The Sportsmen's Club is a two-story, skid-row structure of connected buildings housing a bar, a poker room, and a Chinese restaurant. The Sportsmen's Hotel reaches across the upper floor.
Business depends on a subculture of alcoholics, hustlers, shills, gamblers, and those in need of a cheap room. Among them is Alexander Kyness who seems to have chosen the club as a place in which to live a life of obscurity. His friends call him "Kindness."
In this odd little world of greed, deception, and predation, Kindness maintains an attitude of detachment. But his aversion to entanglement may meet its match in "Little Doll" Grey, the bar manager whose formidable wit keeps order over the misfits and malcontents in this place where something interesting always happens.