"Standing up, she wasn't as tall as the Harper girl and had none of her long-legged, easy Grace, but she was stacked smooth and 12 to the dozen against the contoured retaining - wall of her clothes."
P.22

"I turned and looked at her. Moonlight from the window had moved up the bed and now it fell diagonally across her from the waist up to the big spread - out breast which rocked a little as she shook the ice in her glass. I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full - Bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she'd probably be blowzy."
P.37

"She's a psycho, I thought. She's completely off her trolley. One minute she's a blackmailer as cagey as Khrushchev, and the next she wants to gambol half - naked on a pile of sawdust like a babe on an absinthe Jag. It made me cold to think about it. This was the oversexed and rudderless Maniac who could throw me back to the cops anytime."
P.113

Um hm, another sexist book from the 50s. The use of "girl" instead of woman, the relentless descriptions of female bodies, the condescending attitude towards women...sigh. But I almost stopped reading it altogether when it got to the homophobic part about the lesbian. I had invested this much time already, and this author does know how to crank up the tension of the story, so I kept going. This Williams has you on the edge of your seat at the end. His protagonist has gotten caught up in a whirlpool that is sucking him down. It all started when he couldn't keep his penis zipped up in his pants.

You lost one ( )

Surprisingly good thriller if you like hardboiled fiction. I admit, I was attracted by the cover-- I looked so tawdry, so trashy, I couldn't resist. I love the hardboiled detective genre, so I thought I'd give this a go. It's a short read, made longer by new-fatherhood, but it was one I looked forward to each night no matter how tired.

This is the first book I've read by Williams, but I have more and will read more. In this volume, anyway, he has as a main character an antihero not unlike a lot of similar books of this genre, except that in this case he's a genuine criminal and kind of a jerk. That Williams can make him likable, and indeed almost redeemed in a believable way by the end is a surprising thing and one reason for my high rating. That, and the language. The language! Some of the descriptions, the turns of phrase, are just delightful! This is a 50s era book, so the sex and swearing happen off-page: you imagine they occur, you just can't be privy to a first-hand experience. That was fine by me, though it takes some getting used to with respect to the dialog. But Williams has these classic little phrases (sorry, I don't have it with me to quote) that had me highlighting for reference later, which is not something I usually do unless I'm teaching a novel. Hmmm...

The book has a nice little ending, and although it becomes pretty clear how it's going to wind down, that clarity comes late. Seeing it unfold is fun, and there are enough head-fakes to keep it interesting all while being (relatively) believable. Not great literature, but great fun. ( )

The Hot Spot by Charles Williams is such fantastically good pulp that, from the very first bite of it to the final morsel, it is as good as it gets. What descriptions can I use to describe it? Awesome. Wonderful. Far out. Top notch. Every single sentence in this book drips with pulpy goodness. It is a rich treat so filled with the good stuff that you just drown in it. To put it in a nutshell, if you like the good pulp fiction from the fifties, you can't do any better than Charles Williams' The Hot Spot.

It is plot-wise a story about Harry Madox who has drifted from one job to another and ran into Harshaw somewhere in Oklahoma or something who offered him a job as a car salesman in a small town. It's a job so Madox bites, but boy. maybe you shouldn't just grab the first thing that comes along no matter how hard up you are. Nothing wrong with the job. It's a straight arrow sales job, or at least as straight as car sales can be. But, there's this twenty-one year old blonde in the loan office who Madox can't take his eyes off. And, worse for him perhaps, is Harshaw's wife, she's ripe, perhaps over-ripe and lucious and she wants Madox whenever Harshaw isn't around. There's also one bank in this small one-horse town and, when there's a fire in a cafe, everyone in town including the bank tellers peel out to help put the fire out, leaving one doddering old fellow in the bank with all the drawers still open. Anyone who wants to can just waltz in and take what they want. All they have to do is get past one old dude and a blind guy who sells pencils on the corner. Of course. Madox can't resist. "Why not." he explains. "In this world you took what you wanted; you didn't stand around and what for someone to bring it to you." What he didn't count one was that bosses' wife is onto his game and the country sheriff isn't any dumb fool.

What follows is a hardboiled masterpiece that just drips with the good stuff. It doesn't matter how many napkins you bring with you, this stuff is going to drip all over you, just spilling out of the pages.
The story opens with Madox starting to tell Harshaw to get somebody else to run his errands when he sees the girl (Gloria Harper) come in and changes his mind. "[S]omehow she made you think of a long- stemmed yellow rose." Her hair was the color of honey or of straw, with sun-burned streaks in it. Somehow, Williams, in telling this tale, without even trying to, creates an awkward tension between them, but its a tension that burns hot and passionate. Even after they part that day, he "couldn't get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into [his] mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sunburned hair."

But that's nothing compared to the hot molten metal that is Harshaw's young wife. "Somehow she made you think of an overloaded peach tree." She was "lucious" and "overripe." And, when Madox goes to see her, "She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass." But, "the teenage dress didn't do anything for her overripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks." When he leaves her place, he can't figure out how to "push the sultry weights of Dolores Harshaw off [his] mind. She was dangerous in a town like this." And, there was "a steel-trap deadliness" about her. "She was as tough as a shark, and she got what she wanted."

Charles Williams can write like few others can. He tells more in a sentence or two then other writers can tell in whole chapters or even in whole books. He takes the reader on a journey with him, on a red- hot burning journey to hell and back. These characters are alive. There are no cardboard cutouts here.
( )

I much prefer the original title and cover of the original edition...Visceral tone...lots of carnality...

I've finished this book when in Lisbon the temperature has risen to 43ºC... The book's "temperature" and the weather temperature are one of a kind...

This story of a guy caught in a web of two-timing, bribery, deceit and murder is what makes Noir what it is today.

The book was published in 1953. I was quite surprised with more than a few suggested scenes of sex.

"Hell hat no Fury" gives us two alluring female characters to embody the polar opposites of saintly and femme fatale roles.

It’s very easy to look through Maddox’s eyes and see two alternate lives stretching out ahead. He thinks he is master of his own destiny,ie, he believes he can control events, but this is Noir, and there is no escape from the web of fate...

" ( )

http://booklog.molehill.org/2009/03/24/the-hot-spot-charles-williams ( )