FFB: A Touch of Death -- Charles Williams

You want femmes fatales?  Charles Williams has you covered.  Not all his books feature fatal women, but quite a few of them do.  One of those is A Touch of Death, which I believe is the first book of his that I read.  I read the second Gold Medal printing, and I was so taken with it that I went out and got all the other Williams titles I could find.  And eventually I found several other printings of A Touch of Death, along with the British paperback, which was titled Mix Yourself a Redhead.  

I've never understood why Williams never developed the reputation that some of the other GM authors did.  He did a lot of things really well, and yet his books never got the acclaim they deserved.  He had quite a range, too. He could write comedy as well as tense noir tales, and his sea novels were excellent.  I said a few words about some of these things in this blog post for Mystery*File.

But back to the fatal femme of this post.   Madelon Butler is her name, and when she encounters down-on-his-luck former pro athlete named Lee Scarborough, little does he know what he's in for.  It's a complicated caper, having to do with a dead husband, big bucks, and several other people who want in on the action.  Scarborough always thinks he's one step ahead of Butler, who appears to him to be just a drunk and, after all, a woman.  He narrates the story in first person, so we discover along with him [SPOILER ALERT] how wrong he is.[END SPOILER ALERT]


We're a bit into James M. Cain territory here, and while I don't want to give away too much of the ending, I'll just say that Scarborough's final words are quite chilling.  

This is the novel that Charles Ardai choose to reprint in the Hard Case Crime series, so it's a lot easier to find than it used to be, which is a nice thing for anybody who's interested in femmes fatales.

Overlooked Movies: Dead Calm

Charles Williams, one of my favorite Gold Medal writers, occasionally published in hardcover.  He also knew a thing or two about sailing, and Dead Calm is a hardback suspense novel that lets him show off that knowledge.  It's a good story, and Orson Welles planned to film it.  Like others of his projects, this one never got done.  It would've been interesting to see his take on it, but instead we get a version by Philip Noyce.  It's a dandy little movie, but it's not a lot like the book, aside from the basics of the situation.

What are the basics?  A man and his wife (Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman) are sailing far from the peaceful shore when they come across a boat that's sinking.  There's one man (Billy Zane) aboard, and he comes over to their boat to tell them that everyone on his boat has died of food poisoning.  Neill goes over to check, and Zane, being a bit of a nutter who's killed everyone else on the boat, sails away with Nicole.

After that, it's just one thing after another as Nicole tries to escape, Neill tries to keep the sinking boat he's on afloat, and Zane tries to keep Nicole from going back to rescue her husband.  There's an annoying dog (HUGE SPOILER ALERT: People sensitive to animal deaths should avoid this movie. END OF HUGE SPOILER ALERT) who causes problems, too.  There's a good bit of suspense, a good bit of stupidity on the parts of the characters, and (HUGE SPOILER ALERT) a villain who's not easy to kill (END OF HUGE SPOILER ALERT).  Kidman, Neill, and Zane are all very good, and there's some great ocean scenery.  If you haven't seen it, give it a try.