Popular fiction prefers to explore mythical Las Vegas

      The ingredients for a Las Vegas novel are simple.
      Take one cocktail glass, toss in some mobsters, gambling, sex and showgirls, and stir.
      But don't shake up expectations in your audience. In the world of publishing it seems, Las Vegas is and always will be "Sin City."
      In Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" and his latest, "The Last Don," which airs today, Tuesday and Wednesday on CBS (KLAS-TV, Channel 8 at 9 p.m. each day) and is partially set in Las Vegas, the mythic city is front and center.
      "The Last Don" stars Danny Aiello as Don Clericuzio, a Mafia godfather who wants to make his family legitimate. The six-hour miniseries also stars Joe Mantegna, Kirstie Alley, Rory Cochrane, Jason Gedrick and Daryl Hannah.
      "I was writing a novel about Hollywood," Puzo says in a CBS press release about his latest work. "I was not writing a novel about the Mafia. Writing about Hollywood led me into Las Vegas, which I knew a lot about. And writing about Las Vegas led me into the Mafia again."
      The bottom line for Puzo: Las Vegas equals Mafia.
      Other authors, such as Harold Robbins, have also gotten into the act. Robbins' sequel to his big best seller of the 1960s, "The Carpetbaggers," "The Raiders" tells the story of a billionaire businessman who takes on the mob and takes into bed "a beautiful, sexy blonde with a secret past," as the book flap says.
      "It's difficult to change a myth or popular perception once it's started," says Douglas Unger, associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an author whose books include "Voices From Silence," "El Yanqui," "Leaving the Land" and "The Turkey War."
      "Whenever a one-dimensional idea is present, it is then exploited as a means to sell a commodity to people," Unger says. "A myth doesn't re-adapt itself to the reality."
      The reality of Las Vegas extends well beyond the Strip, a 3-mile-long mythscape of neon, slot machines, entertainers and theme parks.
      The myth of Las Vegas started relatively early in its history, since it became a gambling mecca in the 1940s.
      It took hold even among novelists such as celebrated South Florida crime novelist John D. MacDonald, who in 1960 wrote "The Only Girl in the Game," a paperback original with a back cover featuring these lines: "Coney Island in the desert. Miami Beach without an ocean. Nothing but sand and neon and money, money, everywhere. Big-name entertainers rubbing elbows with big-name gangsters over the green-baize craps tables. Bare-breasted showgirls conning the big spenders in the small hours. ... World without end ... Vegas!"
      The main characters are a hotel manager and a singer who is used by the mob-run casino to keep the suckers playing, and therefore losing.
      About the same time, Ian Fleming's spymaster, James Bond, visited Las Vegas in "Diamonds are Forever." Before arriving, though, Bond got a lesson in what Las Vegas is all about from American intelligence agent Felix Leiter.
      "We're both traveling bad roads and all bad roads lead to the bad town. ... The answer to the public dream of `something for nothing' is to be picked up for the price of your plane fare, on the Strip at Las Vegas. ... All the ad men in the world couldn't have dreamed it up. It made the wishing-well dream come true -- and you wait till you see them wishing in those casinos," Leiter says.
      Over the years, other books set in Las Vegas have been in the same vein. Larry McMurtry's "The Desert Rose," published in 1983, was a little more serious in its approach, but still featured a Stardust dancer and her daughter whose careers are trading places -- mom is on the way down, the daughter is on the rise.
      "Leaving Las Vegas," by the late John O'Brien, told the story of a hopeless alcoholic and his prostitute girlfriend. It showed the underside of Las Vegas, a place where people go to self-destruct.
      Unger doesn't find the "reality" depicted in books to reflect life here.
      The reality is "an underpaid hotel clerk who goes home to the family and tries to live a normal life. I don't find the Las Vegas lifestyle to be all that different from living in Phoenix. You drive around and it feels like you're in any booming city in the Southwest."
      Richard Wiley, a novelist and associate professor of English at UNLV, says he has yet to read a word about Las Vegas that was of much interest.
      "And this town has so much dynamic to it," Wiley says, without an author resorting to the mob angle.
      "If I were writing a book about Las Vegas, I wouldn't research that (mobsters) at all," Wiley says.
      Even local authors have seized on the myth, in one way or another.
      Bill Moody, a former UNLV lecturer and jazz drummer, has used Las Vegas as the backdrop for two novels -- "Solo Hand" and "Death of a Tenor Man" -- about amateur sleuth and jazz pianist Evan Horne.
      But Moody, who has lived off and on in Las Vegas for 21 years, says he's tried to shift the focus away from the Strip.
      "In `Solo Hand,' about 30 percent of the book was set in Las Vegas," Moody says. "My lead character, like myself, is a musician, and hopefully I'm showing the city in a different way. I wanted to show there is more going on on the music side than the hotels."
      In "Death of a Tenor Man," published last year, Horne seeks the truth behind the death of a jazz tenor sax player, Wardell Gray. The book includes a mobster angle, but shows more of the city than the Strip, such as the restaurants, university and residential areas.
      Readers often tell him they didn't know some of those places existed, since they come to the Strip for a few days and then go home, Moody says. Yet, while the myth lives on in print and on movie screens, Las Vegas has attempted to change its image, from sleazy to wholesome family playground.
      Trying to change that image may be a mistake for the city, though, says Unger.
      "I don't know if it's in the best interest of the city to break out of the myth. People come here for that myth."