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Omnibus: Nothing in Her Way / River Girl
Nothing in Her Way presents a convoluted story of two con artists, while River Girl is a classic backwoods thriller about a man who falls for the wrong woman. Both of these novels were originally published in the early 1950’s by Gold Medal Books.
332 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 10, 2014
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28 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 20, 2022
One of the joys of reading American crime fiction is that it gives you an exaggerated version of the seedier side of American life. The characters are usually men who start drinking in the morning. Individualists who live in small towns. Real old school Americans who can live outdoors and do jobs with their hands. Beautiful women driven by lust and love for money. Not some Hollywood crap about yuppies or Mark Zuckerberg. The lives of these hard men and wild women really drives the imagination of a conformist middle class square like me.
Bad crime fiction writers fill their books with meaningless twists and pay little attention to detail. There are many bad crime fiction writers. Charles Williams books usually have complicated plots filled with some ingenious con jobs. But more importantly he pays attention to detail. And this is why he is one of my favorite writers of crime fiction.
Apart from two ingenious con jobs, Nothing in Her Way has some fine chapters where the tortured hero Mike Belen goes to live in a dusty small town called Wyecross. His life in the small town while he carries out a con job made me love this book more than anything.
Here is the hero Mike Belen’s first impression of Wyecross:
“Wyecross was a bleak little town lost in the desert like a handful of children’s toys dropped and scattered along the highway.”
“When I began to see the sand, I knew I was almost there. Beyond the rusty strands of barbed wire, it stretched away toward the horizon on both sides of the highway in desolate and wind-ruffled dunes, with only a tumbleweed or gaunt mesquite here and there to break the monotony of it. Then I could see the water tank up ahead.”
Here is how Belen, the first-person narrator describes his place of stay in Wyecross:
“It was a small cubbyhole as bleak as a Grosz drawing. The front of it was furnished with an iron bedstead and a shaky night table and an old rocker, while at the rear there was a sink and a two-burner gas stove on a table. He (hotel manager) bent down and stuck a match to the open gas heater, which had flakes of asbestos up the back behind the flame. The asbestos turned red with heat."
Williams knew how to invoke the atmosphere in a small town:
“I awoke at dawn on Sunday, and could hear the coyotes somewhere out on the prairie. It was funny. I thought, remembering, how only two or three could sound like thirty.”
Not the sounds of cars and trucks. But wild animals.
I wish more crime fiction writers had taken a leaf out of Williams’ book and given the reader a look around the small towns and seedy hotels inhabited by the characters.
Nothing in Her Way is mostly a tale of revenge. A couple of childhood friends – Mike Belen and Cathy Dunbar hook up to take revenge on the men who destroyed the business in which both their fathers were partners.
The two con jobs – one involving land and the other involving betting on horses must surely have inspired the writer of The Sting – the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film.
Williams does go over the top at times with the twists. Belen and Cathy’s partners and pasts catch up with them quite often making parts of the book very confusing. The ending makes Belen a bit of an unusual hero. But the heroes of Williams’ novels are usually very decent men who are world weary and are forced into ridiculous con jobs by sensual women.
The book has a great beginning at a bar. After that it is one con job after the other. Some of them on the reader.
The parts are better than the sum. There were times when I wondered what this book could have been if Williams had cut down on the twists and paid more attention to character development. Cathy Dunbar is not as intriguing as Miss Harper in The Hot Spot or Madeline Butler in A Touch of Death.
The book comes with an introduction by Rick Ollerman. But it is more of a summary of Williams novels rather than a proper introduction. Williams committed suicide after the death of his wife from cancer.
I read River Girl (the other Williams novel in this edition) in 2015 and you can find my review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Bad crime fiction writers fill their books with meaningless twists and pay little attention to detail. There are many bad crime fiction writers. Charles Williams books usually have complicated plots filled with some ingenious con jobs. But more importantly he pays attention to detail. And this is why he is one of my favorite writers of crime fiction.
Apart from two ingenious con jobs, Nothing in Her Way has some fine chapters where the tortured hero Mike Belen goes to live in a dusty small town called Wyecross. His life in the small town while he carries out a con job made me love this book more than anything.
Here is the hero Mike Belen’s first impression of Wyecross:
“Wyecross was a bleak little town lost in the desert like a handful of children’s toys dropped and scattered along the highway.”
“When I began to see the sand, I knew I was almost there. Beyond the rusty strands of barbed wire, it stretched away toward the horizon on both sides of the highway in desolate and wind-ruffled dunes, with only a tumbleweed or gaunt mesquite here and there to break the monotony of it. Then I could see the water tank up ahead.”
Here is how Belen, the first-person narrator describes his place of stay in Wyecross:
“It was a small cubbyhole as bleak as a Grosz drawing. The front of it was furnished with an iron bedstead and a shaky night table and an old rocker, while at the rear there was a sink and a two-burner gas stove on a table. He (hotel manager) bent down and stuck a match to the open gas heater, which had flakes of asbestos up the back behind the flame. The asbestos turned red with heat."
Williams knew how to invoke the atmosphere in a small town:
“I awoke at dawn on Sunday, and could hear the coyotes somewhere out on the prairie. It was funny. I thought, remembering, how only two or three could sound like thirty.”
Not the sounds of cars and trucks. But wild animals.
I wish more crime fiction writers had taken a leaf out of Williams’ book and given the reader a look around the small towns and seedy hotels inhabited by the characters.
Nothing in Her Way is mostly a tale of revenge. A couple of childhood friends – Mike Belen and Cathy Dunbar hook up to take revenge on the men who destroyed the business in which both their fathers were partners.
The two con jobs – one involving land and the other involving betting on horses must surely have inspired the writer of The Sting – the Paul Newman-Robert Redford film.
Williams does go over the top at times with the twists. Belen and Cathy’s partners and pasts catch up with them quite often making parts of the book very confusing. The ending makes Belen a bit of an unusual hero. But the heroes of Williams’ novels are usually very decent men who are world weary and are forced into ridiculous con jobs by sensual women.
The book has a great beginning at a bar. After that it is one con job after the other. Some of them on the reader.
The parts are better than the sum. There were times when I wondered what this book could have been if Williams had cut down on the twists and paid more attention to character development. Cathy Dunbar is not as intriguing as Miss Harper in The Hot Spot or Madeline Butler in A Touch of Death.
The book comes with an introduction by Rick Ollerman. But it is more of a summary of Williams novels rather than a proper introduction. Williams committed suicide after the death of his wife from cancer.
I read River Girl (the other Williams novel in this edition) in 2015 and you can find my review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 22, 2018
River Girl by Charles Williams
America is a big country, and in the 1950s Americans still didn’t know one other all that well. To an untraveled guy from Boston, a West Virginian may as well have been a space alien for all the commonalities between their lives. This familiarity divide gave birth to a slew of erotic noir crime novels with the selling point that rural America was filled with hidden, unsophisticated, hot and horny babes ready for action with townies willing to venture into the woods. Sprinkle in some blackmail, murder, and a plot twist - and a crime fiction classic is born. This must have been a successful formula because books like Backwoods Teaser, Swamp Nymph, Hill Girl, Shack Road Girl, and Cracker Girl - complete with lurid, painted covers - apparently filled the drugstore spinner racks of the 1950s.
Charles Williams’ 1951 entry into this arena was his third novel, River Girl (later re-released as The Catfish Tangle). Williams’ later books featured nautical themes and brought him success and movie adaptations, but River Girl was before all that. Like many of the best from the era, River Girl was released as a paperback original by Fawcett Gold Medal and has found new life thanks to a reprint from Stark House Books, packaged as a double along with Williams’ 1954 release, Nothing in Her Way.
The short novel stars Jack Marshall as a somewhat crooked deputy working for a very crooked small-town sheriff. Jack serves as the boss’ troubleshooter and bagman for graft collected from the local backroom gambling parlors a whorehouse selling too-young merchandise. Despite his supplementary income, Jack is going broke and restless with a disinterested wife at home who doesn’t appreciate him.
During a solo fishing trip down the river, Jack finds a shack deep in the swamp where an unlikely couple lives. After meeting Doris for the first time while her husband is away, Jack is immediately smitten. All he can think about is Doris despite the intense pressure he’s under from preacher working to shut down the town’s sin parlors and a grand jury convening to investigate local corruption. When Jack’s infatuation with comely Doris is too much to handle, he pays her another visit and learns that the river girl’s story is far more complex than he ever imagined. Even with the impossible hurdles, could they have a life together?
Man, Charles Williams sure could write. The lust, humidity, and pressure Jack experiences throughout this short novel is palpable. The sexual chemistry between Jack and Doris is hot but never graphic, and the culture of rationalized small town corruption is fully realized thanks to Williams ability to put us squarely in Jack’s narrative mindset. The plot twists are ingenious and largely realistic and the tension builds to a violent, action-packed climax. Throughout the book, Williams adeptly walks the line between a noir crime novel and a forbidden romance story and it works quite well - all the way up to the satisfying conclusion.
Put this one in your “must read” pile.
America is a big country, and in the 1950s Americans still didn’t know one other all that well. To an untraveled guy from Boston, a West Virginian may as well have been a space alien for all the commonalities between their lives. This familiarity divide gave birth to a slew of erotic noir crime novels with the selling point that rural America was filled with hidden, unsophisticated, hot and horny babes ready for action with townies willing to venture into the woods. Sprinkle in some blackmail, murder, and a plot twist - and a crime fiction classic is born. This must have been a successful formula because books like Backwoods Teaser, Swamp Nymph, Hill Girl, Shack Road Girl, and Cracker Girl - complete with lurid, painted covers - apparently filled the drugstore spinner racks of the 1950s.
Charles Williams’ 1951 entry into this arena was his third novel, River Girl (later re-released as The Catfish Tangle). Williams’ later books featured nautical themes and brought him success and movie adaptations, but River Girl was before all that. Like many of the best from the era, River Girl was released as a paperback original by Fawcett Gold Medal and has found new life thanks to a reprint from Stark House Books, packaged as a double along with Williams’ 1954 release, Nothing in Her Way.
The short novel stars Jack Marshall as a somewhat crooked deputy working for a very crooked small-town sheriff. Jack serves as the boss’ troubleshooter and bagman for graft collected from the local backroom gambling parlors a whorehouse selling too-young merchandise. Despite his supplementary income, Jack is going broke and restless with a disinterested wife at home who doesn’t appreciate him.
During a solo fishing trip down the river, Jack finds a shack deep in the swamp where an unlikely couple lives. After meeting Doris for the first time while her husband is away, Jack is immediately smitten. All he can think about is Doris despite the intense pressure he’s under from preacher working to shut down the town’s sin parlors and a grand jury convening to investigate local corruption. When Jack’s infatuation with comely Doris is too much to handle, he pays her another visit and learns that the river girl’s story is far more complex than he ever imagined. Even with the impossible hurdles, could they have a life together?
Man, Charles Williams sure could write. The lust, humidity, and pressure Jack experiences throughout this short novel is palpable. The sexual chemistry between Jack and Doris is hot but never graphic, and the culture of rationalized small town corruption is fully realized thanks to Williams ability to put us squarely in Jack’s narrative mindset. The plot twists are ingenious and largely realistic and the tension builds to a violent, action-packed climax. Throughout the book, Williams adeptly walks the line between a noir crime novel and a forbidden romance story and it works quite well - all the way up to the satisfying conclusion.
Put this one in your “must read” pile.
July 25, 2020
[for River Girl] As soon as you regain your balance, Williams cracks you with an uppercut to the chin.
February 4, 2025
I am a big fan of American noir authors. I was not familiar with Charles Williams’s books so really appreciated that this edition came with an excellent introduction by Rick Ollerman. I read Nothing in Her Way based on the review by Goodreads author James Thane, (whose reviews I follow) and who concluded “The cons are intricate and it's fun to watch them unfold, and the characters and dialogue are right out of the golden age of the pulp novel”. River Girl is quite different, much more of a crime novel, although there are similar elements. From the beginning you know it is just not going to end well, “ but another Williams technique continues to emerge here: the perfect crime that turns out to be not so perfect” (from the Ollerman introduction). It is quite a page Turner and makes me want to find more of these Gold Medal imprint books.
May 7, 2014
I enjoyed the 1st half of this book. Gambler teams up with his ex-wife con artist to help swindle two men the ex-wife considers responsible for destroying her father financially.
I realized at the half-way point that I'd read this book a couple of years ago. Charles Williams is such a superior author that I really didn't care.
Until I got a few pages past the half-way mark -after which it became a grueling read.
I also read the 2nd book in this Stark House Press two-fer this past year.
If you're new to Charles Williams, maybe start with The Hot Spot or Go Home Stranger or even better, The Diamond Bikini.
If you're already a fan of Charles Williams, then ...you need this is in your collection.
This would rate 3 stars if not for the superb Rick Ollerman introduction.
May 17, 2014
I’d read Dead Calm (after seeing the movie) and liked it, but never came across another by this author.
In River Girl, a small-town sheriff falls fast and hard for a woman he meets way back in a swamp. Turns out he’s not happy with his wife and she’s not happy with her husband. There’s only one way out: kill the husband and run away together. The situation is complicated by impending corruption charges against the sheriff and deputy, and further complicated by the sheriff’s girlfriend. The tension mounts (although there’s some padding) and the ending is devastating.
Nothing in Her Way is about a man recruited by a con artist of his acquaintance to run a scam. But what a coincidence: the man’s ex-wife is also part of it, and the scam is to take the man who destroyed their fathers’ careers. Interesting con artistry and big sting (actually reminiscent of The Sting) involving a horse race. The ending is quite good.
In River Girl, a small-town sheriff falls fast and hard for a woman he meets way back in a swamp. Turns out he’s not happy with his wife and she’s not happy with her husband. There’s only one way out: kill the husband and run away together. The situation is complicated by impending corruption charges against the sheriff and deputy, and further complicated by the sheriff’s girlfriend. The tension mounts (although there’s some padding) and the ending is devastating.
Nothing in Her Way is about a man recruited by a con artist of his acquaintance to run a scam. But what a coincidence: the man’s ex-wife is also part of it, and the scam is to take the man who destroyed their fathers’ careers. Interesting con artistry and big sting (actually reminiscent of The Sting) involving a horse race. The ending is quite good.
February 14, 2023
River Girl was my third Charles Williams novel. I went in with high expectations because of the first two, and was not disappointed. It's probably time for me to declare him my favorite noir author. I love everything about his writing. He wrote 22 novels before committing suicide in the early '70's. I will track down the other 19 or run out of time trying.
This novel from 1951 is gloriously bleak, with a deeply flawed but somehow likable protagonist. And of course, a beautiful woman that he falls for. As in all great noir novels, there is a growing sense of impending doom, a gnawing in your gut as you read.
A side note...as a kid and young adult I did a lot of fresh water bass fishing. Early in this novel the protagonist goes fresh water bass fishing. Talk about nailing it. The descriptions of working a lure and catching a bass were so spot on I was having vivid flashbacks. The difference being that when I went fishing as a young man in the deep wilderness I never met a beautiful young woman who would turn my life upside down.
Special thanks to Stark House Press for reprinting this 72-year-old novel, which would be almost impossible to find in its original form without paying an exorbitant price.
This novel from 1951 is gloriously bleak, with a deeply flawed but somehow likable protagonist. And of course, a beautiful woman that he falls for. As in all great noir novels, there is a growing sense of impending doom, a gnawing in your gut as you read.
A side note...as a kid and young adult I did a lot of fresh water bass fishing. Early in this novel the protagonist goes fresh water bass fishing. Talk about nailing it. The descriptions of working a lure and catching a bass were so spot on I was having vivid flashbacks. The difference being that when I went fishing as a young man in the deep wilderness I never met a beautiful young woman who would turn my life upside down.
Special thanks to Stark House Press for reprinting this 72-year-old novel, which would be almost impossible to find in its original form without paying an exorbitant price.
November 20, 2022
Firmly set in the 50's
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews