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.
