THE WOMAN CHASER

by Charles Willeford

reviewed by Mike Dennis

Los Angeles, 1960. The very zenith 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, fancies 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 his 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 Hudson 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 a decoy, while he barely hints at the real action taking place in 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 many of Willeford's protagonists, he can get there on his own.

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Copyright © Mike Dennis, 2010

After a long career as a professional musician, MIKE DENNIS moved from Key West to Las Vegas to become a professional poker player. His first novel, The Take, a noir tale of human desperation, will be published in 2010. His short story Pickup Across The River was published online at A Twist Of Noir, and another story, Block, is now available in the 2009 Wizards of Words Anthology.