to catch on that when the game is over, they are chumps. “Abracadabra” is, in the long run—and, for a gambler, the long run is what counts—a love letter to a city few truly understand, and its workers, who few visitors bother to really get to know.
LOW TIDE IN THE DESERT by David Kranes
LOW TIDE IN THE DESERT
Nevada Stories
by David Kranes
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Eleven stories set in Nevada, many of them about life in and around casinos, by the author of the novel Margins (1972), etc. Kranes writes in a telegraphic, disjointed style, a manner that is startling and effective in a set-piece such as ``The Black Friar of Fremont Street''--the tale of Call, an ordinary man who's hooked by the tables when his flight to Salt Lake City is diverted to Las Vegas. Like a jackhammer, Kranes's punchy sentences take Call all the way down, from his rich eastern life to begging on the streets. The style is less successful in ``Slot Queen,'' however, the archetypal story of a woman with a legendary feel for imminent jackpots. Kranes strives for metaphysical effects, and the piece can't bear such freight. Similarly, ``The Phantom Mercury of Nevada,'' invoking Nevada's UFO mythology, hovers uncertainly between realism and the surreal, and fails to convince on either level. It's about some wild teenagers who investigate reports of cattle mutilations, only to discover that an old Mercury and its ghostly inhabitant are responsible. Kranes offers up a nice romance in ``Nevada Dreams,'' about a dealer, Nevada, and two pugnacious men who vie for her, and in ``The Whorehouse Picnic,'' perhaps his best effort, he combines a love story with a schizophrenic man's obsession to build an atomic bomb. The volume's title refers to the most ambitious piece, here, ``Salvage,'' about a core-sampling crew's discovery of a sailing ship beneath the dead sea of Nevada. Their extraordinary efforts to raise the ship--and, metaphorically, sail it again--evoke an extraordinary series of reactions in the reader. Even so, the bold themes here need more explication; the tale would have been better served as a novel. An uneven and somewhat awkward collection. But Kranes working at his best is very good indeed.
Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1996
ISBN: 0-87417-287-X
Page count: 186pp
Review Posted Online: May 20th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 1996
THE LEGEND'S DAUGHTER
STORIES
David Kranes
Torrey House Press (May 1, 2013)
Softcover $13.95 (160pp)
978-1-937226-15-2
Short story collection filled with dynamic prose and genuine characters amid rugged Idaho landscape.
In the opening story in this robust collection of ten, “Where I Am … Where I’ve Been,” two buddies on the last night of their weeklong fishing trip agree, as Clifford explains to Woods, “To find the women … who are in us … who are outside of us.” There’s no more tender a moment throughout The Legend’s Daughter than this, though Kranes is plenty generous throughout, his characters every bit embraceable and real and genuine as they are fallible—in short, human.
The landscape is real, too—Idaho, and rugged, as are the lives some of these folks lead. By the closing lines of “The Legend’s Daughter,” there’s a sense of smoke-and-mirrors or, perhaps, mostly smoke, as one-time musician and grieving stepfather Tom Bachman helps Lanie Lou Macklin search for her father, the musical legend Mackie Macklin. Like so many of Kranes’ characters—lost or abandoned, broken and broken-hearted—Lanie says, “It’s terrible, you know? You want something, then, when you get close, what you’ve wanted scares the shit out of you. You think, I don’t want this after all. It’s too big. It’s too true.”
Kranes’ prose is big, too—achingly big, these words from the title story practically leaping from the page, poetry in motion: “And, in the liquid night, spinning light, the shape played—voice a wanderer, out from the shadows to the blackened rafters of the shabby tavern, notes like lust, words like light, voice like ashes.”
Kranes allows his characters keen reflections: The young boy in “The Man Who Might Have Been My Father” considers his life were his mother to marry the man they’ve set off to meet. In “Angel of Death,” a grown son, estranged from his father, is conflicted between revenge and reconciliation. “Between Projects” introduces us to a famous actor paddling a kayak; a former nun and ex-firefighter; a semi-reclusive artist; and the ex-nun’s ex-con father. “Between Projects” doesn’t involve mirrors, but lots of smoke, and fire.
There’s something to be said about a writer whose style is easily recognized, whose voice stands out, whose stories are readily identified. What’s remarkable about David Kranes’s writing and these stories, though, is that each story stands out on its own merit, while every story is well crafted and conceived. Nothing one-dimensional about his people, nothing one dimensional about his prose, either.
Reviewed by Chris Henning
Summer 2013