A Pair of Aces
A Pair of Aces
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Marie Benedict on A Pair of Aces
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two women with no reason to meetThe book’s premise grew from a structural dissatisfaction with the previous two collaborations. Benedict and Murray had already written about a lone woman and then about two women who were genuine friends. For a third book together, they wanted a harder problem: what happens when the two women at the center have nothing in common and no affection for each other.
We wanted to explore a situation in which two very different women, two women who weren’t friends, who were never gonna be friends, were able to come together to make great change, to become agents of change. [paraphrased from audio]
That frame sent Benedict into the historical record looking for the right pair. She found Eunice Carter, the first Black female prosecutor in 1930s New York, and her first instinct was to keep looking. Then she read further and saw what Carter had actually done with a job that no one else wanted: she identified mob control of prostitution as the legal lever that could topple Lucky Luciano, at a moment when her boss Thomas Dewey considered the angle too minor and too gendered to pursue.
I was a New York City litigator myself for over a decade. And reading about Eunice, you know, really harkened back to my own experience as a young female lawyer, the way she crafted this case to utilize prostitution — mob interference in prostitution — as a way to bring down the mob against all odds. Her story was so incredible, I could not turn away from it.
Benedict’s legal career gave her a way in that most novelists wouldn’t have had: she could read what Carter built, step by step, and recognize the professional audacity it required.
Once Carter was fixed as one of the two women, Benedict used a lawyer’s logic to locate the other. She reasoned backward from the evidentiary problem Carter would have faced: a prosecutor building a case against organized crime needs inside information that official channels cannot supply. That reasoning led her to Polly Adler, the most prominent madam in New York City, whose establishment functioned more like an exclusive private club than a brothel and whose client list included virtually everyone worth knowing.
The more I saw that [Eunice Carter] played this huge role in this massive case against the mob — and knowing as a lawyer the kinds of evidentiary chains she would have to establish to have a successful case — it occurred to me that maybe there was somebody on the other side of the law helping her.
Benedict is explicit that no historical record places Adler and Carter in contact. The collaboration between them is invented. What Adler’s own autobiography did confirm, by carefully omitting any knowledge of mob involvement, was how much she was still protecting when she wrote it.
How she wrote it
Architecture, court records, and the limits of autobiographyBenedict’s account of her research method starts with a building metaphor she uses consistently across interviews, and it clarifies something that might otherwise look like a contradiction: a writer known for meticulous historical accuracy who is also, by necessity, filling large gaps with invention.
The historical research I do is the architecture of my story — the foundation, the pillars and the roof of the story. That’s where the facts hang. In those shadowy, otherwise unknowable places between the foundation and roof and interspersed among pillars comes the fiction. This is particularly the case when dealing with historic women and the paucity of documentation that has been kept about their lives.
For Eunice Carter, the most important single source was a biography written by her grandson Stephen L. Carter, a Yale law professor. The family connection gave the book access to oral history and memory that no archive holds, but it also meant one category of evidence was almost entirely missing: Carter’s own words about what it felt like to be sidelined during the trial she had done more than anyone to make possible.
There’s no real record of how she felt about what went on in the trial. Even in the documentation that her grandson relied upon in the biography, I don’t remember seeing a wealth of letters talking about how it felt to be marginalized in the trial. And that’s really where the fiction comes in.
Polly Adler’s source material posed the opposite problem. Her autobiography, ‘A House Is Not a Home,’ was vivid and full of personality, but written while the mob was still operational, which meant it was also strategically incomplete. Benedict’s legal training made her comfortable with a witness who is telling a partial truth, and she treated the memoir the same way a litigator treats a deposition.
I am always thrilled when you’ve got an autobiography. In some ways there’s no better original source material, but my goodness, you do have to approach it with a grain of salt because that’s them telling their own story through the lens that they want other people to see it, right?
The court records from the Luciano prosecution were daunting in a different way. Most novelists approaching this material would need a lawyer to translate the documents into plain language. Benedict, who spent eleven years in commercial litigation before she left the law, could read them directly. Even so, returning to that world after years away carried its own tension.
It was daunting because I had left the law behind, but also really a thrill to kind of follow her in the historical court records to see how the case was built, to see the evidence that was necessary to bring these charges against Lucky Luciano. [paraphrased from audio]
At the sentence level, Benedict and Murray write each scene in first person and build outward from the body: what the character sees, smells, hears, and feels before expanding to the political and social pressures surrounding her. But ‘A Pair of Aces’ added a constraint the previous two books hadn’t required. In 1930s New York, there were almost no public spaces where a Black woman and a white woman could sit together for a private conversation, which meant the geography of the women’s relationship was itself a research problem.
When you’re trying to put ourselves as the woman into the scene, we write in first person to make it more immediate, to really bring the reader there. You have to ask yourself, ‘What would she be seeing? What would she be smelling? What would she be hearing? What would be going through her mind at that time?’
The personal thread
The lawyer she left behindBenedict practiced commercial litigation in New York for more than a decade before she became a novelist. The experience left her with something more than useful professional knowledge: it left her with a frame for what writing historical fiction actually is. In this account, her corporate clients and her historical subjects are versions of the same professional relationship, with one difference that matters to her.
You’re creating a narrative on behalf of a client when you’re a lawyer, and then you’re writing very often. Usually it’s legal briefs or courtroom arguments, things like that, advocating for that client. And that’s basically what I do now. I research. I’m on a fact-finding mission. I’m writing a narrative that advocates for my client. The client is a historic woman who, I’ll be honest, I care a lot more about than my corporate clients. These women don’t have the chance to have their stories told.
Reading Carter’s biography brought Benedict back to her own years in New York law firms, specifically to the professional calculus women in those environments were expected to perform without complaint. When NPR asked whether the pressures Carter faced in the 1930s had a present-day equivalent, she answered from her own experience before returning to the history.
My generation was told that we could have it all, and that meant that you could have a career, a successful career and children and a family and a home. But sometimes I feel like perhaps the men weren’t told that. And so the infrastructure isn’t there to support that.
What she wants us to sit with
An army, not two exceptionsBenedict’s most direct statement of the book’s argument strips the collaboration between Carter and Adler of any requirement that it be warm, ideologically aligned, or based on mutual admiration. The point, as she frames it, is specifically that none of those conditions are necessary.
At its core, A Pair of Aces tackles the notion that two people don’t have to be friends — they don’t even need to share beliefs or even like each other — to come together and make positive change in the world. Even though we live in divisive times, it seems as though many of us could rally around common goals and undertake some good.
The historical Luciano prosecution succeeded because dozens of sex workers testified at real professional and physical risk. Benedict wants that fact to register, not as background detail but as the moral center of the story. When an NPR interviewer noted that those women had been ‘fearless during a time when they should’ve been really fearful,’ Benedict extended the point beyond individual courage.
It’s also about the power of all these voices. An army of women coming together had the power to effectuate enormous change.