The stories are portraits of colourful characters and are enhanced by Christy’s equally colourful writing style that virtually ignores the rules of syntax and word order.

The 36 men and women who have passed Christy’s scalawag litmus test are a varied lot that include aristocrats, bureaucrats, genius inventors, old West gunslingers, and even a legitimate hero or two – many are crackpots, most over-sexed. All are brazen adventurers with an over-abundance of charm, and an inability to live regular lives like the rest of us common folk.

Christy is obviously a good storyteller, and his rougues gallery is full of inspired choices of lives that deserve to be immortalized in tales; most of whom are at risk of being entirely forgotten by history.

Christy writes about his scalawags with respect and fondness, and dare I say, certain wistfulness for the lost art of the grift that only a true scalawag can pull off.  His writing really comes alive when he inserts the personal (he knows two of the scalawags personally) as when he writes about Arthur Craven, the great boxer (a sport Christy obviously adores) and Lord Buckly, the original jive-talker himself, who Christy first heard on the radio as a impressionable boy.

However, the missed opportunity with this collection is that the stories do not build on one another. The thread that should weave these errant pieces together is the author himself.  He is too often missing from these pages and thus many of the stories fall a little flat.

Yes, Christy does claim that the quality that sets a scalawag apart from the run-of-the-mill con man or con woman is elusive and indefinable, yet what I really wanted was for Christy to at least attempt to take us on his grand adventure to capture the ineffable. (Anvil Press)