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The Quaking Widow
Her fortune was the price on her head
Burt Keating had been trying to make the acquaintance of his pretty red-headed neighbor, but he wasn’t getting very far - until the day she escaped from a strange roadside encounter. For when it turned out that murder had resulted from the affair, she threw herself hysterically into Burt’s arms, pleading for his help.
It seems she had inherited a sealed box, whose contents were entirely unknown. Certain parties wanted that box badly. They had offered her a fortune - or sudden death.
Burt knew then that chivalry can go too far, for there was no longer any way out once he’d tangled with the quaking widow.
174 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1956
2 people are currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Robert Colby
72 books2 followersAmerican novelist and crime thriller paperback genre and short story writer. Colby wrote novels for a number of the paperback houses including Gold Medal, which published his most praised novel, The Captain Must Die. He was also a prolific contributor of short stories to Alfred Hitchcock and Mike Shayne's mystery magazines. Many of these have gathered into two published collections of his stories. Colby also wrote a non-fiction true crime book, The California Crime Book, and co-authored a 'Nick Carter' book, The Death's Head Conspiracy, with Gary Brandner. Author Ed Gorman believed "Robert Colby was one of the best of the paperback original writers".
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 13, 2024
Originally published as Ace D-195 in 1956, Colby’s The Quaking Widow is a top-notch piece of paperback original fiction. Yes, on some ways it is a newer version of The Maltese Falcon with everyone and their grandmother after a secret unopenable box worth millions to someone who knows how to use it and perhaps $200,000 if turned over to the right man. Colby sets all the action on the Florida coast as corporate man Burt Keating recovers from his wife’s tragic death walking like a zombie through each day, that is, until he meets Alicia Shafton, a stunning widow three doors down from Keating’s apartment. What makes this novel tick so well is how tight Colby pulls the tension.
Colby opens this one with the narrator (Keating) telling us that a man get in a lot of trouble if he’s lonely and has time on his hands. He then offers us a typical droll domestic scene, although he does let on that Beverly was not one to turn your head about on the street and that their marriage was not wild or ecstatic, just comfortable and secure. It is almost as if when a big Buick skidded out of control and crushed dear little Beverly against a tree, Keating suddenly can come to life. Not that there was anything wrong with Beverly, she was just comfortable, not exciting, not thrilling, not erotic.
As Keating narrates the story, he took an indefinite leave of absence from his hum-drum corporate life and hum-drum suburban routine and “went to Florida and moved like a zombie through the lush days and nights until [he] met Alicia Shafton.” She, of course, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and moved down the breezeway soundless, carefully stepping. “She came toward [him] in the soft-stepping manner of one who passes through a bedroom where someone is asleep, her white, crested sweater softly ballooned with the thrust of her breasts, the white sharkskin skirt tracing the slender hipline and flow of thighs to long tape of stockinged legs.”
You know at this point without reading further that Keating is hopelessly captured by her spell, locked in, full steam ahead, and that, if you have read any of these crime novels before, he had better make tracks and start running because even if she is Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc all rolled together, she is trouble with a capital T. And that’s before Alicia opens her beautiful mouth and tells Keating that she is “the key to something so valuable that all the dishonest and maybe a few of the honest people in the country would be looking for [her] if they knew. And the ones who do not know would torture or murder me for it.”
Her dear husband, who apparently had lots and lots of secrets, left her an invaluable and impregnable box locked with keys and combinations and ready to explode if tampered with improperly. And everyone wants it. After her first assistant dies in gunfire on the Florida highway and Alicia narrowly escapes, she offers our hero $1,000 to go to the airport and retrieve the box, the holy grail. Maybe he wants the box himself and maybe he wants to keep this woman who has spellbound him, but we all know without even going further that getting anywhere near that box is trouble and that all hell is going to break loose for whoever gets their hands on it.
What Colby does so well here is ratchet up the tension over and over again until you are looking over your own shoulder as you are reading it, hoping no one has the jump on you. He absolutely nails the siren song that Keating falls for and the crazy chases that result. He does not make Keating anyone special or hold him in the highest regard. Keating would quickly cheat on Alicia when given the chance to get information on the box and its mysterious contents. This is one though that is hard to put down. It really is.
Colby opens this one with the narrator (Keating) telling us that a man get in a lot of trouble if he’s lonely and has time on his hands. He then offers us a typical droll domestic scene, although he does let on that Beverly was not one to turn your head about on the street and that their marriage was not wild or ecstatic, just comfortable and secure. It is almost as if when a big Buick skidded out of control and crushed dear little Beverly against a tree, Keating suddenly can come to life. Not that there was anything wrong with Beverly, she was just comfortable, not exciting, not thrilling, not erotic.
As Keating narrates the story, he took an indefinite leave of absence from his hum-drum corporate life and hum-drum suburban routine and “went to Florida and moved like a zombie through the lush days and nights until [he] met Alicia Shafton.” She, of course, was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and moved down the breezeway soundless, carefully stepping. “She came toward [him] in the soft-stepping manner of one who passes through a bedroom where someone is asleep, her white, crested sweater softly ballooned with the thrust of her breasts, the white sharkskin skirt tracing the slender hipline and flow of thighs to long tape of stockinged legs.”
You know at this point without reading further that Keating is hopelessly captured by her spell, locked in, full steam ahead, and that, if you have read any of these crime novels before, he had better make tracks and start running because even if she is Florence Nightingale and Joan of Arc all rolled together, she is trouble with a capital T. And that’s before Alicia opens her beautiful mouth and tells Keating that she is “the key to something so valuable that all the dishonest and maybe a few of the honest people in the country would be looking for [her] if they knew. And the ones who do not know would torture or murder me for it.”
Her dear husband, who apparently had lots and lots of secrets, left her an invaluable and impregnable box locked with keys and combinations and ready to explode if tampered with improperly. And everyone wants it. After her first assistant dies in gunfire on the Florida highway and Alicia narrowly escapes, she offers our hero $1,000 to go to the airport and retrieve the box, the holy grail. Maybe he wants the box himself and maybe he wants to keep this woman who has spellbound him, but we all know without even going further that getting anywhere near that box is trouble and that all hell is going to break loose for whoever gets their hands on it.
What Colby does so well here is ratchet up the tension over and over again until you are looking over your own shoulder as you are reading it, hoping no one has the jump on you. He absolutely nails the siren song that Keating falls for and the crazy chases that result. He does not make Keating anyone special or hold him in the highest regard. Keating would quickly cheat on Alicia when given the chance to get information on the box and its mysterious contents. This is one though that is hard to put down. It really is.
August 4, 2020
The widow is an attractive young woman whose recently deceased husband left her an impregnable box containing unknown objects of incalculable value to be sold for in Florida for $200,000. A hefty chunk of change for 1956. Narrator Burt Keating gets involved for a little romance and a cut of the sale and soon finds out that there are dangerous complications since ruthless criminals will do anything to get that box. I loved the 1950s Florida locations - lost forever to development, and the exceptional plotting where attempts to hide and open the mysterious box takes center stage. Some cat-and-mouse action and a couple of heart-stopping twists round out this superb thriller. Robert Colby is one of my favorite writers and this is one of his best. Highly recommended.
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August 5, 2016My copy of this book is signed by Robert Colby himself with the comment: "Like the book but not the title--by the editor." And it's true, the book is good while the title is not!
July 30, 2025
I won't bother with a general synopsis in this review, as it's already been written in Dave's review
"I was in a frame of mind where I didn't give a particular damn about what happened to me.I wanted to fill my life with distractions and this seemed, at the time, like an exiting game with big stakes"
Burt Keating, our bereaved anti-hero in THE QUAKING WIDOW, is ready to get rich (and possibly get laid) or die trying. So far, so good, right? One thing I can say for Colby is that he had the ability to imbue his characters with the kind of nihilism that makes for unpredictable criminal behavior and knife-edge situations. Here's one more from Burt..
"Much of the warmth I had had for life and humanity left me. Melancholy was replaced with bitterness and I became determined to wreak a kind of revenge. But on who? On what? There was nothing to strike at--except, perhaps, life itself"
I wanted to give this four stars, but the fact is, I just wasn't as thrilled by it as I was the other three Robert Colby books I've read. There were a few twists I didn't like, especially were characters identities were concerned. There was also the box that was central to the story, with it's contents not being revealed until several chapters in. I respect Colby for not going with any of the obvious choices regarding the contents of the box, but it's contents are such that the story becomes a little more complex, and therefore a little longer than I thought was necessary
Despite these criticim's, Colby did write the characters well, even if i didn't like the one switcheroo towards the end. Also, the showdown at the end made me glad I stuck with it, even if I wasn't exactly tearing through it
"I was in a frame of mind where I didn't give a particular damn about what happened to me.I wanted to fill my life with distractions and this seemed, at the time, like an exiting game with big stakes"
Burt Keating, our bereaved anti-hero in THE QUAKING WIDOW, is ready to get rich (and possibly get laid) or die trying. So far, so good, right? One thing I can say for Colby is that he had the ability to imbue his characters with the kind of nihilism that makes for unpredictable criminal behavior and knife-edge situations. Here's one more from Burt..
"Much of the warmth I had had for life and humanity left me. Melancholy was replaced with bitterness and I became determined to wreak a kind of revenge. But on who? On what? There was nothing to strike at--except, perhaps, life itself"
I wanted to give this four stars, but the fact is, I just wasn't as thrilled by it as I was the other three Robert Colby books I've read. There were a few twists I didn't like, especially were characters identities were concerned. There was also the box that was central to the story, with it's contents not being revealed until several chapters in. I respect Colby for not going with any of the obvious choices regarding the contents of the box, but it's contents are such that the story becomes a little more complex, and therefore a little longer than I thought was necessary
Despite these criticim's, Colby did write the characters well, even if i didn't like the one switcheroo towards the end. Also, the showdown at the end made me glad I stuck with it, even if I wasn't exactly tearing through it
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews