A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden recounts the life of World War II veteran Frankie Machine, a card-dealer in an illicit poker game being run not far from the tenement in which he lives. Machine is a morphine junkie just back to Chicago's Near Northwest Side after detoxing in the federal prison for narcotics addicts in Louisville, Kentucky, being exposed again to all the pressures, anxieties, and temptations that put him there in the first place.