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The Big Bite
An ex-football player and a crooked insurance man cook up a blackmail scheme.
Professional football player John Harlan is driving back from a lakeside cabin when a drunk driver named Cannon knocks him off the road. When he comes to, Harlan's leg is shattered and Cannon is dead. His career over, Harlan goes on a bender, and a few days after his hangover clears, he dives headfirst into a life of immorality.
An insurance investigator named Purvis is checking into Cannon's death, hoping to avoid laying out $100,000 to his widow. He suspects Cannon may have survived the accident, only to be murdered while Harlan was unconscious -- and the more he talks about it, the more Harlan believes it. They devise a plan to blackmail dear Mrs. Cannon, but if Harlan was a pro on the field, he's an amateur in the underworld. Next to what the lovely widow is going to do to him, football is a cakewalk.
Professional football player John Harlan is driving back from a lakeside cabin when a drunk driver named Cannon knocks him off the road. When he comes to, Harlan's leg is shattered and Cannon is dead. His career over, Harlan goes on a bender, and a few days after his hangover clears, he dives headfirst into a life of immorality.
An insurance investigator named Purvis is checking into Cannon's death, hoping to avoid laying out $100,000 to his widow. He suspects Cannon may have survived the accident, only to be murdered while Harlan was unconscious -- and the more he talks about it, the more Harlan believes it. They devise a plan to blackmail dear Mrs. Cannon, but if Harlan was a pro on the field, he's an amateur in the underworld. Next to what the lovely widow is going to do to him, football is a cakewalk.
222 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1956
5 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
Charles Williams
33 books99 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Charles Williams
Charles Williams was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years (1929-1939) before leaving to work in the electronics industry. He was a radio inspector during the war years at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington state. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime.
Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay.
After the death of his wife Lasca (m. 1939) from cancer in 1972, Williams purchased property on the California-Oregon border where he lived alone for a time in a trailer. After relocating to Los Angeles, Williams committed suicide in his apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in early April 1975. Williams had been depressed since the death of his wife, and his emotional state worsened as sales of his books declined when stand alone thrillers began to lose popularity in the early 70s. He was survived by a daughter, Alison.
Please see: Charles Williams
Charles Williams was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years (1929-1939) before leaving to work in the electronics industry. He was a radio inspector during the war years at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington state. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime.
Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay.
After the death of his wife Lasca (m. 1939) from cancer in 1972, Williams purchased property on the California-Oregon border where he lived alone for a time in a trailer. After relocating to Los Angeles, Williams committed suicide in his apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in early April 1975. Williams had been depressed since the death of his wife, and his emotional state worsened as sales of his books declined when stand alone thrillers began to lose popularity in the early 70s. He was survived by a daughter, Alison.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 2, 2023
Charles Williams is, without question, one of the top writers to come out of the fifties. The Big Bite is typical of the excellence of his writing.
It is a story about a down-on-his-luck professional football player, who just can't seem to turn as quickly since he was rear-ended by a drunk. The doctors say his leg is all healed, but it just isn't the same and his career is over. "They'd stuck it back on, all right, and it looked like a leg, but something was gone." This isn't good. As the narrator, John Harlan, explains, "The only thing I'd ever owned in my life was a mechanism that ran like something bathed in oil and now it had been smashed and when they put it back together, something was gone." He's cut from the team and goes on a binge. "It was a honey and lasted a week." He wakes up in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere with some girl whose name he didn't recall and "She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up."
Five months after his injury, something about the incident is causing a private investigator to look into it again, off the record. The trail of intrigue leads Harlan to get involved in a blackmail scheme. What else does he have to lose? Why not? He should've had a long professional career and that's now all down the toilet. The blackmail leads him to get involved with a sexy siren that likes of which could barely be described.
The story is filled with tension. It is great from page one all the way to the bitter end. There is not one thing I would change about it if I were editing it. It is that good.
Who is the dish he is blackmailing? Why none other than the widow of the drunken jerk who ran him off the road and flushed his career down the drain. She is, in Harlan's mind, none other than the brown-eyed Fort Knox and he is going to get that woman to open up the vault and pour some gold out. But when he meets her, his mind starts melting: "She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere - just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist." "It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline." And, "You had the impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back, like a window-blind." Is John Harlan over his head when he tries to work Julia Cannon? "She was a cool devil in most ways, but when she was after fun she took it
fervently and unbuttoned."
I highly recommend this excellent pulp-era thriller. It has everything in it that you could want, murder, blackmail, fishing, football, intrigue, and the smartest, craftiest femme fatale to grace the pages of fiction.
It is a story about a down-on-his-luck professional football player, who just can't seem to turn as quickly since he was rear-ended by a drunk. The doctors say his leg is all healed, but it just isn't the same and his career is over. "They'd stuck it back on, all right, and it looked like a leg, but something was gone." This isn't good. As the narrator, John Harlan, explains, "The only thing I'd ever owned in my life was a mechanism that ran like something bathed in oil and now it had been smashed and when they put it back together, something was gone." He's cut from the team and goes on a binge. "It was a honey and lasted a week." He wakes up in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere with some girl whose name he didn't recall and "She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up."
Five months after his injury, something about the incident is causing a private investigator to look into it again, off the record. The trail of intrigue leads Harlan to get involved in a blackmail scheme. What else does he have to lose? Why not? He should've had a long professional career and that's now all down the toilet. The blackmail leads him to get involved with a sexy siren that likes of which could barely be described.
The story is filled with tension. It is great from page one all the way to the bitter end. There is not one thing I would change about it if I were editing it. It is that good.
Who is the dish he is blackmailing? Why none other than the widow of the drunken jerk who ran him off the road and flushed his career down the drain. She is, in Harlan's mind, none other than the brown-eyed Fort Knox and he is going to get that woman to open up the vault and pour some gold out. But when he meets her, his mind starts melting: "She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere - just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist." "It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline." And, "You had the impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back, like a window-blind." Is John Harlan over his head when he tries to work Julia Cannon? "She was a cool devil in most ways, but when she was after fun she took it
fervently and unbuttoned."
I highly recommend this excellent pulp-era thriller. It has everything in it that you could want, murder, blackmail, fishing, football, intrigue, and the smartest, craftiest femme fatale to grace the pages of fiction.
May 15, 2023
10/2016
Such a good book. The suspense, the speed... Just readable and satisfying. And his endings are often unpredictable. This one was great. Charles Williams is definitely one of my favorite writers.
Such a good book. The suspense, the speed... Just readable and satisfying. And his endings are often unpredictable. This one was great. Charles Williams is definitely one of my favorite writers.
April 29, 2021
Ok I’ll bite, as a lover of noir, why did it take me so long to read Charles Williams. Following the Hot Spot, the Big Bite provides a rather unsympathetic lead character, narrator, but a good yarn, and a sensational femme fatale character in Mrs. Cannon. To say complex and complicated is to put it mildly. Like the way Williams put the ending to the tale together too. Definitely going to read more of his stuff.
June 17, 2018
Generally I LOVE Williams. This one was weak. Had little or no connection or remorse for the main character. Super improbable story/plot. It was like he was making it up as he went along. Interesting moments but ultimately disappointing. As a fan, I’d skip this one.
January 30, 2018
Charles Williams' The Big Bite is very good crime/noir thriller, though it's not quite up there with his brilliant 1953 noir The Hot Spot.
John Harlan's pro football career has ended after another driver hit him in what appeared to be a drunk-driving accident. After his recovery, Harlan is in very good shape by normal standards. He's in his late twenties, strong, and fit. He just lost that extra bit of quickness that it takes to compete at the highest level of sport, and now that he can't play football anymore, he's on the skids with no idea what to do next.
As he drifts about, the insurance investigator who originally looked into the drunk-driving accident tells Harlan he suspects there may be more to the story. Part of the accident may have been deliberate, and while Harlan wasn't the intended target of that mischief, he certainly was a victim.
John Harlan is a man of low morals and few scruples. He's bitter, and he thinks he's entitled to get back some of the money he lost due to the premature end of his career. He decides to blackmail the two people who he thinks were responsible for the "intentional" part of the "accident."
When it comes to crime, Harlan is a good planner, even though he's a novice. He takes huge calculated risks, because he's greedy as hell. His risks pay off, up to a certain point, because of his obsessive planning, which is the focus of much of the narrative. He neglects some little things along the way, like failing to examine parts of his plan from every conceivable angle. He also neglects some big things, like failing to fully understand the nature of the people he's blackmailing.
What begins as a brutish game of intimidation and force evolves into a subtle and intense battle of strategy and clever tactics by both the blackmailer and his victims. In fact, for much of the book, it's unclear who the victims will be. Because we see the world through Harlan's eyes, we become as convinced of his plans as he does, and we don't see their flaws until they smack him in the face. Then the reader gets smacked in the face too because Harlan can really suck you in. He's up against some very clever foes, particularly Julia Cannon, who plays a number of roles in turn, and all of them convincingly. She the cheating wife, the femme fatale, the victim, the master, the psychologist, the moralist, and the oracle.
Though the poor writing in the first few pages of the book may turn you off, stick with it. You'll start to see the value by the end of the first chapter.
The Big Bite was originally published by Dell in 1956. This review is of the 1973 Pocket Books reprint, which sold for 95 cents and includes a full-color two-page ad for True cigarettes between pages 128 and 129. Your best chance to find this title is the Mysterious Press eBook edition of 2012.
John Harlan's pro football career has ended after another driver hit him in what appeared to be a drunk-driving accident. After his recovery, Harlan is in very good shape by normal standards. He's in his late twenties, strong, and fit. He just lost that extra bit of quickness that it takes to compete at the highest level of sport, and now that he can't play football anymore, he's on the skids with no idea what to do next.
As he drifts about, the insurance investigator who originally looked into the drunk-driving accident tells Harlan he suspects there may be more to the story. Part of the accident may have been deliberate, and while Harlan wasn't the intended target of that mischief, he certainly was a victim.
John Harlan is a man of low morals and few scruples. He's bitter, and he thinks he's entitled to get back some of the money he lost due to the premature end of his career. He decides to blackmail the two people who he thinks were responsible for the "intentional" part of the "accident."
When it comes to crime, Harlan is a good planner, even though he's a novice. He takes huge calculated risks, because he's greedy as hell. His risks pay off, up to a certain point, because of his obsessive planning, which is the focus of much of the narrative. He neglects some little things along the way, like failing to examine parts of his plan from every conceivable angle. He also neglects some big things, like failing to fully understand the nature of the people he's blackmailing.
What begins as a brutish game of intimidation and force evolves into a subtle and intense battle of strategy and clever tactics by both the blackmailer and his victims. In fact, for much of the book, it's unclear who the victims will be. Because we see the world through Harlan's eyes, we become as convinced of his plans as he does, and we don't see their flaws until they smack him in the face. Then the reader gets smacked in the face too because Harlan can really suck you in. He's up against some very clever foes, particularly Julia Cannon, who plays a number of roles in turn, and all of them convincingly. She the cheating wife, the femme fatale, the victim, the master, the psychologist, the moralist, and the oracle.
Though the poor writing in the first few pages of the book may turn you off, stick with it. You'll start to see the value by the end of the first chapter.
The Big Bite was originally published by Dell in 1956. This review is of the 1973 Pocket Books reprint, which sold for 95 cents and includes a full-color two-page ad for True cigarettes between pages 128 and 129. Your best chance to find this title is the Mysterious Press eBook edition of 2012.
December 22, 2016
Moving on up to the top-ten noirs with a bullet! Great on so many levels. How it ultimately fits into my rankings of Charles Williams novels (and crime/noir in general) will have to wait until I've completed my re-reading of his books (and a lot more of this genre), but safe to say that not many will eclipse this one because it has the full package.
It is similar to A Touch of Death in that they both have ex-football players as protagonists. Kind of a toss-up between the two in that you can't go wrong with either. And if you are a noir fan, you simply have to read them both.
Fantastic beginning with a beautiful inciting incident: John Harlan is an NFL running back and it is pre-season practice and he is a step slow after he broke his leg in a car crash. Career over. What's he going to do?
First plot twist: Stewing over a measly settlement and the lost income from missing out on playing five or six more years in the NFL, he gets a call from an insurance investigator. And the gears starting churning and shifting. Soon Harlan learns that the insurance investigator has gone rogue, gone independent. Worth checking out, no? Yes. Meet arranged. They agree to collaborate. Except - the investigator is murdered and we are on our way.
Becomes a blackmail plot as Harlan wants to be made whole for the what he's lost as a result of the car crash which he now knows to have been deliberate, though not aimed at him.
Okay, I'm not going to describe the whole plot, which twists and turns and ups the ante all the way to the end.
First-person POV with Harlan is superb. He's on his game and off his game. Clever, but making mistakes. Not totally clueless, however, and his suspicions about being played really make this work. Yet, he still gets outsmarted, as we know he must. This cat-and-mouse element of the narrative from the narrator's perspective is so much fun.
Femme-fatale is dyn-o-mite: "She'd heard all the compliments, by experts; and with those eyes she'd probably been using men for throw-rugs since she was three."
Maybe the only weakness of the novel comes at the very end. Big twist. But I liked it. Subjective, though, as I could see how some might call foul. For those who do, I say go back and read it again, as there is a quite remarkable foreshadowing.
Williams is notable for his extended descriptions. I think he describes extended action sequences as well as anyone. And in this novel you have long sections where the first-person narrator is describing what he is doing. How do you turn telling into showing when the narrator is telling the story? Williams shows how it is done. Sure, much of this could have been cut or summarized, but Williams writes so well that it is a pleasure to read these long descriptive passages.
It is similar to A Touch of Death in that they both have ex-football players as protagonists. Kind of a toss-up between the two in that you can't go wrong with either. And if you are a noir fan, you simply have to read them both.
Fantastic beginning with a beautiful inciting incident: John Harlan is an NFL running back and it is pre-season practice and he is a step slow after he broke his leg in a car crash. Career over. What's he going to do?
First plot twist: Stewing over a measly settlement and the lost income from missing out on playing five or six more years in the NFL, he gets a call from an insurance investigator. And the gears starting churning and shifting. Soon Harlan learns that the insurance investigator has gone rogue, gone independent. Worth checking out, no? Yes. Meet arranged. They agree to collaborate. Except - the investigator is murdered and we are on our way.
Becomes a blackmail plot as Harlan wants to be made whole for the what he's lost as a result of the car crash which he now knows to have been deliberate, though not aimed at him.
Okay, I'm not going to describe the whole plot, which twists and turns and ups the ante all the way to the end.
First-person POV with Harlan is superb. He's on his game and off his game. Clever, but making mistakes. Not totally clueless, however, and his suspicions about being played really make this work. Yet, he still gets outsmarted, as we know he must. This cat-and-mouse element of the narrative from the narrator's perspective is so much fun.
Femme-fatale is dyn-o-mite: "She'd heard all the compliments, by experts; and with those eyes she'd probably been using men for throw-rugs since she was three."
Maybe the only weakness of the novel comes at the very end. Big twist. But I liked it. Subjective, though, as I could see how some might call foul. For those who do, I say go back and read it again, as there is a quite remarkable foreshadowing.
Williams is notable for his extended descriptions. I think he describes extended action sequences as well as anyone. And in this novel you have long sections where the first-person narrator is describing what he is doing. How do you turn telling into showing when the narrator is telling the story? Williams shows how it is done. Sure, much of this could have been cut or summarized, but Williams writes so well that it is a pleasure to read these long descriptive passages.
April 1, 2008
A pro football player, forced into retirement by injury, tries blackmail as a new career, and noir ensues. Most of The Big Bite is top-tier Charles Williams, but the narrative is marred by its ending, which comes from a bit too far out in left field. Read A Touch of Death first--a similar Charles Williams novel executed with greater elegance, and easily available from Hard Case Crime.
Read
January 4, 2017The more Charles Williams I read, the more I am becoming convinced that he is *the* great unsung crime fiction writer of the 1950's and '60's. Williams has the storytelling chops of John D. MacDonald (if not quite the same level of sophistication of prose style--but he's a much better pure writer than 95% of his contemporaries on the spinner rack) and the soul and sensibilities of James M. Cain. I don't believe THE BIG BITE is generally seen as one of his best, but it's a humdinger, impossible to put down, with a great curve-ball ending and a femme fatale who's as irresistible as she is cold-hearted. This was another one-sitting read from the days when they knew how to write a lean and mean thriller. Poor John Harlan: if only he understood blackmail as well as he understood football.
July 22, 2018
If one wanted a representative novel to show what Noir truly is, you could choose no example better than Charles Williams's THE BIG BITE. There are no gangsters and few cops, with only an imitation private dick in sight. Instead, it is a story about amoral materialists with little awareness of the pits they have been digging for themselves. A washed-up football player and an insurance investigator contemplate blackmail. A gorgeous femme (alright, I'll say it, fatale) and her brutish lover try to cover their unsavory tracks. No one wins. The great mystery bookseller Otto Penzler wrote an essay called "Noir is For Losers, Not Private Eyes." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-p.... That is exemplified by this novel. Actually, the book is not too good, with sexist cliches and stereotypical tropes abounding. But in the final third of the book, when one character describes the situation that has developed, the inextricable web that Fate, and certain failure, had built around them, that is Noir personified. Bad dramatically, great thematically.
November 4, 2025
Can't remember a thing about it. Probably worth reading again.
January 6, 2018
Часто надежды идут прахом. Перспективы оказываются лишёнными возможности их реализовать. Герой Чарльза Вильямса был успешным игроком в американский футбол, пока не попал в аварию. Пьяный лихач подрезал его автомобиль. Теперь на спортивной карьере поставлен крест. Забыть бы об этом, дабы найти другой интерес в жизни. Но всё случится так, что окажется – он стал жертвой обстоятельств. Лихач желал его смерти. Но почему? Читателю предстоит в этом разобраться.
(c) Trounin
(c) Trounin
July 16, 2014
This one is a fast paced thriller from Charles Williams.First person narrative is full of humor and sarcasm,will keep you chuckling all the way.Brilliant ending will make your jaw drop.
My only complaint is that there is unbelievable coincidence used,which is hard to digest,but it can be taken as fiction liberty.
My only complaint is that there is unbelievable coincidence used,which is hard to digest,but it can be taken as fiction liberty.
February 22, 2015
entertaining, in a 1950's, film noir kinda way.
Want to read
July 19, 2020elibrary
June 11, 2023
Super noire
Complex plot, deep characters, crafty writing. Lots of thrills. This is a writer who knows his craft intimately. I will be back for more.
Complex plot, deep characters, crafty writing. Lots of thrills. This is a writer who knows his craft intimately. I will be back for more.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews