A Hell of a Woman

Jim Thompson & Larry Brown have at least one thing in common...happy endings and classic good guys are almost impossible to find in their books. In the hit or miss world of Jim Thompson novels this one certainly hits...hard! Hell Of A Woman is an ugly story that features characters with few, if any, redeeming qualities. This has surpassed The Killer Inside as my favorite Thompson novel. The suspense and surprise twists that books like The Alcoholics lack can be found here in spades. Thompson seems a little too at home in this setting of paranoia, sex & crime. Its one shortcoming is typical of Thompson stories...it does occasionally come unwravelled, though not often enough to matter. I honestly didn't know how this one was going to turn out. You have the general idea of what's going down, but you can never be sure who's going to fall and who's going to get away with it. Thompson is a master of this hard-boiled genre and this is surely a highlight in an up and down career. Curl up around an ashtray and enjoy!

Frank Dillon employee of Pay-E-Zee Stores is working outside sales in the rain when a flash of lightening illuminates a woman in a window "I'd gotten out of my car and was running for the porch when I saw her. She was peering through the curtains of the door, and a flash of lightning lit up the dark glass for an instant, framing her face like a picture." and thus begins one of Thompson's wildest novels. Frank, his nickname is Dolly which was Jim Thompson's nickname when he worked as a bellboy, is $300 in the hole to the company he works for from skimming the books he's always hoping for a big break to pay it back a break that never comes. Dillon in "A Hell of a Woman" sees his whole life as having been squandered on one worthless woman after another, so much so that all women become a blur. "Tramps, that's all I got. Five godd*mned tramps in a row ... or maybe it was six or seven, but it doesn't matter. It was like they were the same person." But just as they are crowding into one person, Frank is turning into two halfway through the book he creates a new persona, and by the end he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth. We run into comedic and insane subtitles: "Through Thick and Thin: The true story of a man's fight against high odds and low women...by Knarf Nollid" and later "Upward and Onward by Derf Senoj." Towards the end the narration splits with one version told by Frank and the other by unreliable narrators Knarf or Derf and let's just say putting this part under the Cheshire Cat rubric of "We're all mad here" would be a mild way of labeling this. In this, Thompson's best novel, he has made a killer duet or killer in stereo and it is one crazy ride.

This is not your average noir crime book. There are no detectives or mobsters just a small crime on the edges of society and how it can drive a man to madness. Jim Thompson is a dark master who plunges the depths of human darkness. Hell of a Woman shows the lengths to which one man will twist the truth in order to rationalize his own evil actions. If you love twisted crime books look this one up.

"A Hell of a Woman" is somewhat similar to another Jim Thompson classic, "The Killer Inside Me" in that it is a story of murder and mayhem told in the first person through the eyes of the killer. Like "Killer," Frank Dillon, the protagonist here, has deep rooted issues involving women. In fact, the woman of the title could be any of several he describes, including his hell-on-wheels wife. The plot is right out of classic noir, as Dillon hatches an elaborate double murder scheme in order to make a huge score, win the girl he loves and escape his small town life and cruddy job as a salesman working for an abusive boss. Things go awry, as they usually do in these tales, and Dillon has to resort to further violence in a vain attempt to keep his plans from unravelling.
The frank sexuality, gritty violence an unrepentant nature of the central character were probably quite a shock to readers when this book was first published in the early 1950s. It will, however, seem fairly tame to modern readers. A quick read at 185 pages, it is the novel equivilent of film noir from the era of its publication, and can be enjoyed the same way those films are today.

This story might not be for everyone. It is very dark and disturbing. But, it will keep a reader's interest, I think.

It is the story of a door to door salesman named Dillon, and how he gets involved with a troubled young woman with an evil aunt. The aunt has a BIG stash of money. One thing leads to another and several people, including the aunt and Dillon's wife, end up dead. Dillon's boss ends up arrested for a crime he did not commit, but there is poetic justice there. Dillon runs off with the young woman, but things turn out badly for her.

The writing is very good - a reader can really feel like he/she is in the midst of the story. Very gritty, noire and all that. Some of the slang is a bit outdated and hard to follow - the book was written in the 1950's - but the context makes it understandable I thought. Dillon's mental state is "questionable" as the story progresses.

In the original edition of the book, the last part was written as two columns side by side. One was the story as Dillon was seeing it, and the other was the story as actually happening. In this edition, they are mixed as alternating lines in regular type and italics in one column which makes things a little hard to follow. BUT, be patient and read slowly. The ending is rather shocking and surprising.

Not recommended for the faint of heart as they used to say.

Dolly 'Frank' Dillon is one of life's losers. He has limited education, but a gift of gab. He has traveled the country doing door to door sales. He made money along the way, but blew it on liquor and women. Now he is trapped in a dead-end job, working for Pay-E-Zee stores at one of stores in Texas, making sales and collecting on delinquent accounts. He has a marriage he regrets, lives in a bad neighborhood, drives an older car (he stills owes money on), and has no future prospects.

Then he stumbles into an opportunity. Ok, he may have to kill a few people, but it should be a big score. But things all go wrong. He has always been clumsy in his planning when doing anything shady, and a lot of things go awry - the story of his life.

The story drifts at points between the real story, and the fantasy he lives in his mind. There are some interesting outcomes.

Readers will find the origins of this novel in the author's autobiography, "Roughneck." The author did work in that type job for a short period of time.

What seems so boring - Thompson's typical small-town rednecks - would indeed taking the author's prolific output into account, almost constitute a noirish form of pathology. Precisely? This is one of Jim Thompson's best novels, the last 3 or 4 pages a magnificent homicidal/ suicidal stream of consciousness outpouring of brutal love turned to self-loathing. Or not. But for those pages the author deserves to appear in any and every history of American literature.

Jim Thompson is fast becoming my favorite writer.
His books are unpretentious and move quickly with
that "hit the oxygen dialogue" of his. And it's funny
how I picture his characters living in the same
rundown rat traps Bukowski/Chinaski always occupied
proving to me at least that ol' Buk (buke) was a true
Pulpy at heart and that his poetry is truly "poetry
noir." But back to Thompson. What I love about his
leads is they're undercover crazy, sure some more
than others, but then maybe the ones we think are
passably sane are just better at faking it. Hands
down my favorite is Population 1280. That guy
reminds me of Orton's Mister Sloane.

One of the best of the hard boiled detective writers. It's a hell of a good read.

Ending blew me away