flimflammer

Why shouldn't the main arena at Madison Square Garden honor the great flimflammer P.T. Barnum?

A backwater, America looked darn like the mind of the average flimflammer - blemished wild places, a hissing brier patch where dark fruit grows, serpents underfoot."

A notorious flimflammer among traveling salesmen, he presents himself as a professor of musicology, organizing brass bands wherever he goes, but he doesn't have a clue about playing, much less reading, music.

Apprenticing himself to Johnnie Gold, a Chinese con man and fight trainer, McCoy finds his future: he will be both a flimflammer and a boxer, a faker and the genuine article.

The musical, consisting of only black actors and revolved around the traditional minstrel stereotypes, delved into the story of a con artist, Jimmy Flimflammer, and his failed attempts to rob an elderly man of his pension.

The few people who did not smell a flimflammer jockeyed to become his new best buddy, which meant that he never had to pay his bill - not as long as he kept sending folks to a local car dealership to choose the color of their new Mercury Cougars.

Strauss doesn't say so outright, but he plainly favors the last theory, since he's built his novel around a boxer he calls Virgil Selby, a flimflammer, or con man, who steals the name of a dead pugilist and uses it to pave his own way to fame.