The Hot Spot

Charles Williams's Noir Masterpiece

Thanks to everyone who's checked out A Lonesome Place for Dying, my small-town mystery set in Blaine, Washington. There was a very nice review in Mystery Scene:

“Nolan Chase (the pen name for acclaimed author Sam Wiebe) does a masterful job of introducing readers to Ethan Brand…A Lonesome Place for Dying captures the imagination right from the start with a complex tale that will only leave readers wanting more.”

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Both “noir” and “masterpiece” are loaded terms. Rather than litigate them for the billionth time, let’s agree that one test of a great book is whether you’d reread it immediately.

In the noir category, my reread list includes Red Harvest, Pop. 1280, Black Wings Has My Angel, In a Lonely Place, The Executioners, and several novels of James M Cain. I added Solomon’s Vinyard to my list last year, and this year, The Hot Spot by Charles Williams. (Original title: Hell Hath No Fury).

The Hot Spot is very Cain-like. Its plot involves a lust triangle between car salesman Harry Madox, his boss’s wife, Dolores Harshaw, and Gloria Harper, his young and innocent coworker. Madox is after Gloria, and Dolores is after him. In the midst of this, he stumbles upon a foolproof way to rob a bank.

A good plot is part of it, but it’s the writing that raises The Hot Spot. Harry’s voice is perfect. Hardboiled and cynical, as you’d expect:

This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?

But beneath the cynicism are notes of boredom, desperation, fatalism, yearning, even rage.

Oh, sure, I’d stay away from her, all right. Didn’t I always? What was my batting average so far in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp?...And the way she soaked up the booze, and as crazy as she was when she was drunk, she was about as safe to be mixed up with in a town like this as a rattlesnake. You didn’t know what she’d do.

Williams is a wonderful stylist. In nautical suspense novels such as The Sailcloth Shroud and Dead Calm, he wields seafaring lingo with a Melvillian command. That’s not present in Hot Spot, as there’s no place for it. Madox is a landlocked everyman, stranded in a small town and running out of time and patience.

…And that was when it really came home to me what I was about to do. I was going to rob a bank, committing the additional crime of arson in the process, and if I got caught I’d go to prison.

Well, I thought, go on selling second-hand jalopies for another forty years and maybe somebody’ll give you a testimonial and a forty-dollar watch.

Anthony Boucher reviewed Hell Hath No Fury/The Hot Spot when it was published in 1953. This was the first Gold Medal paperback reviewed in The New York Times. Williams, Bocuher  wrote, has

done an unusually good job of characterizing an almost-sympathetic heel as his first-person protagonist, and involved him in a most ingeniously plotted series of crimes, from a tricky bank robbery to an involuntary murder. The striking suspense technique (especially in a powerful scene of line-up identification by a blind witness) may remind you of Woolrich; the basic story, with its bitter blend of sex and criminality, may recall James M Cain. But Mr. Williams is individually himself in his sharp but unmannered prose style and in his refusal to indulge in sentimental compromises.

“Sharp but unmannered” would also describe the 1990 film version of The Hot Spot. Strange that Dennis Hopper directed such a disciplined neo-noir. Don Johnson is perfectly cast as a half-smart drifter who can’t keep it in his pants. Jennifer Connelly is great as unobtainable Gloria. And Virginia Madsen gives the best femme fatale performance of the era. (Yes that is a bold claim, considering the worship critics have for Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction, but Madsen never seems like she’s doing tough gal schtick or vamping—she simply embodies a desperate and amoral sexuality and follows that to its conclusion. It’s a great and honest performance in a very good film. Miles Davis plays on the soundtrack. Williams, who committed suicide in 1975, co-authored the screenplay.

Considering his first novel Hill Girl sold a million copies, Charles Williams’s work is frustratingly hard to track down and mostly out of print. Find yourself a copy of Hot Spot if you can, and enjoy.