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Zona caliente
Harry Madox vive asistido por la tentación. Mientras trabaja en una agencia de autos usados, solo piensa en robar el banco del pueblo y escapar a una playa del Caribe. Sus obstáculos tendrán forma de mujer: la inocente e irresistible Gloria Harper y Dolores Harshaw, la provocativa esposa de su jefe.
Zona caliente es un fulgurante ejemplo sobre cómo escribir una historia perfecta siguiendo los cánones del thriller. Con su arte refinadísimo, la novela prodiga un extraño hechizo en el lector, que, incluso mucho tiempo después de haber llegado al final, no puede olvidar a los personajes. El deslumbrante sentido del ritmo y la construcción de una atmósfera siempre abrasadora hacen que el suspenso y la intensidad narrativa jamás decaigan.
Un moldeado magistral comanda la ejecución de esta trama de rigurosa eficacia. Dueño de un estilo exquisito y despojado, Charles Williams sorprende con su agudeza perceptiva. La traducción extraordinaria de Carlos Gardini otorga a las imágenes y escenas una inusual potencia. Zona caliente es habitualmente recordada por tener el desenlace más admirable del género negro.
Zona caliente es un fulgurante ejemplo sobre cómo escribir una historia perfecta siguiendo los cánones del thriller. Con su arte refinadísimo, la novela prodiga un extraño hechizo en el lector, que, incluso mucho tiempo después de haber llegado al final, no puede olvidar a los personajes. El deslumbrante sentido del ritmo y la construcción de una atmósfera siempre abrasadora hacen que el suspenso y la intensidad narrativa jamás decaigan.
Un moldeado magistral comanda la ejecución de esta trama de rigurosa eficacia. Dueño de un estilo exquisito y despojado, Charles Williams sorprende con su agudeza perceptiva. La traducción extraordinaria de Carlos Gardini otorga a las imágenes y escenas una inusual potencia. Zona caliente es habitualmente recordada por tener el desenlace más admirable del género negro.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1953
50 people are currently reading
2431 people want to read
About the author
Charles Williams
33 books98 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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October 18, 2019
”Didn’t I know what was going to happen as surely as sunrise if I went on living in the same town with that sexy lush?
Oh, sure, I’d stay away from her, all right. Didn’t I always? What was my batting average so far in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp? It was an even zero, and I didn’t see anything in the situation with her that promised I’d improve very much. And the way she soaked up the booze, and as crazy as she was when she was drunk, she was about as safe to be mixed up with in a town like this as a rattlesnake. You didn’t know what she’d do.”
Harry Madox blows into this small Texas town during a simmering heat wave and lands a job selling cars for George Harshaw. It is hard to know why Madox has decided to stop in this forgettable town after living in Houston, but when he notices that the bank is left unattended during a fire in town, we start to see the wheels begin to turn in his head, so maybe stopping off in this little burg wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
He quickly acquires two problems of the female persuasion. There is Gloria Harper, who takes care of the loan paperwork for the car dealership. Something is going on between her and a dipshit named Sutton that is hard to puzzle out. She is so pretty and untainted by life that even the hardboiled Madox can’t help having dreams about settling down with her behind a white picket fence and living happily ever after. Of course, Madox doesn’t realize he is the protagonist in a Charles Williams novel. The only way his circumstances could be worse is if he were the protagonist in a Jim Thompson novel.
The other problem is the sexy lush that my opening quote described. She is Dolores Harshaw, wife of his boss, and she is bored out of her mind. The moment they meet they recognize the mutual deceit and sleaze boiling in each other’s eyes. Madox would like to be the type of guy who would say no to her. He even likes her husband, which makes the betrayal just a little more insidious. She is high entertainment in a small town, and the nights are hot and long, so why not generate some sweat with some stimulating screwing? She might be rotting on the vine, but she isn’t spoiled yet. ”I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.”
There are some wonderful twists and turns as Madox works out a plan for committing a felony while trying to keep the feral and demanding Dolores from ruining his chances with Gloria. The plot is tightly written, and the dialogue is frisky and honest. This is a perfect example of classic noir, and it could very well be Williams’ masterpiece. The sense of impending doom is palpable as I sweated my way through the pages.
The book was originally titled Hell Hath No Fury, which is a dramatic title, but I actually think the new title, The Hot Spot, more perfectly fits the situation that Harry Madox finds himself in from the moment he sets foot in this small Texas town. That hot spot between the legs of Dolores Harshaw is enough trouble for any one man, but Madox has a lot more to contend with than that.
There is a movie from 1990 starring Don Johnson as Harry Madox, Virginia Madsen as Dolores Harshaw, and Jennifer Connelly as Gloria Harper, and it is terrific. It follows the book very closely and certainly captures all that heat and desperation that Williams puts into the novel. I’d advise reading the book and then watch the movie; both are highly recommended.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Oh, sure, I’d stay away from her, all right. Didn’t I always? What was my batting average so far in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp? It was an even zero, and I didn’t see anything in the situation with her that promised I’d improve very much. And the way she soaked up the booze, and as crazy as she was when she was drunk, she was about as safe to be mixed up with in a town like this as a rattlesnake. You didn’t know what she’d do.”
Harry Madox blows into this small Texas town during a simmering heat wave and lands a job selling cars for George Harshaw. It is hard to know why Madox has decided to stop in this forgettable town after living in Houston, but when he notices that the bank is left unattended during a fire in town, we start to see the wheels begin to turn in his head, so maybe stopping off in this little burg wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
He quickly acquires two problems of the female persuasion. There is Gloria Harper, who takes care of the loan paperwork for the car dealership. Something is going on between her and a dipshit named Sutton that is hard to puzzle out. She is so pretty and untainted by life that even the hardboiled Madox can’t help having dreams about settling down with her behind a white picket fence and living happily ever after. Of course, Madox doesn’t realize he is the protagonist in a Charles Williams novel. The only way his circumstances could be worse is if he were the protagonist in a Jim Thompson novel.
The other problem is the sexy lush that my opening quote described. She is Dolores Harshaw, wife of his boss, and she is bored out of her mind. The moment they meet they recognize the mutual deceit and sleaze boiling in each other’s eyes. Madox would like to be the type of guy who would say no to her. He even likes her husband, which makes the betrayal just a little more insidious. She is high entertainment in a small town, and the nights are hot and long, so why not generate some sweat with some stimulating screwing? She might be rotting on the vine, but she isn’t spoiled yet. ”I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.”
There are some wonderful twists and turns as Madox works out a plan for committing a felony while trying to keep the feral and demanding Dolores from ruining his chances with Gloria. The plot is tightly written, and the dialogue is frisky and honest. This is a perfect example of classic noir, and it could very well be Williams’ masterpiece. The sense of impending doom is palpable as I sweated my way through the pages.
The book was originally titled Hell Hath No Fury, which is a dramatic title, but I actually think the new title, The Hot Spot, more perfectly fits the situation that Harry Madox finds himself in from the moment he sets foot in this small Texas town. That hot spot between the legs of Dolores Harshaw is enough trouble for any one man, but Madox has a lot more to contend with than that.
There is a movie from 1990 starring Don Johnson as Harry Madox, Virginia Madsen as Dolores Harshaw, and Jennifer Connelly as Gloria Harper, and it is terrific. It follows the book very closely and certainly captures all that heat and desperation that Williams puts into the novel. I’d advise reading the book and then watch the movie; both are highly recommended.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
March 8, 2021
The Hot Spot by Charles Williams is such fantastically good pulp that, from the very first bite of it to the final morsel, it is as good as it gets. What descriptions can I use to describe it? Awesome. Wonderful. Far out. Top notch. Every single sentence in this book drips with pulpy goodness. It is a rich treat so filled with the good stuff that you just drown in it. To put it in a nutshell, if you like the good pulp fiction from the fifties, you can't do any better than Charles Williams' The Hot Spot.
It is plot-wise a story about Harry Madox who has drifted from one job to another and ran into Harshaw somewhere in Oklahoma or something who offered him a job as a car salesman in a small town. It's a job so Madox bites, but boy. maybe you shouldn't just grab the first thing that comes along no matter how hard up you are. Nothing wrong with the job. It's a straight arrow sales job, or at least as straight as car sales can be. But, there's this twenty-one year old blonde in the loan office who Madox can't take his eyes off. And, worse for him perhaps, is Harshaw's wife, she's ripe, perhaps over-ripe and lucious and she wants Madox whenever Harshaw isn't around.
There's also one bank in this small one-horse town and, when there's a fire in a cafe, everyone in town including the bank tellers peel out to help put the fire out, leaving one doddering old fellow in the bank with all the drawers still open. Anyone who wants to can just waltz in and take what they want. All they have to do is get past one old dude and a blind guy who sells pencils on the corner. Of course. Madox can't resist. "Why not." he explains. "In this world you took what you wanted; you didn't stand around and what for someone to bring it to you." What he didn't count one was that bosses' wife is onto his game and the country sheriff isn't any dumb fool.
What follows is a hardboiled masterpiece that just drips with the good stuff. It doesn't matter how many napkins you bring with you, this stuff is going to drip all over you, just spilling out of the pages.
The story opens with Madox starting to tell Harshaw to get somebody else to run his errands when he sees the girl (Gloria Harper) come in and changes his mind. "[S]omehow she made you think of a long- stemmed yellow rose." Her hair was the color of honey or of straw, with sun-burned streaks in it. Somehow, Williams, in telling this tale, without even trying to, creates an awkward tension between them, but its a tension that burns hot and passionate. Even after they part that day, he "couldn't get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into [his] mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sunburned hair."
But that's nothing compared to the hot molten metal that is Harshaw's young wife. "Somehow she made you think of an overloaded peach tree." She was "lucious" and "overripe." And, when Madox goes to see her, "She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass." But, "the teenage dress didn't do anything for her overripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks." When he leaves her place, he can't figure out how to "push the sultry weights of Dolores Harshaw off [his] mind. She was dangerous in a town like this." And, there was "a steel-trap deadliness" about her. "She was as tough as a shark, and she got what she wanted."
Charles Williams can write like few others can. He tells more in a sentence or two then other writers can tell in whole chapters or even in whole books. He takes the reader on a journey with him, on a red- hot burning journey to hell and back. These characters are alive. There are no cardboard cutouts here.
It is plot-wise a story about Harry Madox who has drifted from one job to another and ran into Harshaw somewhere in Oklahoma or something who offered him a job as a car salesman in a small town. It's a job so Madox bites, but boy. maybe you shouldn't just grab the first thing that comes along no matter how hard up you are. Nothing wrong with the job. It's a straight arrow sales job, or at least as straight as car sales can be. But, there's this twenty-one year old blonde in the loan office who Madox can't take his eyes off. And, worse for him perhaps, is Harshaw's wife, she's ripe, perhaps over-ripe and lucious and she wants Madox whenever Harshaw isn't around.
There's also one bank in this small one-horse town and, when there's a fire in a cafe, everyone in town including the bank tellers peel out to help put the fire out, leaving one doddering old fellow in the bank with all the drawers still open. Anyone who wants to can just waltz in and take what they want. All they have to do is get past one old dude and a blind guy who sells pencils on the corner. Of course. Madox can't resist. "Why not." he explains. "In this world you took what you wanted; you didn't stand around and what for someone to bring it to you." What he didn't count one was that bosses' wife is onto his game and the country sheriff isn't any dumb fool.
What follows is a hardboiled masterpiece that just drips with the good stuff. It doesn't matter how many napkins you bring with you, this stuff is going to drip all over you, just spilling out of the pages.
The story opens with Madox starting to tell Harshaw to get somebody else to run his errands when he sees the girl (Gloria Harper) come in and changes his mind. "[S]omehow she made you think of a long- stemmed yellow rose." Her hair was the color of honey or of straw, with sun-burned streaks in it. Somehow, Williams, in telling this tale, without even trying to, creates an awkward tension between them, but its a tension that burns hot and passionate. Even after they part that day, he "couldn't get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into [his] mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sunburned hair."
But that's nothing compared to the hot molten metal that is Harshaw's young wife. "Somehow she made you think of an overloaded peach tree." She was "lucious" and "overripe." And, when Madox goes to see her, "She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass." But, "the teenage dress didn't do anything for her overripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks." When he leaves her place, he can't figure out how to "push the sultry weights of Dolores Harshaw off [his] mind. She was dangerous in a town like this." And, there was "a steel-trap deadliness" about her. "She was as tough as a shark, and she got what she wanted."
Charles Williams can write like few others can. He tells more in a sentence or two then other writers can tell in whole chapters or even in whole books. He takes the reader on a journey with him, on a red- hot burning journey to hell and back. These characters are alive. There are no cardboard cutouts here.
August 4, 2011
Madox is new to town when he hatches a scheme to rob the bank. At the same time, he's having an affair with his boss's wife and has the hots for the loan officer at the used car lot where he works. The robbery goes as smoothly as it can but Madox's life goes spiraling out of control in a web of sex, murder, and blackmail.
I'm going to have to track down more Charles Williams books. The writing was slick and the book had so many "Oh shit!" plot twists that I lost count. While Mrs. Harshaw was pure poison, it was easy to see how Madox wouldn't be able to resist her. Madox's internal conflict about the robbery, murders, blackmail, and feelings for Gloria was very well done. As things fell apart, the book took on a frantic pace and I couldn't put it down.
The Hot Spot is one hell of a read and my favorite crime novel to be adapted into a movie starring Don Johnson.
I'm going to have to track down more Charles Williams books. The writing was slick and the book had so many "Oh shit!" plot twists that I lost count. While Mrs. Harshaw was pure poison, it was easy to see how Madox wouldn't be able to resist her. Madox's internal conflict about the robbery, murders, blackmail, and feelings for Gloria was very well done. As things fell apart, the book took on a frantic pace and I couldn't put it down.
The Hot Spot is one hell of a read and my favorite crime novel to be adapted into a movie starring Don Johnson.
February 22, 2021
I sat on the side of the bed stark naked in the sweltering night . . . and thought about how easy it would be. There'd be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up.
Harry Madox is your fairly typical crime novel antihero. He attempts to live a straight life: a job, maybe a family down the line, possibly with the lovely young miss he met in the small town where he currently resides, but he's tempted by the dark side: a married woman of easy virtue, and the wads of cash sitting lonely in a nearly empty bank . . .
This was a fine, well written and taut thriller - good, I thought, but nothing really exceptional.
And then, I got to the ending - WOW! Twisted, dark, and nasty, though quite honestly, at this stage of my life, I was somewhat happy to see
That's how a four-star book jumped into five-star territory. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more by Williams.
Harry Madox is your fairly typical crime novel antihero. He attempts to live a straight life: a job, maybe a family down the line, possibly with the lovely young miss he met in the small town where he currently resides, but he's tempted by the dark side: a married woman of easy virtue, and the wads of cash sitting lonely in a nearly empty bank . . .
This was a fine, well written and taut thriller - good, I thought, but nothing really exceptional.
And then, I got to the ending - WOW! Twisted, dark, and nasty, though quite honestly, at this stage of my life, I was somewhat happy to see
That's how a four-star book jumped into five-star territory. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more by Williams.
November 20, 2023
What was my batting average so far for staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp? It was an even zero, and I didn't see anything in the situation here that promised I'd improve very much.All I can do is chuckle whenever I read about people being in such an uproar recently about the ending of the book and movie Gone Girl. I keep thinking that obviously they've never really read true classic noir fiction. Because if they had, then they'd know that an ending like that is true to form with the genre and had been done many times back in the genre's heyday! That's how I like my noir: depraved and nihilistic! And this nifty, archetypal, little dark thriller fits right there in that category, with it's tale of a horny, low-life car salesman who's aching to not only bed down a couple of the local ladies, but also to rip off the local bank, which is just begging to get robbed. He quickly finds out that these two goals don't fit very well together.
The smart thing was to get out of here and let her happen to somebody else.Author Charles Williams was one of the star pulp writers back in the 50's and this is considered one of his best works. It was originally published as a Gold Medal original, titled Hell Hath No Fury, but is now more commonly known as The Hot Spot after the movie adaptation. But The Hot Spot is terribly boring and I definitely prefer the original name. This book is a great example of the classic pulp and Gold Medal tradition, with its tight plotting, suspense, witty, hard-boiled dialogue ( "She was as crazy as frozen dynamite" ), its lusty femme fatale, and questionable morality. This is an essential one for fans of the genre.
Maybe some day I'll make it and become the only bank director in the world who started at the bottom by robbing the bank and worked his way up by becoming indispensable to a bitch, and the only one anywhere who has twelve thousand three hundred dollars of his bank's assets buried under six inches of slowly rotting manure in a collapsing barn on a sandhill and who intends to let it stay there until the barn rots or the money rots or he rots himself. It's an ambition, and everybody should have one...
January 31, 2021
I have now read seven novels by Charles Williams. The Hot Spot (also known as Hell Hath No Fury) is the best among them. It is more of a small-town backwoods thriller and not a nautical thriller which Williams is famous for. The setting is similar to the ones in his novels Nothing in Her Way and River Girl.
Maddox, a 30-year-old ex-sailor/drifter is working as a car salesman in a small hot town somewhere in Texas. He lives in a sweaty rooming house and dislikes his overzealous boss Harshaw. His dislike does not extend to Harshaw’s blonde wife who seduces him. But Maddox sets his eyes on the beautiful and innocent Gloria Harper (who is a co-worker) whom he wants to settle down with and the barely secure small-town bank which he plans on robbing. But standing in his way is Mrs.Harshaw, the hard-living backwoods redneck Sutton with whom Gloria Harper has a strange relationship and the local Sheriff who suspects Maddox of robbing the bank.
On the surface, The Hot Spot is a terrific crime procedural. I wonder whether Williams had an alternate career as a criminal or a serial killer. Some of his methods to escape or mislead the law are simply ingenious. The bank robbery scene in this book is one of the most pulsating that I have ever enjoyed (in both books and movies). It is a pretty dangerous book in the sense that the one-man bank robbery plot can be replicated in real life. Though the book is set in a world without ID’s and surveillance cameras that is now long gone.
The small-town characters are ones that make you wonder why Hollywood makes so many shitty movies about yuppies when they have all this literature based on wild Texan characters they could make movies on. Dolores Harshaw must be one of the greatest femme fatales because she does not want to destroy Maddox, but actually wants to marry him and live a life of domesticity. Gloria Harper is a bit of a caricature of the innocent small-town girl. She is much like Shannon Wayne in Gulf Coast Girl because the hero is desperate to possess her. For Maddox, she is the last bit of innocence left in this corrupt world that he has to hold on to. Sutton, the blackmailing redneck who uses words like “geetus” is someone who could walk into a Rob Zombie movie and fight The Devil’s Rejects. Then of course there is the hero Maddox. This hard-boiled character longs to settle down with Gloria Harper but life throws one hurdle after the other at him. He is a personification of the quote “Anxiety is the natural state of twentieth century man” (Norman Mailer). Here are some of his inner monologues –
“I kept having a nightmare about trying to run uphill out of a river bottom with a dead man shackled to my leg. I’d wake up covered with sweat and shaking”
or
“Let them send me to the chair. Let ‘em burn me. All they could do was kill me—It’s like committing suicide by holding your breath."
The unnamed small town is beautiful on the surface, but also hot and sweaty and without any real opportunity. Its backwoods are filled with pine needles and swamp and it spawns/attracts evil like Dolores Harshaw and Sutton who make life hell for Maddox and Gloria Harper.
Williams is as adept at describing the small town as he is at describing the ocean:
“The land began to drop away on the west side of the ridge and then we were in the river bottom, driving under big oaks, and it was a little cooler. Most of the sloughs were dried up now, in midsummer, and when we came out to the river itself it was low, with the sandbars showing, and fairly clear. After we crossed it, I stopped the car and got out and went back to stand on the end of the wooden bridge looking at it. It was beautiful. The river came around a long bend above and slid over a bar into the big pool under the bridge. Part of the pool was in the shadow of the dense wall of trees along the bank and it looked dark and cool and deep. The only sound anywhere was a mockingbird practicing his scales from a pin oak along the other bank. There was a peace here you could almost feel, like a hand touching you.”
Williams etched the town's atmosphere into my mind with a few simple lines:
“I waited until twelve. And then it was one a.m. Somewhere far off a train whistled for a crossing, and once in a while a little night breeze would rustle through the oaks around the clearing.”
The small-town is sort of a heaven-hell that entraps Maddox the sailor and gives him grief.
The Hot Spot is among the top three crime fiction novels that I have read in my life. Unfortunately, Charles Williams novels are hard to find now (especially if you live in India). But in his better days, Williams work was adapted by the very best of filmmakers - Dennis Hopper, Francois Truffaut, Osron Welles, Rene Clement, Claude Sautet (famous for Classe Tous Risques), Phillip Noyce, Delbert Mann (famous for Marty) and Hubert Cornfield (famous for Plunder Road and Night of the Following Day).
I would also recommend the movie directed by Dennis Hopper based on this book. Do not let the 6.4 rating (the handiwork of attention deficit superhero fanboys, I am sure) on IMDB turn you away.
Maddox, a 30-year-old ex-sailor/drifter is working as a car salesman in a small hot town somewhere in Texas. He lives in a sweaty rooming house and dislikes his overzealous boss Harshaw. His dislike does not extend to Harshaw’s blonde wife who seduces him. But Maddox sets his eyes on the beautiful and innocent Gloria Harper (who is a co-worker) whom he wants to settle down with and the barely secure small-town bank which he plans on robbing. But standing in his way is Mrs.Harshaw, the hard-living backwoods redneck Sutton with whom Gloria Harper has a strange relationship and the local Sheriff who suspects Maddox of robbing the bank.
On the surface, The Hot Spot is a terrific crime procedural. I wonder whether Williams had an alternate career as a criminal or a serial killer. Some of his methods to escape or mislead the law are simply ingenious. The bank robbery scene in this book is one of the most pulsating that I have ever enjoyed (in both books and movies). It is a pretty dangerous book in the sense that the one-man bank robbery plot can be replicated in real life. Though the book is set in a world without ID’s and surveillance cameras that is now long gone.
The small-town characters are ones that make you wonder why Hollywood makes so many shitty movies about yuppies when they have all this literature based on wild Texan characters they could make movies on. Dolores Harshaw must be one of the greatest femme fatales because she does not want to destroy Maddox, but actually wants to marry him and live a life of domesticity. Gloria Harper is a bit of a caricature of the innocent small-town girl. She is much like Shannon Wayne in Gulf Coast Girl because the hero is desperate to possess her. For Maddox, she is the last bit of innocence left in this corrupt world that he has to hold on to. Sutton, the blackmailing redneck who uses words like “geetus” is someone who could walk into a Rob Zombie movie and fight The Devil’s Rejects. Then of course there is the hero Maddox. This hard-boiled character longs to settle down with Gloria Harper but life throws one hurdle after the other at him. He is a personification of the quote “Anxiety is the natural state of twentieth century man” (Norman Mailer). Here are some of his inner monologues –
“I kept having a nightmare about trying to run uphill out of a river bottom with a dead man shackled to my leg. I’d wake up covered with sweat and shaking”
or
“Let them send me to the chair. Let ‘em burn me. All they could do was kill me—It’s like committing suicide by holding your breath."
The unnamed small town is beautiful on the surface, but also hot and sweaty and without any real opportunity. Its backwoods are filled with pine needles and swamp and it spawns/attracts evil like Dolores Harshaw and Sutton who make life hell for Maddox and Gloria Harper.
Williams is as adept at describing the small town as he is at describing the ocean:
“The land began to drop away on the west side of the ridge and then we were in the river bottom, driving under big oaks, and it was a little cooler. Most of the sloughs were dried up now, in midsummer, and when we came out to the river itself it was low, with the sandbars showing, and fairly clear. After we crossed it, I stopped the car and got out and went back to stand on the end of the wooden bridge looking at it. It was beautiful. The river came around a long bend above and slid over a bar into the big pool under the bridge. Part of the pool was in the shadow of the dense wall of trees along the bank and it looked dark and cool and deep. The only sound anywhere was a mockingbird practicing his scales from a pin oak along the other bank. There was a peace here you could almost feel, like a hand touching you.”
Williams etched the town's atmosphere into my mind with a few simple lines:
“I waited until twelve. And then it was one a.m. Somewhere far off a train whistled for a crossing, and once in a while a little night breeze would rustle through the oaks around the clearing.”
The small-town is sort of a heaven-hell that entraps Maddox the sailor and gives him grief.
The Hot Spot is among the top three crime fiction novels that I have read in my life. Unfortunately, Charles Williams novels are hard to find now (especially if you live in India). But in his better days, Williams work was adapted by the very best of filmmakers - Dennis Hopper, Francois Truffaut, Osron Welles, Rene Clement, Claude Sautet (famous for Classe Tous Risques), Phillip Noyce, Delbert Mann (famous for Marty) and Hubert Cornfield (famous for Plunder Road and Night of the Following Day).
I would also recommend the movie directed by Dennis Hopper based on this book. Do not let the 6.4 rating (the handiwork of attention deficit superhero fanboys, I am sure) on IMDB turn you away.
August 9, 2012
[9/10]
I prefer the original title "Hell Hath No Fury" , but "The Hot Spot" works too. Mother Nature conspired to put me in the mood for this, by bringing 42 Celsius in the shade (108 F) heat wave upon my humble town. I really feel the pain of Harry Madox, trapped in a stifling motel room, drenched in sweat and contemplating his bleak future in a dead end job. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse. He's only 30 years old, but his voice in the novel makes him feel like 50.
A former marine, brawler and opportunist, Madox lands a job as a used car salesman in a small Texas town in the early 50's. He thinks he's tough and wise to the ways of the world . But there's a slight flaw in his character: he can't say no to temptation. By his own confession, he has a track record of ZERO when it comes to “staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp.”
The tramp in question being arguably the real star of the novel - one of the best vamps I've come across in a noir novel, and I've read a few. Enter Dolly Harshaw, the wife of his boss, blonde and plump, with a volatile temper and predatory eye. Here's how Harry describes her : I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.
Her demonic presence is balanced in the novel by Gloria Harper: barely 21, slender, church going, community helping damzel-in-distress that pulls the heartstrings of poor Harry right, everytime Dolly pulls left. She's trouble, too, for all her angelic countenance.
Madox illusion of being in control of his own life will be tested even further once he sets his eyes on some easy money : the poorly guarded city bank.
So this is how the pieces of the game are layed out initially on the chessboard of this classic noir masterpiece. Like in other similar books from the period, I had the premonition of trouble, of inevitable doom, of a cruel god moving the people around according to his rigid rules (the code said "crime doesn't pay"), of Harry as a moth trapped inside a glass bowl while he still thinks he can escape his fate. This tragic angle of paying the cost for living outside the law ( When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. ) is something I feel is lacking in more modern crime novels and movies. Now the criminal is some super smart, likable rogue who usually gets the loot, and then retires to some tropical paradise island to sip polichrome cocktails in the company of the hot female cop who chased him.
The second thing that makes The Hot Spot masterful and I feel is kinda lost today is the style: the minimalist approach in presentation, the atmosphere, the wisecracks, the tough guy talk, the emotional intensity - everything packed in less than 200 pages. I would not add or remove a single phrase from the novel. I felt the same way about Goodis and Cain. Either the public expectations have changed, or the editors prefer to sell books by the pound, but most of the recent crime novels I've tried have at least three times the length and half the story.
One final note about the movie adaptation : check it out, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly are spot on, and the whole claustrophobic pressure of high summer in a very small town captured just right. Take some notes of the soundtrack : Taj Mahal and John Lee Hooker are flawlees as background music when reading the novel.
I prefer the original title "Hell Hath No Fury" , but "The Hot Spot" works too. Mother Nature conspired to put me in the mood for this, by bringing 42 Celsius in the shade (108 F) heat wave upon my humble town. I really feel the pain of Harry Madox, trapped in a stifling motel room, drenched in sweat and contemplating his bleak future in a dead end job. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse. He's only 30 years old, but his voice in the novel makes him feel like 50.
A former marine, brawler and opportunist, Madox lands a job as a used car salesman in a small Texas town in the early 50's. He thinks he's tough and wise to the ways of the world . But there's a slight flaw in his character: he can't say no to temptation. By his own confession, he has a track record of ZERO when it comes to “staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp.”
The tramp in question being arguably the real star of the novel - one of the best vamps I've come across in a noir novel, and I've read a few. Enter Dolly Harshaw, the wife of his boss, blonde and plump, with a volatile temper and predatory eye. Here's how Harry describes her : I thought of a full and slightly bruised peach beginning to spoil a little. She was somewhere between luscious and full-bloom and in another year or so of getting all her exercise lying down and lifting the bottle she’d probably be blowzy.
Her demonic presence is balanced in the novel by Gloria Harper: barely 21, slender, church going, community helping damzel-in-distress that pulls the heartstrings of poor Harry right, everytime Dolly pulls left. She's trouble, too, for all her angelic countenance.
Madox illusion of being in control of his own life will be tested even further once he sets his eyes on some easy money : the poorly guarded city bank.
So this is how the pieces of the game are layed out initially on the chessboard of this classic noir masterpiece. Like in other similar books from the period, I had the premonition of trouble, of inevitable doom, of a cruel god moving the people around according to his rigid rules (the code said "crime doesn't pay"), of Harry as a moth trapped inside a glass bowl while he still thinks he can escape his fate. This tragic angle of paying the cost for living outside the law ( When you break the law you can forget about playing the averages because you have to win all the time. ) is something I feel is lacking in more modern crime novels and movies. Now the criminal is some super smart, likable rogue who usually gets the loot, and then retires to some tropical paradise island to sip polichrome cocktails in the company of the hot female cop who chased him.
The second thing that makes The Hot Spot masterful and I feel is kinda lost today is the style: the minimalist approach in presentation, the atmosphere, the wisecracks, the tough guy talk, the emotional intensity - everything packed in less than 200 pages. I would not add or remove a single phrase from the novel. I felt the same way about Goodis and Cain. Either the public expectations have changed, or the editors prefer to sell books by the pound, but most of the recent crime novels I've tried have at least three times the length and half the story.
One final note about the movie adaptation : check it out, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly are spot on, and the whole claustrophobic pressure of high summer in a very small town captured just right. Take some notes of the soundtrack : Taj Mahal and John Lee Hooker are flawlees as background music when reading the novel.
March 30, 2021
An equally good title for this might have been "Ripe for the Picking". When Harry Madox blows into town, looking to leave his troubles behind, there are some temptations that he just can't resist.
"Well? she said. She sat on the chair with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching and stared at me, sulky-eyed, over ripe, and spoiling, and said, Well? Well?"
Williams demonstrates an amazing flair for suspense and creates a fantastically nuanced view of Madox, walking a fine line between painting him as a kind of selfish (if not ruthless), insolent, bull headed grifter and a guy that's actually sympathetic, smart and yearns to settle down with the girl he's unexpectedly falling in love with. Madox's instincts for trouble (or perhaps lack of instincts for avoiding it) land him in hot water, despite the fact that he should know better. When a blackmailer comes out of the woods the story takes on a series of chilling "I know what you did last summer" twists that ratchet up the suspense and sucking you down, along with Madox, into a bottomless pit of despair and desperation as he sees everything he's yearning for pushed farther and farther out of reach.
"Well? she said. She sat on the chair with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching and stared at me, sulky-eyed, over ripe, and spoiling, and said, Well? Well?"
Williams demonstrates an amazing flair for suspense and creates a fantastically nuanced view of Madox, walking a fine line between painting him as a kind of selfish (if not ruthless), insolent, bull headed grifter and a guy that's actually sympathetic, smart and yearns to settle down with the girl he's unexpectedly falling in love with. Madox's instincts for trouble (or perhaps lack of instincts for avoiding it) land him in hot water, despite the fact that he should know better. When a blackmailer comes out of the woods the story takes on a series of chilling "I know what you did last summer" twists that ratchet up the suspense and sucking you down, along with Madox, into a bottomless pit of despair and desperation as he sees everything he's yearning for pushed farther and farther out of reach.
May 15, 2023
02/2016
Torn between a review of four and a review of five ... Went with five, because once the story got going, it had top level suspense and drive. Seems like a typical noir plot, but ends a mythic tale of guilt and consequences.
Torn between a review of four and a review of five ... Went with five, because once the story got going, it had top level suspense and drive. Seems like a typical noir plot, but ends a mythic tale of guilt and consequences.
November 20, 2020
I’d forgotten just how subversive this 1953 Williams noir was. Unlike some of his other blackmail driven plots - The Big Bite and A Touch of Death, for example - which both feature an everyman protagonist narrator driven to crime by hard luck and the lure of a sexy woman, Harry Madox is a criminal from the get go. In this novel Charles Williams and Jim Thompson are simpatico. The other writer I kept thinking about when casting for comparisons, however, is Cornell Woolrich, because for much of the novel we have unrelenting fear, dread, paranoia, and a mind threatening to unhinge with the ticking clock. Plenty of reviews describe the plot, so I will just give you the ingredients: a smooth-talking amoral drifter; a reckless femme-fatale; a nice girl hiding nasty secrets; a scummy blackmailer; a crafty Sheriff; a sultry small town in Texas; and a bank begging to be robbed. There's a 1990 movie version titled The Hot Spot. Directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly. The movie is pretty darn faithful to the novel, which is not so surprising as the screenplay was originally written by Charles Williams (with Nona Tyson) in 1962. The scenes are all there. The only thing the movie really couldn’t duplicate from the novel is the narrative interiority, and not having that to amp up the in-between scene tension made the movie a bit flatter than the novel. What the faithful scene rendering of the movie does is reflect back how many great scenes the novel has. An awesome noir not to be missed.
August 28, 2015
Published as Hell Hath No Fury by Gold Medal in 1953 and as The Hot Spot for its trade paperback release by Vintage Crime in 1981, this was my introduction to the pulp fiction of Texas author Charles Williams, a 10th grade dropout from San Angelo who joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at the age of 20. Williams began publishing while earning a living as an electronics inspector and this, his fourth novel, is suspense wired at an precision level and kept me tuned through the end.
The tale is narrated by Harry Madox, new arrival in an unnamed town where the business district is one street wide and three blocks long. Thirty years old, Madox starts work as a used car salesman for George Harshaw, a man who made his bones in the loan business and recently began selling automobiles. Madox is hot, bothered and lazy and when ordered to repossess a '54 Ford, begins to argue with his boss, until he gets a look at the girl being sent with him, Harshaw's 22-year-old loan officer Gloria Harper.
Gloria is nervous about taking the Ford from its deadbeat owner, a lug named Frank Sutton who lives far off the highway amid heavy pine and abandoned farmhouses. She lies to Madox about locating Sutton by the river and collecting a payment, but when big boy returns home, Madox detects something salacious and familiar in the way he talks to the loan officer on the porch. Madox assumes Gloria is that kind of girl and returning to town without the Ford, plants a kiss on her lips, much to her displeasure.
Things start heating up in town. Madox visits the bank and finds the place deserted, save for one feeble teller, due to a fire that every able-bodied soul has gone to watch. Later, Madox receives a visit from Dolores Harshaw, his boss's shapely and much younger wife. He offers to help her unload old newspapers to the storeroom the Harshaws keep downtown. Madox takes a look around and notes how quick the building would go up in a fire. Back at his airless boardinghouse room, the idea takes root:
Why kid myself? I wasn't a salesman. And I couldn't go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn't getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I'd quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I'd had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn't just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.
It may come as a surprise to readers unfamiliar with hard-boiled crime, but Madox's scheme does not go as planned(!) With her husband out of town, Dolores invites Madox over to move more than newspapers. Her combustive and unpredictable whims surface to give Madox an alibi from the cagey sheriff who suspects him of bank robbery, but her price does not come cheaply. He begins courting Gloria Harper, "a sweet kid from a nice family", behaving as a gentleman and keeping her out of his scheme, but more curious than ever about what Frank Sutton has on her.
The Hot Spot is the consummate caper, loaded with whiskey breathed lingo, tempestuous atmosphere, an well-designed plot but most surprising, characters I wanted to see get away with the score. Whichever film noir actor you hear when you read Harry Madox (I couldn't get Robert Mitchum out of my head), Williams's prose swings:
She's a psycho, I thought. She's completely off her trolley. One minute she's a blackmailer as cagey as Kruschev, and the next she wants to gambol half-naked on a pile of sawdust like a babe on an absinthe jag. It made me cold to think about it. This was the oversexed and rudderless maniac who could throw me back to the cops at any time.
What made the novel light up for me is that I came to respect Harry Madox, I came to like Harry Madox. The character transitions away from the horny fop that's practically a trademark in the genre and becomes a guy falling in love, whose ingenuity and work ethic open up the road for an honest living and a deep relationship. As the original title indicates, Madox has one problem pop up. Williams totally invested me in wanting to see Madox's dilemma resolved. It's a flawless novel.
In the early '60s, Charles Williams adapted a screenplay with Nona Tyson (Tyson later worked for Universal Pictures and became assistant to Steven Spielberg as he transitioned from television to feature films.) Williams committed suicide in 1975 and his script remained unproduced, until Orion Pictures offered the project to director Dennis Hopper as a follow-up to Colors in 1988. Hopper jettisoned a newer draft and revised the original by Williams & Tyson, casting Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, Barry Corbin and William Sadler in the 1990 film.
The tale is narrated by Harry Madox, new arrival in an unnamed town where the business district is one street wide and three blocks long. Thirty years old, Madox starts work as a used car salesman for George Harshaw, a man who made his bones in the loan business and recently began selling automobiles. Madox is hot, bothered and lazy and when ordered to repossess a '54 Ford, begins to argue with his boss, until he gets a look at the girl being sent with him, Harshaw's 22-year-old loan officer Gloria Harper.
Gloria is nervous about taking the Ford from its deadbeat owner, a lug named Frank Sutton who lives far off the highway amid heavy pine and abandoned farmhouses. She lies to Madox about locating Sutton by the river and collecting a payment, but when big boy returns home, Madox detects something salacious and familiar in the way he talks to the loan officer on the porch. Madox assumes Gloria is that kind of girl and returning to town without the Ford, plants a kiss on her lips, much to her displeasure.
Things start heating up in town. Madox visits the bank and finds the place deserted, save for one feeble teller, due to a fire that every able-bodied soul has gone to watch. Later, Madox receives a visit from Dolores Harshaw, his boss's shapely and much younger wife. He offers to help her unload old newspapers to the storeroom the Harshaws keep downtown. Madox takes a look around and notes how quick the building would go up in a fire. Back at his airless boardinghouse room, the idea takes root:
Why kid myself? I wasn't a salesman. And I couldn't go back to sea, if I wanted to. I wasn't getting any younger, and another whole year was down the drain. I'd quit two jobs and got fired from three, and I'd had to get out of Houston in a hurry after a brawl with a longshoreman over some turning-basin chippy. We tore up a lot of fixtures in a cheap beer joint by the time the thing became general, and somewhere in the confusion the longshoreman had his jaw broken with a bottle of Bacardi rum. It wasn't just an isolated incident, either; life was just a succession of jams over floozies of one kind or another.
It may come as a surprise to readers unfamiliar with hard-boiled crime, but Madox's scheme does not go as planned(!) With her husband out of town, Dolores invites Madox over to move more than newspapers. Her combustive and unpredictable whims surface to give Madox an alibi from the cagey sheriff who suspects him of bank robbery, but her price does not come cheaply. He begins courting Gloria Harper, "a sweet kid from a nice family", behaving as a gentleman and keeping her out of his scheme, but more curious than ever about what Frank Sutton has on her.
The Hot Spot is the consummate caper, loaded with whiskey breathed lingo, tempestuous atmosphere, an well-designed plot but most surprising, characters I wanted to see get away with the score. Whichever film noir actor you hear when you read Harry Madox (I couldn't get Robert Mitchum out of my head), Williams's prose swings:
She's a psycho, I thought. She's completely off her trolley. One minute she's a blackmailer as cagey as Kruschev, and the next she wants to gambol half-naked on a pile of sawdust like a babe on an absinthe jag. It made me cold to think about it. This was the oversexed and rudderless maniac who could throw me back to the cops at any time.
What made the novel light up for me is that I came to respect Harry Madox, I came to like Harry Madox. The character transitions away from the horny fop that's practically a trademark in the genre and becomes a guy falling in love, whose ingenuity and work ethic open up the road for an honest living and a deep relationship. As the original title indicates, Madox has one problem pop up. Williams totally invested me in wanting to see Madox's dilemma resolved. It's a flawless novel.
In the early '60s, Charles Williams adapted a screenplay with Nona Tyson (Tyson later worked for Universal Pictures and became assistant to Steven Spielberg as he transitioned from television to feature films.) Williams committed suicide in 1975 and his script remained unproduced, until Orion Pictures offered the project to director Dennis Hopper as a follow-up to Colors in 1988. Hopper jettisoned a newer draft and revised the original by Williams & Tyson, casting Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, Barry Corbin and William Sadler in the 1990 film.
January 14, 2024
Pitch-perfect noir with brilliant POV. I'll be seeking out more Charles Williams post-haste.
July 21, 2008
With his fourth novel, Charles Williams hits his stride. In Hell Hath No Fury, an Average Joe moves to a small town to work at a used car lot, and he happens to notice how easy it would be to rob the local bank. Women and noir ensue. This is a classic novel of its type, in which a sympathetic protagonist does rather unsympathetic things, but we root for him all the same as events spiral out of his control. In order to enjoy books of this sort, readers must grant writers a bit of latitude in the realm of plausibility; nevertheless, I do wish that Williams had done a little bit more to convince me that this particular Average Joe would jump at the chance to rob a bank. But this is a minor quibble with an excellent book.
May 18, 2024
There was too much of it and it was coming at me too fast to see the whole picture at once. Crazy pieces of it kept flashing up in the sick confusion of my thoughts, and then they'd be gone and there'd be something else.
A delicious post-WWII roman noir with all the right elements: a down-on-his-luck drifter, an innocent young girl, a manipulative married woman, a small Texas town, and a virginal bank just waiting to be knocked over. The James M. Cain vibes are strong, as are those of Jim Thompson and David Goodis, not only in the story of criminal opportunity and unexpected consequences, but also in the simple, sparse prose that nevertheless reveals the dark undercurrents lurking just below the surface.
A delicious post-WWII roman noir with all the right elements: a down-on-his-luck drifter, an innocent young girl, a manipulative married woman, a small Texas town, and a virginal bank just waiting to be knocked over. The James M. Cain vibes are strong, as are those of Jim Thompson and David Goodis, not only in the story of criminal opportunity and unexpected consequences, but also in the simple, sparse prose that nevertheless reveals the dark undercurrents lurking just below the surface.
February 14, 2021
A fun and enjoyable light read with lots of interesting twists and turns.
Poor old Harry Madox sure got some bad breaks!
The Pulp Fiction Goodreads group's read for February and one of my favourites of those.
Poor old Harry Madox sure got some bad breaks!
The Pulp Fiction Goodreads group's read for February and one of my favourites of those.
March 19, 2014
Classic 50's pulp fiction. Harry Madox is a drifter, and drifts right into a maelstrom of opportunity and temptation; a bank begging to be robbed, a beautiful young girl with troubles, his boss' bored wife who is trouble.
"I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn't sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, laboring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I'd start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to the other thing I couldn't entirely forget.
It was that bank with nobody in it."
Madox isn't a career criminal, as far as we know (but Madox doesn't tell us much about his life before he arrived in this sleepy town to be hooked by the lovely Gloria and the provocative bank): he's an ordinary guy who has the misfortune to have temptation ladled from every direction. Which temptation should he resist? Gloria is delicious and (for some reason) falls for him. The bank is easy and he deserves this once-in-a-lifetime chance to change his no-account drifting life. The boss' wife would be dangerous anywhere but in this gossip powered backwater she is a volatile explosive charge. This Harry Madox is a fatalist and a pessimist - he knows he doesn't deserve the innocent Gloria, he expects the bank job to go wrong and he is certain the boss' wife will bring disaster. He dives in anyway, taking his immediate pleasures as they come, hoping something will turn up to save him from his pre-ordained doom.
Just before his darkest hour Madox is thrown a lifeline (via someone else's misfortune)and his new dawn suddenly looks good. Charles Williams is a cruel author, though, and Madox's upward curve suddenly spirals out of his control, again.
Williams knits all the false starts and character weaknesses together to create a propulsive narrative that could/should be devoured in one sitting. He handles the pace and suspense with the diligent care of a provocateur, and the climax matches the build up.
The copy I read was published in 1969 (priced 4/-, or 20 pence in modern Sterling), and, if anything, the faded print against the almost brown paper added to the pulp experience.
At the same time, Williams' 1953 work is full of reminders that it was written over 60 years ago - "Negro maids" and "Negro youths" drift along in the background, with dialogue to match, "Mister Julian? You theah, Mr Julian? Wheahbouts the fiah?" Of course, it may be unfair to make certain judgement calls on Williams so long after the period he was working in. Still, I'm fairly sure the white characters in 'The Hot Spot' aren't speaking with my accent (working class, north east of Ireland), so if I can read the dialogue that Williams puts into the Texan(?) mouths of Madox, Gloria et al without a random phonetic prompt, I don't need one for the other characters either - and it jars.
A good read, nonetheless, and especially for any pulp fiction fans of the black n white movie era.
"I was still sweltering when I went back to the room. I couldn't sleep. In the next room an old man was reading aloud to his wife from the Bible, laboring slowly through the Book of Genesis, a begat at a time, and pronouncing it with the accent on the first syllable. I lay there on the hard slab of a bed in the heat and wondered when I'd start walking up the walls. Gloria Harper and Sutton kept going around and around in my mind, and a long time afterwards, just before I dropped off, I came back to the other thing I couldn't entirely forget.
It was that bank with nobody in it."
Madox isn't a career criminal, as far as we know (but Madox doesn't tell us much about his life before he arrived in this sleepy town to be hooked by the lovely Gloria and the provocative bank): he's an ordinary guy who has the misfortune to have temptation ladled from every direction. Which temptation should he resist? Gloria is delicious and (for some reason) falls for him. The bank is easy and he deserves this once-in-a-lifetime chance to change his no-account drifting life. The boss' wife would be dangerous anywhere but in this gossip powered backwater she is a volatile explosive charge. This Harry Madox is a fatalist and a pessimist - he knows he doesn't deserve the innocent Gloria, he expects the bank job to go wrong and he is certain the boss' wife will bring disaster. He dives in anyway, taking his immediate pleasures as they come, hoping something will turn up to save him from his pre-ordained doom.
Just before his darkest hour Madox is thrown a lifeline (via someone else's misfortune)and his new dawn suddenly looks good. Charles Williams is a cruel author, though, and Madox's upward curve suddenly spirals out of his control, again.
Williams knits all the false starts and character weaknesses together to create a propulsive narrative that could/should be devoured in one sitting. He handles the pace and suspense with the diligent care of a provocateur, and the climax matches the build up.
The copy I read was published in 1969 (priced 4/-, or 20 pence in modern Sterling), and, if anything, the faded print against the almost brown paper added to the pulp experience.
At the same time, Williams' 1953 work is full of reminders that it was written over 60 years ago - "Negro maids" and "Negro youths" drift along in the background, with dialogue to match, "Mister Julian? You theah, Mr Julian? Wheahbouts the fiah?" Of course, it may be unfair to make certain judgement calls on Williams so long after the period he was working in. Still, I'm fairly sure the white characters in 'The Hot Spot' aren't speaking with my accent (working class, north east of Ireland), so if I can read the dialogue that Williams puts into the Texan(?) mouths of Madox, Gloria et al without a random phonetic prompt, I don't need one for the other characters either - and it jars.
A good read, nonetheless, and especially for any pulp fiction fans of the black n white movie era.
March 2, 2021
There isn't a lot to say about this classic of the crime noir subgenre that hasn't been said by a murderer's row of critics, but I'll just say this: if you think of the quintessential noir story as being about a loser who looks a like a winner and then sets about proving the difference between the two — usually in pursuit of money, revenge or infatuation/lust/love/obsession — before either getting exactly what he deserves or getting away with less than deservingly, then THE HOT SPOT, originally titled HELL HATH NO FURY, deserves every bit of its critical acclaim (as well as a film treatment better than the campy, overheated 1990 vehicle starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly).
Further, THE HOT SPOT may be the high spot of its author, Charles Williams, and Williams is one of the genre's all-time greats, with a dark-coffee and dead-cigarette poetry of the damned on damned near every page. Examples like the following and three dozen like them are shot through with hot sleepless nights and cheap rented rooms and the insect crawl of dead-end time:
— "I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?"
— "There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon."
— "It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse."
— "You’re all right. You’re sweet. You’re a big ugly bastard with a face that’d stop a clock, but you’re sweet. You know what I mean?”
— "God knows I’ve always had some sort of affinity for gamey babes, but she was beginning to be a little rough even for me."
— "Madox, you might as well face it. You stick out in this thing like a cootch dancer at a funeral.”
— "She’s a psycho, I thought. She’s completely off her trolley. One minute she’s a blackmailer as cagey as Kruschev, and the next she wants to gambol half-naked on a pile of sawdust like a babe on an absinthe jag. It made me cold to think about it."
Further, THE HOT SPOT may be the high spot of its author, Charles Williams, and Williams is one of the genre's all-time greats, with a dark-coffee and dead-cigarette poetry of the damned on damned near every page. Examples like the following and three dozen like them are shot through with hot sleepless nights and cheap rented rooms and the insect crawl of dead-end time:
— "I sat in the room in my shorts and looked out the window at the back yard as the sun went down. It had a high board fence around it, a little grass turning brown with the heat, and a chinaberry tree with a dirty rabbit hutch leaning against it. This is the way it looks at thirty, I thought; anybody want to stay for forty?"
— "There’d be ten or fifteen thousand dollars or maybe more lying around in that comic-opera bank for a man with nerve enough to pick it up. And you could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it’s always afternoon."
— "It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse."
— "You’re all right. You’re sweet. You’re a big ugly bastard with a face that’d stop a clock, but you’re sweet. You know what I mean?”
— "God knows I’ve always had some sort of affinity for gamey babes, but she was beginning to be a little rough even for me."
— "Madox, you might as well face it. You stick out in this thing like a cootch dancer at a funeral.”
— "She’s a psycho, I thought. She’s completely off her trolley. One minute she’s a blackmailer as cagey as Kruschev, and the next she wants to gambol half-naked on a pile of sawdust like a babe on an absinthe jag. It made me cold to think about it."
February 12, 2021
As soon as you catch your breath, Williams doubles you over with a left hook to the liver.
January 18, 2023
Twenty eight year old Harry Maddox, who narrates, leaves Houston and drifts into a small, parched and fiercely hot Texas town looking for work. He finds it a car dealership and settles at a cheap and drab boarding house.
The boss's wife, Dolores, seduces Harry for what he thinks is a straight-forward one nighter, but she doesn’t see it that way and although she has no real feelings for him, she adds him to her collection, he could be her escape from a marriage barely holding together.
Harry meanwhile, falls for Gloria, who runs the loan office. When they date, Dolores is infuriated.
While all this is going on, Harry sees the opportunity to indulge in a little skullduggery. He watches a minor fire on the Main Street, and notices the bank is left unattended. But the Sheriff is a bit more clued in the Harry expected, and suspects him. Before he realises it he is drowning in a sea of lies as one transgression leads to the next.
Its a hell of a set up - a mouth-watering set of ingredients for a cracking noir; the unrealiable narrator, the beautiful but villainous young woman, the femme fatale who intends to let no one stand in her way, the simmering heat in the rural Texan backwater, the dubious set of characters, and not least, that paragon of the noir, a car dealership.
Williams certainly does it justice as events unfurl in unsparing prose.
The boss's wife, Dolores, seduces Harry for what he thinks is a straight-forward one nighter, but she doesn’t see it that way and although she has no real feelings for him, she adds him to her collection, he could be her escape from a marriage barely holding together.
Harry meanwhile, falls for Gloria, who runs the loan office. When they date, Dolores is infuriated.
While all this is going on, Harry sees the opportunity to indulge in a little skullduggery. He watches a minor fire on the Main Street, and notices the bank is left unattended. But the Sheriff is a bit more clued in the Harry expected, and suspects him. Before he realises it he is drowning in a sea of lies as one transgression leads to the next.
Its a hell of a set up - a mouth-watering set of ingredients for a cracking noir; the unrealiable narrator, the beautiful but villainous young woman, the femme fatale who intends to let no one stand in her way, the simmering heat in the rural Texan backwater, the dubious set of characters, and not least, that paragon of the noir, a car dealership.
Williams certainly does it justice as events unfurl in unsparing prose.
February 8, 2019
121110: good, fast read, but not deep, there is some pleasure in anticipating where the story is going in genre fiction and satisfaction when the story takes an unanticipated but correct twist. but this does not happen here. this is linear and too predictable. this makes me think of postman always rings twice death row confession, though the author is soon to be dead, he is condemned to be free. i think i wanted a conclusive, cathartic, and probably violent resolution to this story...
October 20, 2013
Pretty inspired sleaze from the unheralded king of erotic noir, Charles Williams. If you haven't seen the steamy Dennis Hopper movie starring Don Johnson, then check out the novel about the used car dealer who knocks off a bank while knocking around the local Madonna and the local whore, all within the same 190 pages. The pages will make your fingers burn and so will your pants!
May 24, 2019
"She went out. It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse."
One of the finer illustrations of Pascal's claim that all one's problems stem from an inability to sit alone in a room.
Tension raised by entertaining plot twists near end that were almost a surprise. Williams does a pretty good job of setting things up to keep you wondering until the payoff.
My favorite line: "All I have to do is step inside and turn and reach down, and before he gets his hand on that gun I'll have mine on his throat and turn the blackmailing bastard off like a leaky faucet."
Well-crafted sentence with four simple conjunctions setting up a marvelous simile.
One of the finer illustrations of Pascal's claim that all one's problems stem from an inability to sit alone in a room.
Tension raised by entertaining plot twists near end that were almost a surprise. Williams does a pretty good job of setting things up to keep you wondering until the payoff.
My favorite line: "All I have to do is step inside and turn and reach down, and before he gets his hand on that gun I'll have mine on his throat and turn the blackmailing bastard off like a leaky faucet."
Well-crafted sentence with four simple conjunctions setting up a marvelous simile.
May 2, 2023
A well written horror novel disguised as a crime novel with a mean streak. This is Williams's most popular novel, and I had high expectations but disliked the protagonist and found his character and some of his decisions unbelievable (cynical borderline psychopath goes goo goo over girl next door). This is a well thought out and well detailed novel which makes the parts that don't make sense stand out more. The experience was more frustrating than it should have been. I will probably try Williams again as I suspect this book is well known because of its more extreme twists, which I did not like.
August 27, 2012
The Hot Spot is a novel with the perfect mixture of greed, guilt, lust, revenge, and violence that exemplifies 50's noir. Harry Modox, a drifter, wanders into town one day and finds a job at a used car lot. Soon, he’s talked into robbing a bank and, before he knows it, he’s tangled up in murder, an affair with his boss’ wife, and a beautiful girl not entirely what she seems. Small town America is intimately felt, William’s characters are colorful and sleazy, and the plot is fast-paced and exiting.
November 24, 2013
I read this some time ago, and for some reason I thought this was a book by Charles Wileford (?). Anyway, this author did a wonderful job of concentrating on just what you needed for the story and no more. The setting, with its one-horse town and the one family in town with some money, will stick with you. The bored wife who could chop your nuts off if you do the wrong thing seemed like a real person in an era of bullshit femme fatales. The writing reminded me of Highsmith with a little Jim Thompson thrown in.
November 9, 2025
Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams (1953, 209 pgs., Kindle, $9.99) has been on my list for quite awhile and I've now read it for Noir-vember, 2025. This classic lived up to all the positive reviews I've seen over the years and it was a dark one...It's about a 30-year old con-man/scammer who arrives in town where he lands a job as a used car salesman...this leads to arson, bank robbery, a love triangle, and murder! In addition I found author Williams to be a suburb straight ahead writer, he might be the best of the '50's pack at crafting plot & prose. I highly recommend Hell Hath No Fury...5.0 outta 5.0....-It was made into a film called The Hot Spot (1990) staring Don Johnson & Jennifer Connelly which I'm going to watch this evening! :-)
September 29, 2025
"You can take just so much might-have-been."
I have been having a great week as far as my book selections are concerned, and I don't know how with my love of noir crime thrillers I had not come across this little gem before. First published in 1953 under a different name this is how a great noir novel is done no matter what you name it. Madox is a bad guy but he is deliciously good at it, femme fatale Mrs. Harshaw smoulders off the page, and the unrelenting suspense leads you to one heck of an ending. Highly recommend to any noir lover who might have missed it.
I have been having a great week as far as my book selections are concerned, and I don't know how with my love of noir crime thrillers I had not come across this little gem before. First published in 1953 under a different name this is how a great noir novel is done no matter what you name it. Madox is a bad guy but he is deliciously good at it, femme fatale Mrs. Harshaw smoulders off the page, and the unrelenting suspense leads you to one heck of an ending. Highly recommend to any noir lover who might have missed it.
November 12, 2024
Excellent noir crime novel with a completely unhinged femme fatale. Great character development, especially of the narrator Madox. I really felt for him and wanted him to get out of his predicament, but his series of bad choices quickly spirals out of control. The ending was a gut punch. One of the best noir novels I have read.
April 23, 2021
It's not often these days that I can sit and read for eight to ten hours straight- I think the last time that had happened was with Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler- but it happened again with this short crime/noir novel from 1952, The Hot Spot by Charles Williams, set in a small town in Texas (that was my impression, anyway- we're told that Houston is about an hour's drive south), decades later adapted into a movie directed by Dennis Hopper. The movie came out in 1990, only a year after '89's Dead Calm, which was also based on a Williams novel of the same name (having served in the Merchant Marine, he was apparently known for maritime thrillers, including one with a fantastic title- Scorpion Reef). Sounds like a good couple of years for Williams's work, although he wasn't around to enjoy it, having committed suicide in Los Angeles in 1975.
But about the book. What kind of crime/noir story is this? Well, it's not the kind with a P.I. or a detective. Representatives of the law are encountered, sure, but they don't play a large role. Instead, the story focuses on a drifter by the name of Maddox, who takes a job as a car salesman in the aforementioned small town. Like the people in town, we don't really know where he's from or what he's done before this. He tells people he's from New Orleans, because "it sounded as good as anywhere else." Obviously capable of criminal acts, he isn't totally unsympathetic- at least not to me. Early on, lying in bed in a sweaty boarding-house, with an old man loudly reading passages from the Bible in the next room, he starts to think about the money you could get from knocking over the local bank:
You could get away from the rat-race for a long time with that kind of money, with a brown-eyed girl on the beach somewhere in the Caribbean, sailing a catboat and going fishing off the reefs and drinking Cuba Libres where it's always afternoon.Some variation on this fantasy seems almost obligatory in the sub-genre, but that's why it takes a little skill on Williams's part to keep it from sounding like all the others you've read or heard. Or maybe I'm just overly impressed because I don't know what the hell a catboat is. Either way, you know immediately that Maddox is never going to taste the Cuba Libres, and the rest of the story takes on the inevitability of a myth.
Naturally, I didn't really expect this sordid-, disreputable-looking Black Lizard crime paperback to have much in common with the highbrow, artsy-fartsy German novel I'm currently reading, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. But after thinking about it for a few days, I realize that they do have something in common. They're both about inertia; about coming to a point in life where the adventure grinds to a shrieking halt. They're both about getting stuck in some seemingly timeless place, not being able to leave, and maybe not wanting to, ultimately. Both books, I think, could alternately be titled Purgatory.
Anyway, it's a page-turner with a real bummer of an ending. If you like Jim Thompson, you'll probably like this.
September 12, 2025
A classic of hardboiled crime fiction. Don't read this book if you like perfectly sketched characters who always act logical and reasonable. Don't read this novel if you expect a story to develop slowly over hundreds of pages. Don't read this book if you have problems with the one-sided perception of woman. But read this book if you like it when a story starts right in the middle. Read this novel if you like page-turners with a fast, but not too simple diction. And read this book, if you take pleasure of a story that doesn't play in a perfect world. 'The Hot Spot' is a world where you can't escape the consequences of the own evil deeds.
***UPDATE 2025***
I reread a different edition of the book and realized just afterwards here on Goodreads that I have read the novel before over ten years ago. Well, what should I say? The book definitely didn't age well. Even if you presume that the author didn't sketch the protagonist as a role model but as a sinister guy, it is extremly hard to observe the "hero" molesting women, beating up other guys and considering murder as a solution of his problems. The plot is still suspenseful and exciting, but for me, the reread was more of an historical study of pulp crime instead of an enjoyable reading experience.
***UPDATE 2025***
I reread a different edition of the book and realized just afterwards here on Goodreads that I have read the novel before over ten years ago. Well, what should I say? The book definitely didn't age well. Even if you presume that the author didn't sketch the protagonist as a role model but as a sinister guy, it is extremly hard to observe the "hero" molesting women, beating up other guys and considering murder as a solution of his problems. The plot is still suspenseful and exciting, but for me, the reread was more of an historical study of pulp crime instead of an enjoyable reading experience.
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