What do you think?
Rate this book
A Hell of a Woman
A Hell of a Woman is Jim Thompson's version of an American Crime and Punishment. In a novel completely devoid of sentiment, 'Dolly' Dillon, a door-to-door salesman, goes about the appalling business of murder without conscience, without remorse and without any hope of redemption, because of a woman ...
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1954
88 people are currently reading
2927 people want to read
About the author
Jim Thompson
160 books1,639 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.
The writer R.V. Cassills has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson". Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."
Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.
James Myers Thompson was a United States writer of novels, short stories and screenplays, largely in the hardboiled style of crime fiction.
Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction.
Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. In these works, Thompson turned the derided pulp genre into literature and art, featuring unreliable narrators, odd structure, and surrealism.
The writer R.V. Cassills has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever "wrote a book within miles of Thompson". Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because "The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it."
Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoevsky and was nicknamed "Dimestore Dostoevsky" by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 250 reviews
December 5, 2011
Down on his luck salesman Frank Dillon meets a girl named Mona who's being abused and practically put on the street corner by her elderly aunt. When Dillon finds out the aunt has over a hundred thousand dollars hidden in the house, he plans to kill her and run off with Mona. Unfortunately, this book was written by Jim Thompson...
Nobody writes noir tales about the wheels coming off an already shaky plan like old Mr. Cheerful himself, Jim Thompson. A Hell of a Woman is a tale very nearly from the James M. Cain mold. Man meets woman, bumps off someone in order to be with her, then quickly descends into madness.
Frank Dillon coming unglued is a testament to Jim Thompson's skill as a writer. As things start coming unraveled, Frank's cracking is very believable. The way his personality splits into two parts was very well done and quite jarring toward the end.
That's about all I can say without giving too much away. This is definitely an upper tier Jim Thompson book. It's an easy four stars.
Nobody writes noir tales about the wheels coming off an already shaky plan like old Mr. Cheerful himself, Jim Thompson. A Hell of a Woman is a tale very nearly from the James M. Cain mold. Man meets woman, bumps off someone in order to be with her, then quickly descends into madness.
Frank Dillon coming unglued is a testament to Jim Thompson's skill as a writer. As things start coming unraveled, Frank's cracking is very believable. The way his personality splits into two parts was very well done and quite jarring toward the end.
That's about all I can say without giving too much away. This is definitely an upper tier Jim Thompson book. It's an easy four stars.
December 19, 2014
It’s nice to know that when everyday life starts to seem kind of depressing that you can escape into a good book. Unless that book is by Jim Thompson. Then you’re screwed.
Frank ‘Dolly’ Dillon will tell you that he’s a hard working joe saddled with a lazy wife, and he just can’t catch a break at his job as salesman/collection agent for a company that sells cheap goods on credit to poor people. While making his rounds Dolly meets Mona, a young woman who is being pimped out her by nasty old aunt, and Dolly finds himself sympathetic towards her even though he’s got his hands full with his own problems at work.
In some ways this is a typical noir story with a small time loser coming up with a criminal scheme to get the better life he thinks he deserves. However, since this is Jim Thompson the plot takes enough twists and turns to keep you guessing even if you have a pretty good idea of the outcome. What I like best about Thompson is the way could write lead characters who tell us one thing in their narration, but whose actions say a whole lot more about what they’re really like. Dolly is a nasty little piece of work, and he’s what makes this one really hum. At least until the very end. I didn’t much care for the last chapter which knocked this down a bit for me.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from Jim Thompson telling this kind of story, and that’s pretty damn good.
Frank ‘Dolly’ Dillon will tell you that he’s a hard working joe saddled with a lazy wife, and he just can’t catch a break at his job as salesman/collection agent for a company that sells cheap goods on credit to poor people. While making his rounds Dolly meets Mona, a young woman who is being pimped out her by nasty old aunt, and Dolly finds himself sympathetic towards her even though he’s got his hands full with his own problems at work.
In some ways this is a typical noir story with a small time loser coming up with a criminal scheme to get the better life he thinks he deserves. However, since this is Jim Thompson the plot takes enough twists and turns to keep you guessing even if you have a pretty good idea of the outcome. What I like best about Thompson is the way could write lead characters who tell us one thing in their narration, but whose actions say a whole lot more about what they’re really like. Dolly is a nasty little piece of work, and he’s what makes this one really hum. At least until the very end. I didn’t much care for the last chapter which knocked this down a bit for me.
It’s exactly what you’d expect from Jim Thompson telling this kind of story, and that’s pretty damn good.
January 25, 2020
Top notch pulp masterpiece. Jim Thompson has a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest of all the pulp writers. He wrote thirty novels in the late 1940's and the 1950's, many of which later became box office hits. But watching a movie based on one of Thompson's books is not the same as reading the original material. Although hundreds of writers have tried to ape his style, there was only one Jim Thompson. His tales are sordid. They are filled with psychopaths and grifters. His heroes are anti-heroes. They are not just criminals, but often mean, violent, sadistic men. Also, his books are filled with a sardonic sense of humor that often leaves the reader laughing out loud.
A Hell of A Woman is classic Jim Thompson. It is filled with the kind of characters and sardonic humor that Thompson is famous for. It is told in the first person and the reader is left to figure how much of what "Dolly" Dillon says is accurate and how much is his making excuses for his actions.
As with all of Thompson's books, it is not the plot which is ultimately fascinating, but his bizarre, despair-filled world beginning in the first chapter with the shocking incident of the old lady offering up her sweet niece in exchange for whatever trinkets a traveling salesman is willing to part with.
There are simply no redeeming characters in this book. Dillon is wife- beating, old lady-murdering, scum. Mona eagerly wants Dillon to kill her aunt so they can run off with the money. Joyce is sloppy and trampy and money-hungry. It's a bleak, miserable world that Dillon lives in and everyone is a welcher, a scoundrel, a cheat.
But, what Thompson does is take this miserable existence and makes it interesting. He tells it with Dillon's voice with Dillon bitching about the slow unattractive waitresses and, when asked why he doesn't try some other restaurant, Dillon says its all the same everywhere, nothing is any better anywhere. No one else writes like this.
Thompson didn't just focus on the anti-heroes, but he got inside their heads and the reader felt their misery and Thompson did this way before anyone else got wise to doing it. Indeed, it is the physicality of emotions that Thompson conveys so well.
It is, indeed, a pulp noir masterpiece, but it clearly will not appeal to everyone given its focus on twisted people.
A Hell of A Woman is classic Jim Thompson. It is filled with the kind of characters and sardonic humor that Thompson is famous for. It is told in the first person and the reader is left to figure how much of what "Dolly" Dillon says is accurate and how much is his making excuses for his actions.
As with all of Thompson's books, it is not the plot which is ultimately fascinating, but his bizarre, despair-filled world beginning in the first chapter with the shocking incident of the old lady offering up her sweet niece in exchange for whatever trinkets a traveling salesman is willing to part with.
There are simply no redeeming characters in this book. Dillon is wife- beating, old lady-murdering, scum. Mona eagerly wants Dillon to kill her aunt so they can run off with the money. Joyce is sloppy and trampy and money-hungry. It's a bleak, miserable world that Dillon lives in and everyone is a welcher, a scoundrel, a cheat.
But, what Thompson does is take this miserable existence and makes it interesting. He tells it with Dillon's voice with Dillon bitching about the slow unattractive waitresses and, when asked why he doesn't try some other restaurant, Dillon says its all the same everywhere, nothing is any better anywhere. No one else writes like this.
Thompson didn't just focus on the anti-heroes, but he got inside their heads and the reader felt their misery and Thompson did this way before anyone else got wise to doing it. Indeed, it is the physicality of emotions that Thompson conveys so well.
It is, indeed, a pulp noir masterpiece, but it clearly will not appeal to everyone given its focus on twisted people.
Read
December 20, 2022
America, the land of opportunity.
There's reason aplenty to be optimistic if you set out on a professional career with a good education or have connections where you can land yourself a decent job or can cash in on a unique talent or most especially... if you come from money.
But what if you lack education, connections, a special talent and don't have the dough to buy a decent suit? Welcome to the world of A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson's 1954 hardboiled crime novel chock full of enough psychic mud to smear over each of its 196 pages.
The tale's protagonist and narrator, Frank "Dolly" Dillon, a thirty-year-old door-to-door salesman for Pay-E-Zee Stores, epitomizes the working stiff who never caught a break in his miserable life. Abused as a kid, kicked out of school, forced to peddle crap merchandise door-to-door so he doesn't starve to death, Dolly is one beaten down chump.
Regarding home life, hell, if you can call it that, by Dolly's account he's had to put up with a sorry string of dirty, good-for-nothing, lazy tramps. After taking the usual needling and pounding from Staples, his soft-spoken, oily voice, son of a bitch manager, Dolly drags himself back to his four-room dump and Joyce (wife number three or four, Dolly's lost count) each evening, where he relates:
"The kitchen sink was filled with dirty dishes: there were soiled sticky pans all over the stove. She'd just got through eating, it looked like, and of course she'd left the butter and everything else sitting out. So now the roaches were having themselves a meal. Those roaches really had a happy home with us. They got a hell of a lot more to eat than I did."
So it goes, day after lousy day, but then it happens on a rainy Thursday, his final call in the door-to-door routine after he persuades an old bag to let him inside - Dolly Dillon meets Mona. Ah, Mona, "a baby girl and sweet child and I wouldn't hurt her for the world." After a few tender exchanges, Dolly can see this swell blonde honey is just the type of dame he could really, truly love.
A Hell of a Woman is a thriller. Exactly what you don't need, dear reader, is a reviewer spoiling the hell out of your reading pleasure by giving away too much. Thus, I'll take a shuffle to overriding themes:
MUCKRAKING JIM
The publisher blurb states, "In A Hell of a Woman, Jim Thompson offers another arresting portrait of a deviant personality." However, if we scratch slightly deeper we'll detect Jim Thompson provides a scathing depiction of the underside of American capitalism, the ways in which the entire system is rigged in favor of owners and companies and against people starting out with nothing, rigged so much it twists and deforms human nature.
Deviant personality, you say? Jim Thompson would have you consider if the entire system can be judged deviant, spawning the type of men and women spilling across the pages of this novel.
Jim Thompson's first two published books were non-crime, literary novels focusing on oppressive capitalism and its destructive effects on families and the environment. If those early novels proved commercially successful, we might wonder if Jim would continue as a 1950s-style muckraker in the tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens from the Progressive Era instead of switching to hardboiled crime fiction as a way to pay the bills.
RELIABLE NARRATOR?
How much of what Frank Dillon tells us is true, how much is exaggeration or complete horsecrap? I think we can trust the general outline of events but when Frank repeatedly throws in such phrases as "I'd swear to it on a stack of Bibles," and "I kid you not, dear reader," and unswervingly characterizes himself as the good, decent guy deserving all he takes, even when he takes by violence, we can be fairly certain we're dealing with...hum, Frank, really...a narrator that's less than reliable.
CHANGE OF RHYTHM
One curious insertion into A Hell of a Woman: such chapter titles as: THROUGH THICK AND THIN: THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN'S FIGHT AGAINST HIGH ODDS AND LOW WOMAN (author's caps)...by Knarf Nollid.
It's as if Frank "Dolly" Dillon uses Horatio Alger rags to riches storytelling as a way of recasting his life and shielding himself from the truth of his own ongoing failures.
SILENCE
This is 1950s America, not only the land of opportunity but the land of logorrhea where everybody is a know-it-all and blabs nonstop. And this sewer of chatter is fueled by continual consumption of tobacco and liquor. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. The dreaded enemy: silence. Frank Dillon falls under the social spell, thinking the more he talks, both to others and to himself, the more he'll figure out the needed solutions to all his problems.
MONEY
The ultimate means and the ultimate end of life in 1950s USA - in a word: money. "If only I had stacks and stacks of greenbacks," so the thinking goes, then my life would be an unending paradise. And what if individuals can smell all that dough but lack legitimate means to make it their own? Are we to be shocked when so, so many men and women turn to shady deals, robbery, murder, manipulation, exploitation and the like as a way to realizing their dreams of living in luxury on easy street?
REALITY LURKING BEHIND APPEARANCES
Frank Dillon thinks he's so smart. But like so many others before him in American society, he find out the hard way that people and things are frequently not what they seem to be. As Jim Thompson knew from his own life, capitalism sound good in theory but it has a tendency to pit husband against wife, associate against associate, industry against community, all in an ongoing battle to rake in as much of the big bucks as possible.
MADNESS
A Hell of a Woman is a hell of a novel. As events propel themselves forward, where will it all end? Escape, happiness, madness, suicide? Oh, Dolly, you really did it this time!
American crime novelist Jim Thompson, 1906-1977
December 13, 2023
This one ties with Big Island L.A. by Boston Teran as the best crime-thriller I’ve read all year.
This is an absolute masterpiece.
It’s tightly written with a diabolical “can’t-lose” set up for a born loser.
It’s a fingernail gnawing thriller that while not necessarily graphic, its narrator’s skewed retelling of acts of violence against women gets a mite hairy.
Like being the only other customer at the bar besides an obnoxious drunk a few stools down who’s decided that you’d be the perfect guy for him to pitch his problems to. Agree with whatever nutjob jargon spills from his lips. Help him sort out the puzzle that frames his predicament. How he got to where he is.
He figures it’s all about “the tramps”.
And you figure it’s time to drink up and go home.
Highest Possible Recommendation
This is an absolute masterpiece.
It’s tightly written with a diabolical “can’t-lose” set up for a born loser.
It’s a fingernail gnawing thriller that while not necessarily graphic, its narrator’s skewed retelling of acts of violence against women gets a mite hairy.
Like being the only other customer at the bar besides an obnoxious drunk a few stools down who’s decided that you’d be the perfect guy for him to pitch his problems to. Agree with whatever nutjob jargon spills from his lips. Help him sort out the puzzle that frames his predicament. How he got to where he is.
He figures it’s all about “the tramps”.
And you figure it’s time to drink up and go home.
Highest Possible Recommendation
October 1, 2025
"There's just some guys that get the breaks, and some that don't. And me, I guess you know the kind I am."
One of the best from one of the all time pulp/noir greats, Jim Thompson, the "Dimestore Dostoevsky." Published in 1954. He also wrote The Killer Inside Me, among many others. Both that book and this one are studies of psychopaths, of real cultural interest in the post war years. Frank “Dolly” Dillon works door-to-door for a crummy outfit, Pay-E-Zee Stores, and he can’t make ends meet. He can’t stand Joyce, his wife. At one house an old woman offers his niece, Mona, in exchange for some silverware. He falls for Mona, and through her discovers the miserly woman has a lot of money squirreled away in the basement.
That’s the basic framework, though we also know Dolly, who tells his own story, but you know, Dolly ain’t too smart, and he makes a few mistakes along the way. And we get a glimpse into a man descending into madness.
A couple other issues: The title is kind of a pulpy expectation that falling in love with some dames will lead to your ruin, ala the historical critiques of (the female) Eve as responsible for many of the ills of the world. In this case, all the women are “hell” for Dolly, but remember who is telling the story, and we see that no one is more responsible for Dolly’s “hard luck” than Dolly himself. Underneath Dolly's attraction to women is his assessment, that feels just a wee bit like misogyny, that most of them he was ever with he calls "tramps." Let's just say, consider the source; we could take a poll of all the women he has ever met about his character. But no one, including the women, are saints in Thompson's world.
There’s another thing this book (and maybe most noir) is about, that is best captured in Glenn Russell’s fine review: Capitalism, which sets people against each other, everyone scrambling to make ends meet. Never enough. Crappy jobs. There’s lots of thinking from Dolly like this:
“Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?
So you come to this town, and you see this ad: 'Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker.' And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like the right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manure. Hating it. Hating yourself.”
Everyone wants out--Dolly, his boss, Joyce, Mona--everyone. No one is admirable, and this may be less because of “psychopathology” than just the drive to economic survival that 98% face. .But this is a terrific book, with great dialogue.
One of the best from one of the all time pulp/noir greats, Jim Thompson, the "Dimestore Dostoevsky." Published in 1954. He also wrote The Killer Inside Me, among many others. Both that book and this one are studies of psychopaths, of real cultural interest in the post war years. Frank “Dolly” Dillon works door-to-door for a crummy outfit, Pay-E-Zee Stores, and he can’t make ends meet. He can’t stand Joyce, his wife. At one house an old woman offers his niece, Mona, in exchange for some silverware. He falls for Mona, and through her discovers the miserly woman has a lot of money squirreled away in the basement.
That’s the basic framework, though we also know Dolly, who tells his own story, but you know, Dolly ain’t too smart, and he makes a few mistakes along the way. And we get a glimpse into a man descending into madness.
A couple other issues: The title is kind of a pulpy expectation that falling in love with some dames will lead to your ruin, ala the historical critiques of (the female) Eve as responsible for many of the ills of the world. In this case, all the women are “hell” for Dolly, but remember who is telling the story, and we see that no one is more responsible for Dolly’s “hard luck” than Dolly himself. Underneath Dolly's attraction to women is his assessment, that feels just a wee bit like misogyny, that most of them he was ever with he calls "tramps." Let's just say, consider the source; we could take a poll of all the women he has ever met about his character. But no one, including the women, are saints in Thompson's world.
There’s another thing this book (and maybe most noir) is about, that is best captured in Glenn Russell’s fine review: Capitalism, which sets people against each other, everyone scrambling to make ends meet. Never enough. Crappy jobs. There’s lots of thinking from Dolly like this:
“Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?
So you come to this town, and you see this ad: 'Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker.' And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like the right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manure. Hating it. Hating yourself.”
Everyone wants out--Dolly, his boss, Joyce, Mona--everyone. No one is admirable, and this may be less because of “psychopathology” than just the drive to economic survival that 98% face. .But this is a terrific book, with great dialogue.
July 16, 2015
"L'enfer, c'est les autres"
- Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
There is only so much Jim Thompson one should read in a summer. Even an Arizona summer starts to seem dark under the weight of too much Thompson. Finishing this book makes me want to punch someone. Hard. Look, this isn't his best pitch. I get it. He's done better stuff. Things that will hang with you longer. Stories that were a bit more dynamic. But still, reading this Dimestore Dostoevsky is going to bend you no matter how this book measures up to Thompson's other stuff. This novel reads like a linear, painful nervous breakdown. The women hurt and the money doesn't help.
Just remember folks. Life isn't fair. Women are hard. Money is damn slippery. It all becomes that much more complicated when you are beat down and a bit crazy to boot. Some people never get a lucky roll. Some people never catch an easy day. This book is for the poor, the misunderstood, the downtrodden. It is a book to remind those poor sons-of-bitches that not only could their lot be worse, but yeah baby, someday it most certainly WILL be worse.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit
There is only so much Jim Thompson one should read in a summer. Even an Arizona summer starts to seem dark under the weight of too much Thompson. Finishing this book makes me want to punch someone. Hard. Look, this isn't his best pitch. I get it. He's done better stuff. Things that will hang with you longer. Stories that were a bit more dynamic. But still, reading this Dimestore Dostoevsky is going to bend you no matter how this book measures up to Thompson's other stuff. This novel reads like a linear, painful nervous breakdown. The women hurt and the money doesn't help.
Just remember folks. Life isn't fair. Women are hard. Money is damn slippery. It all becomes that much more complicated when you are beat down and a bit crazy to boot. Some people never get a lucky roll. Some people never catch an easy day. This book is for the poor, the misunderstood, the downtrodden. It is a book to remind those poor sons-of-bitches that not only could their lot be worse, but yeah baby, someday it most certainly WILL be worse.
September 26, 2015
This is the first Jim Thompson book I've read (don't know why it took so long), but it was definitely an experience. The story starts out with a fairly simple and familiar noir plot, focusing on a door-to door salesman who gets smitten for a meek, but strangely attractive young woman, and hatches a plot to steal some dough from her aunt, who's a down-right deplorable old witch that pimps out her niece to everyone around town. But eventually, it evolves into this totally bizarre and unpredictable character-driven ride. And WHOA! WHAT AN ENDING!
I'm excited to get into his other novels! Any author that has the balls to write a line like the one below, is definitely one to get excited about:
"...even the puke was beautiful like everything else."
I'm excited to get into his other novels! Any author that has the balls to write a line like the one below, is definitely one to get excited about:
"...even the puke was beautiful like everything else."
December 3, 2025
Upward and onward.
The true story of a man’s fight against high odds and low women
Frank ‘Dolly’ Dillon has a chip on his shoulder. He believes everybody is out to get him and that every woman is a goddamned tramp. Starting with his wife Joyce. We spend the whole of this short novel inside his sick head and, while Thompson does a truly astounding job of putting us there, the whole experience is distasteful, dirty and depressing. Deadly so, if I were to continue with my alliteration. No matter how well written this story is, my sense of rejection was so strong that I couldn’t be bothered to care about the events or about anything Frank is trying to tell us. It goes on and on along these lines:
Why was it that every time I thought I was getting a break it went sour on me?
The whole goddamned world [is] sitting up at night to figure out how to give me a hard time.
This was no fault of mine because, although I seldom complain, you have doubtless discovered that I am one hard luck son-of-a-bitch, and people keep pouring it on me until I don’t know my tail from my t-bone.
It was an accident, of course. Hell, you know me, dear reader, and you are aware that I wouldn’t hurt a goddamned fly if I could get out of it.
To call Frank an unreliable narrator is an insult to the whole concept of intelligent planning. Our man is too stupid, too delusional and too self-centered to merit any circumstantial reprieve from this reader. Exactly what the author aimed at, most probably, but I can only echo his boss at the Pay-E-Zee Stores:
“Oh, my dear boy, I’m almost embarrassed for you.”
The title suggest some trouble with low women, the same claim made by Frank in his fictional memoir. A more appropriate title for me would be ‘A Hell of a Man’ because both his wife Joyce and his nubile temptress Mona serve as punchbags for Frank’s general resentment against people and Fate.
“And here’s one for you,” I said.
I brought it up from the belt, the sweetest left hook you ever saw in your life. She spun around on her heels and flopped backwards, right into the tub full of dirty bath water. And, Jesus, did it make a mess our of her.
I intentionally said nothing about the plot here. It’s a straightforward crime heist that goes haywire because the criminal mind over estimated its own cleverness. The real point of the novel is the internal monologue of Frank, and the last chapters are the big reward for the patient reader with the strong stomach. As Frank sanity unravels, we get split chapters from the perspective of his schizoid paranoia, until he completely loses contact with reality in a jumbled last paragraph.
The book is probably one of the best examples of Jim Thompson’s uncompromisingly bleak portrait of the criminal mind, but it was too well written for my own sanity.
The true story of a man’s fight against high odds and low women
Frank ‘Dolly’ Dillon has a chip on his shoulder. He believes everybody is out to get him and that every woman is a goddamned tramp. Starting with his wife Joyce. We spend the whole of this short novel inside his sick head and, while Thompson does a truly astounding job of putting us there, the whole experience is distasteful, dirty and depressing. Deadly so, if I were to continue with my alliteration. No matter how well written this story is, my sense of rejection was so strong that I couldn’t be bothered to care about the events or about anything Frank is trying to tell us. It goes on and on along these lines:
Why was it that every time I thought I was getting a break it went sour on me?
The whole goddamned world [is] sitting up at night to figure out how to give me a hard time.
This was no fault of mine because, although I seldom complain, you have doubtless discovered that I am one hard luck son-of-a-bitch, and people keep pouring it on me until I don’t know my tail from my t-bone.
It was an accident, of course. Hell, you know me, dear reader, and you are aware that I wouldn’t hurt a goddamned fly if I could get out of it.
To call Frank an unreliable narrator is an insult to the whole concept of intelligent planning. Our man is too stupid, too delusional and too self-centered to merit any circumstantial reprieve from this reader. Exactly what the author aimed at, most probably, but I can only echo his boss at the Pay-E-Zee Stores:
“Oh, my dear boy, I’m almost embarrassed for you.”
The title suggest some trouble with low women, the same claim made by Frank in his fictional memoir. A more appropriate title for me would be ‘A Hell of a Man’ because both his wife Joyce and his nubile temptress Mona serve as punchbags for Frank’s general resentment against people and Fate.
“And here’s one for you,” I said.
I brought it up from the belt, the sweetest left hook you ever saw in your life. She spun around on her heels and flopped backwards, right into the tub full of dirty bath water. And, Jesus, did it make a mess our of her.
I intentionally said nothing about the plot here. It’s a straightforward crime heist that goes haywire because the criminal mind over estimated its own cleverness. The real point of the novel is the internal monologue of Frank, and the last chapters are the big reward for the patient reader with the strong stomach. As Frank sanity unravels, we get split chapters from the perspective of his schizoid paranoia, until he completely loses contact with reality in a jumbled last paragraph.
The book is probably one of the best examples of Jim Thompson’s uncompromisingly bleak portrait of the criminal mind, but it was too well written for my own sanity.
December 19, 2011
these 3 star ratings reflect a lack of consistency as thompson was a pulpdrunk piece-of-shit meet-a-deadline writer who could reach great heights but then'd mar the work with some sloppyass booshit. just as simenon, in response to a question asking if he had a 'great' book in him, said that all his slim, singularly focused books were mere tiles in a great mosaic, i kinda think thompson's oeuvre adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts. they usually follow a pretty traditional route until they flip off into the realm of total batshittiness... which we like. the unreliable narrators, linguistic experimentation, clashes in tone, the slowburn and eventual total dissolution of a character's entire fucking identity, grotesques who'd fit right in in ol' sherwood's winesburg... we like. we like a lot.
February 2, 2024
11/2016
Good plot, good suspense. Displays Thompson's mastery of twisted perspective shifts. Kind of just sinks into a hellhole at the end, like a fair amount of his fiction does.
Good plot, good suspense. Displays Thompson's mastery of twisted perspective shifts. Kind of just sinks into a hellhole at the end, like a fair amount of his fiction does.
September 14, 2011
This is vintage Jim Thompson--a story filled with irredeemable characters and lots of sex, violence and alcohol.
Frank Dillon is an outside salesman/collector for a company that preys on low-income people. He drinks too hard and plays fast and loose with his company accounts. A parade of unsatisfactory women have passed through his life, all of them memorable only for the faults they displayed. And then Frank meets the beautiful Mona, a sexy young woman desperately in need of being rescued from the aunt who abuses her by trading Mona's favors rather than paying her bills.
Frank is immediately entranced and thinks that Mona might finally be the woman he's waited for. He's even more excited to learn that he might not only have Mona but a huge pile of money as well. And all he has to do to get both the girl and the cash is kill a couple of people who desperately deserve killing. But poor Frank doesn't know that he's wandered into Jim Thompson country and that things are probably not going to turn out well.
Frank Dillon is an outside salesman/collector for a company that preys on low-income people. He drinks too hard and plays fast and loose with his company accounts. A parade of unsatisfactory women have passed through his life, all of them memorable only for the faults they displayed. And then Frank meets the beautiful Mona, a sexy young woman desperately in need of being rescued from the aunt who abuses her by trading Mona's favors rather than paying her bills.
Frank is immediately entranced and thinks that Mona might finally be the woman he's waited for. He's even more excited to learn that he might not only have Mona but a huge pile of money as well. And all he has to do to get both the girl and the cash is kill a couple of people who desperately deserve killing. But poor Frank doesn't know that he's wandered into Jim Thompson country and that things are probably not going to turn out well.
June 3, 2024
Dammit, I knew it! I just reviewed the whole Jim Thompson omnibus when deep down I knew that one review of A Hell of a Woman would say just about all I need to say about Jim Thompson. From the first page you know this is Thompson at his best: the girl glimpsed through a window in a lightning storm; the hard-luck shyster salesman-cum-debt-collector out in the rain lusting after her; and the slang-talking first-person POV he would make famous in The Killer Inside Me, only here put to work in the service of a story, to my mind, deeper than Killer:
This is Thompson writing from the heart, or as close to it as his sleazy choice of genre will allow. Better still, that genre takes him places he maybe couldn't get otherwise, through some sordid, creepy acts of violence and scenes of dialogue reminiscent of Crime and Punishment in their potential double-meanings, which play on the paranoiac narrator's nerves to the point of near-insanity. The self-pity is just about pitch-perfect too, as is the humble-pie act, which in Killer or Pop 1280 seemed slightly pat, but here is so close to the line between self-aware and deluded that the narrator himself seems unsure whether to believe in it or not. And this tightrope-walk may be the essence of Thompson's genius. There's a scene around the middle of Woman in which the narrator, Frank 'Dolly' Dillon, is suddenly confronted with a 'Where did you get that money?' by a character we know has been playing it coy for several pages, and even though we see it coming it's chilling, because what we can't know is just how Dolly will react, given that he's been lulling himself in a dream-world by deliberately taking things at face value. A repeated line throughout this: 'That's how I wanted it to be, so that's how it was.'
Of course because it's Thomspon — and Thompson at his most freeform — it's never gonna be perfect. Funny thing, in Killer he had the narrator bitch about contemporary fiction writers, about their propensity to dispense with grammar and get all experimental at the climaxes to their novels, yet this is exactly what he does here (and to a lesser degree in Killer itself). Also a slightly hokey story-within-the-story device (in which the narrator writes and rewrites an increasingly delusional autobiography) is out of place here, yet works psychologically and thanks to the rapid-fire style manages not to offend. In contrast, the slangy conversational style is brilliant — as good as just about anything I've read by Thompson or anyone else for that matter — some of it so hilarious that I laughed out loud and shook my head in admiration for minutes after reading the choicest parts. So too the sex scenes: these truly are genius, for suggesting so much with so little, for staying well out of range of the censors while managing to be both thrilling and gruesome in their import, and giving ample motivation for ol' Dolly to tie the noose ever-tighter round his neck in his struggle to grasp his ideal image of Woman. In the end, I think that’s the crux of this book: it's about the delusions inspired by sex and romantic love — it's Thompson's Vertigo — and, you ask me, it's the explication of a subtext that runs through all his work, and motivates most if not all of the dirty little crimes of his protagonists. Added to that, this is pulp, shamelessly so, and all the better for it. No pretensions to literary in-jokes as in Killer (in which the narrator, a deep thinker and bibliophile in the guise of a pea-brained yokel, seems almost like a scathing self-portrait of Thompson the literary master trapped in the body of a pulp writer); nah, here it's just a street-talking over-reaching everyman on the road to ruin in an unnamed hellhole in middle America, and despite his cramming an impressive array of stylistic tricks into the delivery the mask never drops, we never catch Thompson drawing attention to himself.
Make no mistake, this is sordid. It's brave. It's funny. And even though the end will have you scratching your head it gets the point across, and at least suggests a satisfying hall-of-mirrors effect which, while a touch too 'experimental', is well within and somehow even emblematic of the pulp tradition to which it aspires.
Jeez, it's ridiculous, but gloriously, liberatingly so, especially when you remind yourself this is 1954. And remember, this is the guy that wrote Kubrick's Paths of Glory; he's a seriously good writer in the old-fashioned sense. But something's come over him. You want fever-dream? This is pretty close to it.
You pull a thread out of this and it'd fall apart. And there's loose threads here, plenty. But you wanna hear a howl from the throat of the 20th-century Proletarian pushed to breaking point by babes and booze and survival-of-the-fittest consumerism, you could do a lot worse. Could be, for all its cartoonish surreal absurdity, that A Hell of a Woman is some kind of Great American Novel. The best kind: camouflaged. Set to blow.
All of a sudden something seemed to snap inside of my head. It was just like I wasn't anymore, like I'd just shriveled up and disappeared. And in my place there was nothing but a deep hole, a deep black hole, with a light shining down from the top.
This is Thompson writing from the heart, or as close to it as his sleazy choice of genre will allow. Better still, that genre takes him places he maybe couldn't get otherwise, through some sordid, creepy acts of violence and scenes of dialogue reminiscent of Crime and Punishment in their potential double-meanings, which play on the paranoiac narrator's nerves to the point of near-insanity. The self-pity is just about pitch-perfect too, as is the humble-pie act, which in Killer or Pop 1280 seemed slightly pat, but here is so close to the line between self-aware and deluded that the narrator himself seems unsure whether to believe in it or not. And this tightrope-walk may be the essence of Thompson's genius. There's a scene around the middle of Woman in which the narrator, Frank 'Dolly' Dillon, is suddenly confronted with a 'Where did you get that money?' by a character we know has been playing it coy for several pages, and even though we see it coming it's chilling, because what we can't know is just how Dolly will react, given that he's been lulling himself in a dream-world by deliberately taking things at face value. A repeated line throughout this: 'That's how I wanted it to be, so that's how it was.'
Of course because it's Thomspon — and Thompson at his most freeform — it's never gonna be perfect. Funny thing, in Killer he had the narrator bitch about contemporary fiction writers, about their propensity to dispense with grammar and get all experimental at the climaxes to their novels, yet this is exactly what he does here (and to a lesser degree in Killer itself). Also a slightly hokey story-within-the-story device (in which the narrator writes and rewrites an increasingly delusional autobiography) is out of place here, yet works psychologically and thanks to the rapid-fire style manages not to offend. In contrast, the slangy conversational style is brilliant — as good as just about anything I've read by Thompson or anyone else for that matter — some of it so hilarious that I laughed out loud and shook my head in admiration for minutes after reading the choicest parts. So too the sex scenes: these truly are genius, for suggesting so much with so little, for staying well out of range of the censors while managing to be both thrilling and gruesome in their import, and giving ample motivation for ol' Dolly to tie the noose ever-tighter round his neck in his struggle to grasp his ideal image of Woman. In the end, I think that’s the crux of this book: it's about the delusions inspired by sex and romantic love — it's Thompson's Vertigo — and, you ask me, it's the explication of a subtext that runs through all his work, and motivates most if not all of the dirty little crimes of his protagonists. Added to that, this is pulp, shamelessly so, and all the better for it. No pretensions to literary in-jokes as in Killer (in which the narrator, a deep thinker and bibliophile in the guise of a pea-brained yokel, seems almost like a scathing self-portrait of Thompson the literary master trapped in the body of a pulp writer); nah, here it's just a street-talking over-reaching everyman on the road to ruin in an unnamed hellhole in middle America, and despite his cramming an impressive array of stylistic tricks into the delivery the mask never drops, we never catch Thompson drawing attention to himself.
Make no mistake, this is sordid. It's brave. It's funny. And even though the end will have you scratching your head it gets the point across, and at least suggests a satisfying hall-of-mirrors effect which, while a touch too 'experimental', is well within and somehow even emblematic of the pulp tradition to which it aspires.
we smoked the hay. we started sniffing the snow... guzzle the juice and puff the mary and sniff the c... we did that and then we went on the h. we started riding the main line... we were blind, too paralysed to feel, too numb. but everything began to get beautiful.
Jeez, it's ridiculous, but gloriously, liberatingly so, especially when you remind yourself this is 1954. And remember, this is the guy that wrote Kubrick's Paths of Glory; he's a seriously good writer in the old-fashioned sense. But something's come over him. You want fever-dream? This is pretty close to it.
Lonesome, he said. The man said I looked lonesome. And I had all kinds of company. All kinds. All dead. All jumping up in front of me wherever I looked, all laughing and crying and singing in my mind.
You pull a thread out of this and it'd fall apart. And there's loose threads here, plenty. But you wanna hear a howl from the throat of the 20th-century Proletarian pushed to breaking point by babes and booze and survival-of-the-fittest consumerism, you could do a lot worse. Could be, for all its cartoonish surreal absurdity, that A Hell of a Woman is some kind of Great American Novel. The best kind: camouflaged. Set to blow.
April 22, 2009
I remember buying this when Black Lizard first came out and the cover was laminated with an amazing cover by Nancy McGregor showing an insane Marilyn Monroe leering right at you in a darkened office. That cover pulled $3.95 out of my pocket in record time. Since it was my last $3.95 I had to go downtown and donate my blood so I could have more money for books.
I read "A Hell Of A Woman" lying on a gurney pumping my plasma for book dough, and the transfusion didn't make my blood run cold, this awesome novel did. A credit shark named "Dolly" kills an old woman who holds her stuttering imbecile of a niece captive so he can play house with her. The climax to the book is unlike anything ever written and has to be read to be believed.
I read "A Hell Of A Woman" lying on a gurney pumping my plasma for book dough, and the transfusion didn't make my blood run cold, this awesome novel did. A credit shark named "Dolly" kills an old woman who holds her stuttering imbecile of a niece captive so he can play house with her. The climax to the book is unlike anything ever written and has to be read to be believed.
August 31, 2018
A masterclass in noir, A Hell of a Woman delves into crime, paranoia, passion, and madness. It also has some of my favorite noir tropes, such as a rude, no-nonsense protagonist and a metric ton of witty smart-mouthing.
November 16, 2025
“There’s just some guys that get the breaks and some that don’t. And me, I guess you know the kind I am.”
This was my first venture into the world of a Jim Thompson crime novel, and after finishing, I do have some mixed feelings about the overall experience. In some ways, while this novel has some definite staples of the genre, this one is very atypical of a traditional crime novel.
The basis of the plot focuses on one Frank Dillon, a down-and-out door-to-door salesman. He hates his dead-end job and he seems to have no direction. While making the rounds at his job, he happens to stumble on a beautiful young lady (Mona) and the opportunity to get a big score ($100,000). However, we find that there are many variables that come into conflict in Frank’s world: he has a very rocky marriage, his relationship with his boss is very fractured, and there is one mean old lady standing in the way of him and the loot.
However, there is a big “twist” (or maybe it is a variation of twists) toward the latter portions, that throw this narrative on its proverbial head, and maybe lead us to question many things that have happened. Which version of events is the most accurate one? What is true and what is exaggerated?
One thing I do appreciate is the experimentation utilized by Thompson to give the novel a more psychological edge to it. This comes in the form of Frank Dillon’s fractured state of mind and descent as well as the aforementioned surprise that comes to us in the novel’s second half. Because of this, the novel really becomes as much of a character study and analysis as it is a suspense and crime novel.
However, all this being said, I really was put off by our said protagonist (antagonist?). This guy is just really unsympathetic and irredeemable, pretty much a loser. I honestly just didn’t want to be in this guy’s head for the duration of 200 plus pages. (But then again, maybe that’s a credit to the author for drawing this reaction).
Alongside this, the novel is bleak, raw, depressing, and violent. While I did want to see the eventual outcome, I was just happy to have finally finished the final page.
Who knows, though? Maybe I will try another Jim Thompson novel in the future.
This was my first venture into the world of a Jim Thompson crime novel, and after finishing, I do have some mixed feelings about the overall experience. In some ways, while this novel has some definite staples of the genre, this one is very atypical of a traditional crime novel.
The basis of the plot focuses on one Frank Dillon, a down-and-out door-to-door salesman. He hates his dead-end job and he seems to have no direction. While making the rounds at his job, he happens to stumble on a beautiful young lady (Mona) and the opportunity to get a big score ($100,000). However, we find that there are many variables that come into conflict in Frank’s world: he has a very rocky marriage, his relationship with his boss is very fractured, and there is one mean old lady standing in the way of him and the loot.
However, there is a big “twist” (or maybe it is a variation of twists) toward the latter portions, that throw this narrative on its proverbial head, and maybe lead us to question many things that have happened. Which version of events is the most accurate one? What is true and what is exaggerated?
One thing I do appreciate is the experimentation utilized by Thompson to give the novel a more psychological edge to it. This comes in the form of Frank Dillon’s fractured state of mind and descent as well as the aforementioned surprise that comes to us in the novel’s second half. Because of this, the novel really becomes as much of a character study and analysis as it is a suspense and crime novel.
However, all this being said, I really was put off by our said protagonist (antagonist?). This guy is just really unsympathetic and irredeemable, pretty much a loser. I honestly just didn’t want to be in this guy’s head for the duration of 200 plus pages. (But then again, maybe that’s a credit to the author for drawing this reaction).
Alongside this, the novel is bleak, raw, depressing, and violent. While I did want to see the eventual outcome, I was just happy to have finally finished the final page.
Who knows, though? Maybe I will try another Jim Thompson novel in the future.
November 17, 2025
I had been a bit disappointed with my first Jim Thompson novel - Pop. 1280, but A Hell of a Woman was very satisfying. It was written in 1954. Frank "Dolly" Dillon is a man who feels that he's been shortchanged in every way in life. He's never been paid properly for his hard work. He's never been with a woman who's a decent person. His wife is slovenly, unappreciative and mean. His job is awful and his boss doesn't treat him properly. Suddenly, he comes across a jackpot waiting to be claimed. At one of his door-to-door sales stops, he meets an old woman who is offering her niece up as sexual payment for his goods. Instead, he befriends the niece, who eventually tells him about a gigantic horde of cash her Aunt has. Dolly can't believe he's finally hit on good luck, and quickly goes about planning how to get at that money with the help of the niece.
One of Thompson's themes here is how we an be very effective in telling ourselves great big lies that justify bad behavior when we want something badly. Dolly has a great plan to get what the world's been conspiring all his life to keep him from. But is that truly why he's dirt poor, or is it simply that he's not as smart as he thinks he is ?
Thompson is wonderfully skilled at entertaining writing and exaggerated, circus- or cartoon-like characters and action. Like many good books, A Hell of a Woman is an unlikely story, but a fun ride.
My favorite scenes were those with Dolly and his hag wife Joyce. The mean and sarcastic banter between them had me laughing out loud:
"You can hop back into your nightgown. I've seen you before, and I still say there's better ones on sidewalks."
"Oh-yeah?" Her eyes flashed. "You rotten bastard! When I think of all the good guys I passed up to marry you, I -"
"Passed them up?" I said. "You mean lined 'em up, don't you?"
One of Thompson's themes here is how we an be very effective in telling ourselves great big lies that justify bad behavior when we want something badly. Dolly has a great plan to get what the world's been conspiring all his life to keep him from. But is that truly why he's dirt poor, or is it simply that he's not as smart as he thinks he is ?
Thompson is wonderfully skilled at entertaining writing and exaggerated, circus- or cartoon-like characters and action. Like many good books, A Hell of a Woman is an unlikely story, but a fun ride.
My favorite scenes were those with Dolly and his hag wife Joyce. The mean and sarcastic banter between them had me laughing out loud:
"You can hop back into your nightgown. I've seen you before, and I still say there's better ones on sidewalks."
"Oh-yeah?" Her eyes flashed. "You rotten bastard! When I think of all the good guys I passed up to marry you, I -"
"Passed them up?" I said. "You mean lined 'em up, don't you?"
June 26, 2014
Comment from 2008: In recent months, I seem to have stumbled into the project of reading in publication order the collected works the noirboiled greats. Thus, since beginning to read noir in an orderly way, I've read the first two novels of Charles Williams, the first three of Raymond Chandler, the first six or seven by Cornell Woolrich, etc. At some point, I'll start with the first Jim Thompson book, and begin working my way through his canon in an orderly fashion, too, and when I reach (and re-read) my Thompson favorites, I will post comments about them. For now, I will just stick them in my Noir Hall of Fame.
Comment upon second reading: Reading this novel for a second time was an interesting experience. When I first read A Hell of a Woman more than 20 years ago, it floored me. I was completely unprepared for genre fiction from this era that was so unapologetically risky and experimental. I have reflexively put the novel in my Noir Top Ten ever since. Rereading it, I was expecting a masterpiece, but this change in expectation left me acutely aware of the novel's shortcomings. To put it bluntly, the book is a mess. But this is where I am supposed to clarify that A Hell of a Woman is a groundbreaking mess that helped to pave the way for noir fiction to be taken seriously as art, right? I don't know. I think I may need to read it again.
First reading: circa 1992
Second reading: 20 March 2014
Comment upon second reading: Reading this novel for a second time was an interesting experience. When I first read A Hell of a Woman more than 20 years ago, it floored me. I was completely unprepared for genre fiction from this era that was so unapologetically risky and experimental. I have reflexively put the novel in my Noir Top Ten ever since. Rereading it, I was expecting a masterpiece, but this change in expectation left me acutely aware of the novel's shortcomings. To put it bluntly, the book is a mess. But this is where I am supposed to clarify that A Hell of a Woman is a groundbreaking mess that helped to pave the way for noir fiction to be taken seriously as art, right? I don't know. I think I may need to read it again.
First reading: circa 1992
Second reading: 20 March 2014
April 21, 2022
A Hell of a Woman is a hell of a book (sorry); it should be mentioned in the same breath as the Killer Inside Me and The Grifters. It features Thompson’s most unlikeable narrator, a door to door salesman/lowlife/grifter who is unrepentant in his misogyny and generally misanthropic worldview. And, of course, he’s a psychopath. To say exactly how much of a psychopath would be a spoiler but suffice to say, ol’ Dolly Dillon is a murderous piece of work. And a piece of shit. He is charmless, but in the best possible way. Unlike Killer’s Lou Ford, you will not find yourself rooting for Dillon to pull through. A Hell of a Woman is quite possibly Thompson’s meanest, grimiest novel, with an ending that packs as much force as any he ever wrote. This book deserves to be in the conversation when you talk about Thompson’s (and crime fiction’s) best.
February 5, 2022
Another slick and enjoyable Jim Thompson caper that explodes into fragmented shards of Burroughs-like lunacy in the last couple of chapters. Wow. Did not see that coming. I think one of my favorite things about this guy is that he was clearly capable of writing salable by-the-book crime fiction (not to mention co-writing classic Kubrick films), but apparently felt compelled to include extremely perverse ideas and themes that a writer of more cautious temperament never would've. Having gone to Catholic school for thirteen years, it's a quality I can't help appreciating.
Bonus Pop Quiz:
You find yourself in a vaguely seedy, noir-like setting in 1950s America. It's a bar to be specific, a bar with a very noir-like vibe to it. It's a shadowy place. Since it's imperative that you know the time but you don't have a cell phone (you're supposed to meet Walter with the money at 8- by then his wife will be dead), cell phones not having been invented yet, you turn to the man sitting next to you. You do not know his name, so therefore you address him as:
a) Buster
b) Bud
c) Buddy
d) Pardon, stranger...
e) Sport
f) Sweet child
g) Jack
h) Mac
August 3, 2013
A door to door salesman stumbles across a young woman being held captive against her will and used as a sex slave by an unassuming yet villainous older woman. Offered the services of the sex slave as payment for goods he quickly turns down the offer (one of his very few redeemable moments) and sets out to free Mona. Of course, the cool thousand buck score sweetens the deal.
Frank Dillion (aka Dolly) isn’t a nice man. He’s abusive, a scammer; a grifter of sorts with little going for him apart from the amazing ability to attract nice looking dames who can’t wait to marry him. Having had upwards of five wives already, it’s clear for the reader to discern a pattern in Dolly’s actions and warped sense of thought.
A HELL OF A WOMEN is pure noir. Dolly has little to no redeeming qualities, violence is easy and without emotion, and the ending isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The plot itself was entertaining but was soured by a confusing last couple of pages where Dolly’s mind is put in question in almost no uncertain terms.
Not as good as some of Jim Thompson’s other works but still serviceable. 3 stars.
Frank Dillion (aka Dolly) isn’t a nice man. He’s abusive, a scammer; a grifter of sorts with little going for him apart from the amazing ability to attract nice looking dames who can’t wait to marry him. Having had upwards of five wives already, it’s clear for the reader to discern a pattern in Dolly’s actions and warped sense of thought.
A HELL OF A WOMEN is pure noir. Dolly has little to no redeeming qualities, violence is easy and without emotion, and the ending isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. The plot itself was entertaining but was soured by a confusing last couple of pages where Dolly’s mind is put in question in almost no uncertain terms.
Not as good as some of Jim Thompson’s other works but still serviceable. 3 stars.
September 14, 2019
Although, Dolly, the first person narrator is not as psychotic as many of Jim Thompson's narrators, he is a whack-a-doodle and Thompson hangs him out to dry. And this is really Thompson's forte, taking on the voice of a character he wants to skewer and doing them in with their own voice. Thompson's ability to throw his narrative voice is vastly underrated and it is on full display in this novel. One thing I loved is the way he showed Dolly scrambling, making mistakes and then trying to cover them up, all the while he has a dialog going in his head thinking he is smarter than everyone else.
The ending! Wow, I had forgotten how he had layered the alternate readings into one flowing narrative. That is five-star all by itself!
The ending! Wow, I had forgotten how he had layered the alternate readings into one flowing narrative. That is five-star all by itself!
February 6, 2015
Sure fire formula for a great book....completely messed up, unreliable narrator who degenerates into madness. I despise people who don't accept responsibility for their actions, but somehow I forgive it in a Jim Thompson character. Frank Dillon is such a heel that I had to laugh at him. Crazy ass ending as usual....sort of a split-screen drug experience thing..... I've never read anything like it, except Thompson.
May 19, 2016
"There's just some guys that get the breaks, and some that don't. And me, I guess you know the kind I am." Not my favourite Jim Thompson novel, but a great read nonetheless, with a complex narrator and a plot that twists and turns in a dozen different ways.
December 31, 2023
An extra start for the ending which is weird and horrific and unique.
February 25, 2020
Novela negra de 144 páginas de uno de los autores con un lenguaje más directo y crudo. Con el típico ambiente sórdido de este género, que radiografía la decadente sociedad estadounidense de los años 50; Thompson no escatima en el sufrimiento de las clases más desfavorecidas, atrapados en su ignorancia e intentando sobrevivir día tras día.
Aunque sé que debo hacer un esfuerzo para ponerme en el lugar y en los valores de aquella época, no puedo evitar mi desagrado en el tratamiento hacia las mujeres en esta novela. En ocasiones despectiva, en otras agresivas. De ahí mi baja puntuación. Sin embargo y sin duda, una novela negra contundente y realista en toda su esencia. Recomendada para los amantes de la novela negra clásica.
Aunque sé que debo hacer un esfuerzo para ponerme en el lugar y en los valores de aquella época, no puedo evitar mi desagrado en el tratamiento hacia las mujeres en esta novela. En ocasiones despectiva, en otras agresivas. De ahí mi baja puntuación. Sin embargo y sin duda, una novela negra contundente y realista en toda su esencia. Recomendada para los amantes de la novela negra clásica.
January 26, 2025
Well, this time at least I managed to finish the book. For the most part, it was not very convincing or even very good. The protagonist was absurd. But it was certainly redeemed to some measure by the ending – both the twist and especially the style. I see that Jim Thompson is going to be for me, at least, a very mixed bag.
(First attempt: DNF. Nah…. I’m not buyin’ it….)
(First attempt: DNF. Nah…. I’m not buyin’ it….)
October 5, 2025
Gonna quit reading for a little while. It hasn’t done me much good
August 19, 2023
This was fun to re-read. I had forgotten how odd it can get at times. Another author starts retelling the story a part way through. In the end the protagonist experiences some kind of mental break or maybe he is correct and not insane like in the movie Vertigo. I've read weirder, trust me, but in this genre experimentation like that is hard to find.
Frank Dillon is the worst kind of chump who wants to blame his problems on everyone else but miraculously he keeps getting into more all by his lonesome. Pretty soon he's got himself snug with all the other muckrakers and next thing you know its murder this and hide that. The tried-and-true tale that takes the firm stance that killing someone is easy but getting away with it is murder.
Definitely worth reading, I think Grifters is a better starting place for Thompson overall.
-old review-
I really dug the style of this one with all of the twists (one of which is so outrageous I loved it immediately) and clever bits of writing. For once the main character doesn't think himself exceptionally clever and Dolly Dillon is exactly as stupid and unlikeable as I could ask for in a pulp leading man. Staples is written superbly, always giving Dillon the business at work and later fits snugly into the narrative. Fantastic light reading.
Frank Dillon is the worst kind of chump who wants to blame his problems on everyone else but miraculously he keeps getting into more all by his lonesome. Pretty soon he's got himself snug with all the other muckrakers and next thing you know its murder this and hide that. The tried-and-true tale that takes the firm stance that killing someone is easy but getting away with it is murder.
Definitely worth reading, I think Grifters is a better starting place for Thompson overall.
-old review-
I really dug the style of this one with all of the twists (one of which is so outrageous I loved it immediately) and clever bits of writing. For once the main character doesn't think himself exceptionally clever and Dolly Dillon is exactly as stupid and unlikeable as I could ask for in a pulp leading man. Staples is written superbly, always giving Dillon the business at work and later fits snugly into the narrative. Fantastic light reading.
December 17, 2017
Pulp fiction at its finest.
I first knew about Jim Thompson's work from seeing some of their film adaptations, things like 'The Getaway' and 'The Grifters' (though I haven't read those two novels). Once I saw 'After Dark, My Sweet', I kept it in the back of my mind to get around to reading its source material - and I eventually did read that one.
~which eventually led me to reading 'The Killer Inside Me', and now 'A Hell of a Woman'. These two novels, surprisingly, are actually rather different in tone; 'AHOAW' is less psychotic and more of a standard, if intricate, crime novel (with a somewhat-psychotic sidebar). It's a great, quick read - with enough passages of genuine brilliance, along with some welcome mordant humor.
I'll keep it in mind to get around to more of his work. The crime world is not really among my favorite worlds of fiction - but when it's handled with distinctive style (as it is here), I'm in.
I first knew about Jim Thompson's work from seeing some of their film adaptations, things like 'The Getaway' and 'The Grifters' (though I haven't read those two novels). Once I saw 'After Dark, My Sweet', I kept it in the back of my mind to get around to reading its source material - and I eventually did read that one.
~which eventually led me to reading 'The Killer Inside Me', and now 'A Hell of a Woman'. These two novels, surprisingly, are actually rather different in tone; 'AHOAW' is less psychotic and more of a standard, if intricate, crime novel (with a somewhat-psychotic sidebar). It's a great, quick read - with enough passages of genuine brilliance, along with some welcome mordant humor.
I'll keep it in mind to get around to more of his work. The crime world is not really among my favorite worlds of fiction - but when it's handled with distinctive style (as it is here), I'm in.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 250 reviews