Like Cornell Woolrich, Charles Williams was a brilliant and innovative author of hard boiled noir fiction. He was at his height in the 1950s and early 1960s and his debut novel was a million seller. Alas, like Woolrich, he is largely unknown today.
Once again, the movies come to the rescue. Thanks to them, for a time, his name and reputation were kept going. Back in 1990, around the time Jim Thompson's Hollywood re-birth was unfolding, The Hot Spot, directed by the infamous Dennis Hopper and starring Virginia Madsen, was released. Oddly enough, although the The Hot Spot is a title of a Williams novel, the story for the movie was actually taken from another Williams book, Hell Hath No Fury.
Too bad, because The Hot Spot is a fine novel with an intense plot.
It focuses on Madox, a discharged sailor from the US Navy who is languishing in a small Texas town, struggling to sell cars and pretending to belong in a world he quietly and secretly loathes. At the novel's outset, Madox is sent by Harshaw, his boss, to accompany Gloria, the office's book keeper, on a run to re-possess a car from Sutton, a notorious deadbeat customer. When the two get to Sutton's place, Madox finds that things get very strange. Sutton leers at Gloria and makes numerous insinuating comments about her. After she meets with Sutton in private, Gloria returns to tell Madox that they can leave. Madox asks about the car, but Gloria nervously brushes off his inquiries.
One of Madox's idle days on the car lot is interrupted by the arrival of Delores, Harshaw's wife. She invites Madox to ride with her up to an old house where a charity she volunteers for stores the old clothes and books it donates. Outwardly friendly but inwardly cursing, Madox accompanies her.
His annoyance dissolves once they get to the house, which he quickly finds is so overloaded with discarded furniture and clothes that it is a fire trap - "A fire marshal would take one look at it and run amok" he thinks.
Earlier in the book, Madox was sardonically amused by how easily distracted the local citizenry was by a fire downtown. Seeing the dangerous condition of the old house makes him him go to the washroom on the pretext of washing his hands of the grime and dirt that covered the house:
"There was no idea or plan in my mind...There was a window in the washroom all right, as I thought there would be. It was closed and locked with an ordinary latch on top of the lower sash...I reached over and took hold of the latch and unlocked it."
This is an interesting passage as it reveals the subtle genius of Williams's style. Madox insists he doesn't know what he's doing, but he's already setting in motion a plan to torch the house as a distraction for a robbery he would like to commit on a poorly protected bank downtown.
It's interesting how this passage ties together various elements brought out in the first twenty-five pages of the book. Madox sees the fuss caused by a fire which arouses his cynical contempt of the local populace. His dealings with Harshaw, the boss, are argumentative. Madox can't be bothered putting up with a man he thinks nothing more than a pompous shill: the early sections of the novel are littered with classic exchanges of cynical badinage between the two men.
It is the genius of Williams to show how this garden variety cynicism quickly degenerates into out right sociopathic behavior when Madox spots the unlocked latch in the washroom. The Hot Spot of the title is the fire Madox wants to set off, the sweltering heat the town is trapped in, the heat of Madox's passion for Gloria, with whom he starts a torrid affair, but it is also the heat of the barely contained rage and violence that burn under Madox's casually cynical and flippant exterior.
In the following chapters Madox travels far afield from the town to buy materials to build a bomb that will blow up the old house. Soon,he goes through with the plot, climbing through the unlocked washroom window to enter the house and plant the time bomb. When the house blows up, he robs the bank and afterward, as a newcomer in town, police finger him as a suspect and interrogate him in a brilliantly described scene that would fit in nicely in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Madox also learns that Gloria is being blackmailed by Sutton and that Delores has various extortion schemes in motion to ensnare him in her grip forever.
I won't go into detail the hair raising ways these plot lines are played out. That is a special pleasure that will be yours when you read this classic of noir fiction.
I'd love to read more of Williams's books, if I can find them. Hopefully, some of them have been re-issued as e-books. I'll investigate this in the near future.
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