Trick Baby

Trick Baby is a novel by the American writer Iceberg Slim, published in 1967 by Holloway House. It is written as the biography of a confidence man, and its author had worked the streets himself before he became a writer for a largely Black readership.

The book is built on a pair of partners. Blue Howard is the older man, a hustler who takes in the boy and teaches him the trade. White Folks is his pupil, the light-skinned son of a Black prostitute and a white father, and his appearance is the capital the two of them live on: in a city where nobody expects a white man to be running a game on them, his face opens doors that Blue's never would. The cons they work depend on the assumptions people make about race, and the two men use those assumptions deliberately, with Blue usually playing the part of the vulnerable Black man while his partner plays the man doing the exploiting.

The story was adapted for the screen in 1972, and the novel remains one of the best-known accounts of street-level hustling to come out of the American paperback market of its time.