This cartoon captures the enthusiasm that gamesters bring to the proceedings. One of Ghostwriter's favorites -- which he couldn't forget, but couldn't find either -- it was rediscovered for him in February of 1995 in San Francisco's Adobe Bookshop by Helena Handbasket, who has amazing radar. The cartoon was drawn by George Price, published first in The New Yorker magazine and republished in "The Early Forties" section of The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album (1951). Price also illustrated Mary Lasswell's "Suds in Your Eye" books, upon whose pages Mrs. McFeely roamed freely. He was a beautiful, bent genius.
"Mr. Gardiner did not attempt to conceal these particulars from the Longbourn family. Jane heard them with horror. 'A gamester!' she cried. 'This is wholly unexpected. I had not an idea of it.' "
Jane Austin, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Chapter XLVIII
Discovered and contributed by Helena Handbasket.
"Incidentally, I'm like you and I very much enjoy reading about the death of an academician in the newspapers. I always ask myself immediately: 'Who's going to succeed him?' And I draw up my list. It's a game, a very amusing little game that they play in every drawing-room in Paris whenever an 'Immortal' passes on: the game of Death and the Forty Old Men."
Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami (1885); Ch.6, Georges Duroy to Madame WalterDiscovered and contributed by The Bury Pranksters
"There is one thing I've never told an interviewer," Lockhorn said, after a pause. "I've never told any interviewer about the game. 'Don't tell the man about the game,' Mrs. Lockhorn always says. 'Promise me you won't tell the man about the game.' Let me ask you one thing why would Martha ask me not to tell you about the game if there were no game?"
"She wouldn't, of course," said Price, taking a long slow sip of his drink to cover his embarrassment. The two men drank in silence for a while. "My second wife left me because of the game," Lockhorn said, "but you can't print that, because she would deny it, and I would deny it." Lockhorn took a great gulp of his drink and stared into the fire again. Two minutes of silence went by, during which Price found himself counting the ticks of the clock on the mantelpiece. "My memory is beginning to slip," Lockhorn said, "but if you print that, I'll sue Hammer's pants off. Maybe I'll sue his pants off, anyway. Sunday editors are the worst vermin in the world. If you use that, credit it to Mencken."
James Thurber, "The Interview," collected in Alarms & Diversions (1957)
The following (edited) exchange takes place in The Dead Pool, a 1988 Warner Brothers film produced by and starring Clint Eastwood, written by Steve Sharon, from a story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. "Dirty Harry" Callahan (Eastwood) interviews a film director named Peter Swan (Liam Neeson) about a 'death list' with a dead rock star on it:
Callahan: I'd like to talk to you about your list.
Swan: It's no big secret... The Dead Pool is just a harmless game.
Callahan: Sounds pretty sick to me.
Swan: Nobody takes my films or the Dead Pool seriously... The whole idea is to pick celebrities who aren't going to make it because they're old or because they're sick or because they're in a high-risk profession...
Callahan: You want to play the game, you'd better know the rules...
"Okay, innocents, there's the national death game and the local branch. The national one was written up in the Express... In the death game the players each make a list of sixty-nine people they expect to die within the year. The nominees have to be nationally known, or known well enough to have their obituaries in the New York Times. For each person who dies, the player gets points. The younger the deceased, the greater the points. So if somebody over ninety goes, it's hardly worth the cost of buying the Times. Over ninety equals one point. Someone between eighty and ninety is two points, and so on."
Susan Dunlop, Death and Taxes (1992), Chapter 15
Discovered and contributed by a patron of the arts, Jessica Behrman
This is the only known specific appearance of our Game in fiction. The novel's plot revolves mainly around a fictional local (Berkeley) version of the Game. The "Express" citation is to "The Death Game," an article by Dashka Slater, which ran in The East Bay Express (Oakland, California) on July 13, 1990, in Section Two, pp. 1, 18-23, and which, we assume, provided the idea to the novelist.
"My name is not Dr. Death."
Bart Simpson, writing on the blackboard during the opening credits of the TV show, "The Simpsons", no date given.
Discovered and contributed by Nostradahmer
"You guys ever do the dead pool? I do it every year."
-- Part of a long soliloquy on dead pools in general by a character named Russ Claven in Stephen White's Cold Case (Signet Books, 2000, pp.17-18)
Discovered and contributed by Mullen's Revenge
For non-fiction accounts of the Death Game and other Dead Pools, click here.
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