THE WOMAN CHASER by Charles Willeford (1960)

Review by Mike Dennis, 2010

Los Angeles, 1960.  The pinnacle of the California dream.  Cars are king, and the king of the used cars is Richard Hudson, recent transplant from San Francisco.  That’s the backdrop for The Woman Chaser, a fine noir novel by Charles Willeford.

Hudson, a Type A personality if ever there was one, regards himself as one of the greatest used car salesmen of all time, and he’s not too far wrong.  He really knows all sides of the business, as he opens up a Los Angeles lot for Honest Hal Parker, the leading used car dealer in San Francisco.  No angle escapes Hudson’s sharp eye, no customer gets anything less than his highest-pressure pitch, and no car goes unsold.

He makes plenty of money, lives well, tips generously, and you would think he’s hit his lick.  But no.  There’s an itch that he can’t quite scratch.  He longs to be in the movie business.  The position of writer-producer-director will do just fine, thank you.

His stepfather (who is only seven years older) is a blacklisted Hollywood director, and one night Richard approaches him with an idea for a script.  It can’t miss, Richard says, turning on his salesman’s charm.  And before you can say “Lights, camera, action!”, the two of them are trying to get his script turned into a movie.

The novel is divided not into chapters, but sections separated by movie script jargon (dissolve, cut to, fadeout, etc), and it’s somewhat unsettling, but that’s why Willeford is so good.  He can use a pedestrian story as an overlay, or even as a decoy, while he barely hints at the swampy mess that is the human condition festering underneath.  You just know that, despite Hudson’s having made it in the used car business, he’s doomed as a human being.

The title implies that Hudson spends most of his time hitting on women, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Women pop up here and there in the novel, but in fact, he’s wracked with guilt over his own lack of real masculine desire.  It bothers him that he’s too preoccupied with business to get bogged down with women.  And that includes his mother, an oddball ex-ballerina who is a book all by herself.

In reality, Hudson doesn’t need a woman to lead him down the road to perdition.  Like so many of Willeford’s protagonists, he can get there on his own.

Of course, the answer is nothing. There’s not a single thing you can do about it, unless you’re Stephen King or somebody. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you you can’t judge a book by its cover. That made for a good Bo Diddley song, but you might remind them that forcing a person to make snap judgments with very little else to go on is precisely the purpose of covers.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to have a hip editor, as Megan Abbott did for her debut 2005 novel, Die A Little, then a lot of the stress melts away and you get a cover like this.

This outstanding cover, designed and photographed by Richie Fahey, is, as I said in a review of this novel, almost worth the price of the book by itself. The use of hand-coloring over a black & white photo, with all the tones just right, make this a book which will grab the attention of even the most casual browser.

Fahey also painted, but did not design, the cover of Andrew Vachss’ The Getaway Man (2003), arguably Vachss’ best novel.

These two covers, along with the ones that follow, are among my favorites. Here’s Cruel Poetry, a great 2007 Florida noir novel by Vicki Hendricks. I just love all the elements of this one.

John Ridley’s terrific noir novel, Love Is A Racket (1998), sported an attention-getting cover. I love the little heart in the gun barrel, as well as the scary font.

No need to introduce Hard Case Crime. We all know the great work they do. Here are a couple of their stunning efforts.

Black Lizard/Vintage Crime put out some pretty damned good covers back during the late 80s and early 90s. Jim Thompson’s classic nightmare novel from 1952, The Killer Inside Me, leaps to the front of my mind whenever I think about them.

I don’t know who they got to pose for this photograph, but one look into his eyes and I can promise you I never want to meet up with him.

Another Jim Thompson book, 1953′s Recoil, has a particularly creepy cover. I think it’s the glasses the guy is wearing.  

The cover to Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up (1967) is a great example of how a photograph can start off looking romantic and then end up looking dangerous.

David Goodis’ Black Friday (1954) is minimalist cover design at its most effective.

Last, and certainly not least, is Dorothy B Hughes underrated 1946 novel, Ride The Pink Horse.

By the way, these are all great novels. If you haven’t read them, I urge you to do so. You won’t be sorry.

Anybody out there got any fave covers they’d like to share? These are just a few of mine, but my list is long.

I’m a crime fiction writer, living in Las Vegas, who’s been toiling in the vineyards for years until L&L Dreamspell Publishing picked up one of my novels, The Take.  It’s a fast-paced little noir effort that will be out sometime in 2010.   Thanks go to Morgan St James for her energetic efforts in helping me with the preliminary editing.  You can read an excerpt of it here on this site. 

I’ve always admired the best of the crime novelists.  I’m talking about hardboiled fiction guys like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and Raymond Chandler, among others, who between them, managed to kick the door open a crack or two, all the while operating under the stigma of  “pulp” writer.  They made it ”respectable” to write crime fiction, elitist public opinion notwithstanding.  Later, you had Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy, and so many others who shoved the door all the way open so guys like me could just walk right through it.  Speaking only for myself, I owe these men a serious debt of gratitude.