The Big Bite

John Harlan looks OK. You'd never guess that a drunk driver had run him off the road a year ago. But he's lost just enough off his speed and timing to end his professional football career, and he's not sure what comes next. Still, Mr. Cannon, the other driver in the accident, wound up dead, so Harlan figures he got the better end of the deal.

Opportunity knocks in the form of the insurance investigator who worked his case, who pops up to tell Harlan that he doesn't think that accident was accidental at all, and he really doesn't think that Cannon's death was accidental. He needs Harlan's help to prove that Cannon was murdered by Mrs. Cannon and her lover, with an eye toward blackmailing them to keep their crime a secret.

This is noir, and show more all of the obligatory elements are in place. Harlan is both tough and clever, albeit a bit less so (on both counts) than he might believe; Mrs. Cannon is a knockout who can give him a run for his money in both of those departments; and Harlan's beautifully conceived blackmail scheme will run perfectly right up to the moment when it suddenly doesn't.

The prose is hard-boiled to the core. Here's Harlan, on the end of his football career:

"When you're a half stride slow in the National Football League you're an old lady trying to walk up Niagara Falls with a crutch; they run down your throat faster than you can spit out your teeth. The old man gave me every chance in the world, and even tried me out in a defensive spot before he let me go, but it was no use. I couldn't pivot and swing fast enough to go with the play even when I saw it coming, and they ran through me like B-girls through a sailor's bankroll."

The characters are vivid; the story zips along with a brisk, chilly inevitability; the twists and turns -- especially the very last one -- are gloriously nasty; and everyone gets exactly what they deserve.

As for the obligatory old book language warning: This is a 1956 novel, and while some of the language is now archaic ("colored"), it was the proper and polite language to use at the time, and it is never used in a disrespectful or derogatory way.

This was my introduction to Charles Williams, who was quite successful in the 1950s and 1960s. These days, he seems to be mostly a critic's darling, the sort who pops up on lists of underrated crime writers. I would be more than happy to read more of his work if it's as good as this. show less

Charles Williams is, without question, one of the top writers to come out of the fifties. The Big Bite is typical of the excellence of his writing.

It is a story about a down-on-his-luck professional football player, who just can't seem to turn as quickly since he was rear-ended by a drunk. The doctors say his leg is all healed, but it just isn't the same and his career is over. "They'd stuck it back on, all right, and it looked like a leg, but something was gone." This isn't good. As the narrator, John Harlan, explains, "The only thing I'd ever owned in my life was a mechanism that ran like something bathed in oil and now it had been smashed and when they put it back together, something was gone." He's cut from the team and goes on a show more binge. "It was a honey and lasted a week." He wakes up in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere with some girl whose name he didn't recall and "She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up."

Five months after his injury, something about the incident is causing a private investigator to look into it again, off the record. The trail of intrigue leads Harlan to get involved in a blackmail scheme. What else does he have to lose? Why not? He should've had a long professional career and that's now all down the toilet. The blackmail leads him to get involved with a sexy siren that likes of which could barely be described.

The story is filled with tension. It is great from page one all the way to the bitter end. There is not one thing I would change about it if I were editing it. It is that good.

Who is the dish he is blackmailing? Why none other than the widow of the drunken jerk who ran him off the road and flushed his career down the drain. She is, in Harlan's mind, none other than the brown-eyed Fort Knox and he is going to get that woman to open up the vault and pour some gold out. But when he meets her, his mind starts melting: "She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere - just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist." "It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline." And, "You had the impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back, like a window-blind." Is John Harlan over his head when he tries to work Julia Cannon? "She was a cool devil in most ways, but when she was after fun she took it
fervently and unbuttoned."

I highly recommend this excellent pulp-era thriller. It has everything in it that you could want, murder, blackmail, fishing, football, intrigue, and the smartest, craftiest femme fatale to grace the pages of fiction. show less