Ardai focuses on a young, innocent small-town hick as his protagonist. This young innocent hick comes to big bad New York City and encounters strippers and mobsters and, with the entire city seemingly against this protagonist, solves a deepening mystery.

This book (Fifty To One) opens with Patricia Heverstadt arriving from
South Dakota with two suitcases and a typewriter out to follow her
older sister's footsteps in New York City. Of course, her sister tells her
to go home and, within moments of arriving, she is conned out of most
of her funds by some sharp talking New Yorker. She, still carrying her
bags, follows the address on the business card left her by the con
artist to an office building where she auditions for a dancing part.
Having no money left, she asks the producers for an advance and they
give her a place to stay in the "Chateau," which turns out to be a
converted office next door with bunks for a dozen would-be starlets.
Trixie, as she now calls herself, finds no other than her con man on the
same floor and he is none other than "Charlie" who is running a new
publishing house, Hard Case Crime and is also running from a beating
by none other than Mickey Spillane. Could "Charlie" be an alter ego for
Charles Ardai? Hard to tell.

In addition to her dancing career (at a club run by mobsters, of
course), it seems Trixie is an aspiring novelist who writes a novel
(using the pen name "anonymous") telling the story about a how a
famous mobster is robbed of $3 million. Since truth is always stranger
than fiction, it turns out that the mobster was actually robbed of $3
million and, of course, Trixie is the prime suspect since she bragged
about it in her book.

With that as a backdrop, Ardai takes the reader on a journey through
late fifties New York and pits Trixie and Charlie against a mobster
determined to get his money back.

Ardai had a little fun with this one, throwing in odd bits of parody
throughout the book. He also named each chapter after a Hard Case
Crime book. The title refers not just to the book's number within the
ranks of Hard Case publishing history, but also to a card game that a
mobster likes to play. One card is removed from the deck and the odds
are fifty-to-one that the player can now guess the top card. Guess it and maybe you live a little longer. Fail to guess it and there might be a
new bullet hole in your chest.

It's a great fun novel to read in and of itself and the bits of parody that
Ardai throws in actually do not take away from the finished product. I
really enjoyed reading this one ( )

A pretty good idea, the chapters being the titles of the first 49 books!! ( )

Fifty-to-One is a gimmick novel written by Charles Ardai, founder of Hard Case Crime and twice published in the same series under the name Richard Aleas. If you're unfamiliar with the series, this might not be the best starting point, since it has a light-hearted tone unlike the rest of the series and contains many in-jokes. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed this novel which caused me to chuckle out loud several times. ( )