Customer Reviews

A Hell of a Woman

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jim Thompson & Larry Brown have at least one thing in common...happy endings and classic good guys are almost impossible to find in their books. In the hit or miss world of Jim Thompson novels this one certainly hits...hard! Hell Of A Woman is an ugly story that features characters with few, if any, redeeming qualities. This has surpassed The Killer Inside as my favorite Thompson novel. The suspense and surprise twists that books like The Alcoholics lack can be found here in spades. Thompson seems a little too at home in this setting of paranoia, sex & crime. Its one shortcoming is typical of Thompson stories...it does occasionally come unwravelled, though not often enough to matter. I honestly didn't know how this one was going to turn out. You have the general idea of what's going down, but you can never be sure who's going to fall and who's going to get away with it. Thompson is a master of this hard-boiled genre and this is surely a highlight in an up and down career. Curl up around an ashtray and enjoy!

I'd heard high-praise for Mr. Thompson's books--from Stephen King to James Ellroy--but it wasn't until I read A Hell of a Woman that I became a believer. It's not only dark, like you'd expect, but alive! The book gets inside your head and won't leave, even after you've finished the last page. Images you will never shake! Read it!

Frank Dillon is working outside sales in the rain when a flash of lightening illuminates a woman in a window and thus begins one of Thompson's wildest novels.
Dillon in A Hell of a Woman sees his whole life as having been squandered on one worthless woman after another, so much so that all women become a blur. But just as they are crowding into one person, Frank is turning into two; halfway through the book he creates a new persona, and by the end he's speaking out of both sides of his mouth.
The text at the end splits into lines of alternating type one italic and the other regular print, so that we actually read
two stories at once. One is a fantasty version of events and the other is what is really happening. I read
the last two pages seperating out the italics and the print and reading them seperately and I understood the ending better. Thompson has made a killer duet or killer in stereo with this novel and it is one wild ride.

This novel deserves to be known as one of Thompson's best. Dolly Dillon may not appear to be as menacing as Lou Ford, but he is, if possible, more insane. Population 1280, Savage Night, The Nothing Man, After Dark, My Sweet, and The Killer Inside Me all feature 1st-person narrators with mental problems, but none of them have a problem like Dillon. Read to the end to see what I mean.

The story's narrator Dolly Dillon is so exquisitely creepy. A Hell of a Woman is the type of book that leaves you feeling a bit disturbed when you finish reading. A fabulous journey into the dark side of humanity. I can't wait to read another Jim Thompson novel.

"A Hell of a Woman" is somewhat similar to another Jim Thompson classic, "The Killer Inside Me" in that it is a story of murder and mayhem told in the first person through the eyes of the killer. Like "Killer," Frank Dillon, the protagonist here, has deep rooted issues involving women. In fact, the woman of the title could be any of several he describes, including his hell-on-wheels wife. The plot is right out of classic noir, as Dillon hatches an elaborate double murder scheme in order to make a huge score, win the girl he loves and escape his small town life and cruddy job as a salesman working for an abusive boss. Things go awry, as they usually do in these tales, and Dillon has to resort to further violence in a vain attempt to keep his plans from unravelling.

The frank sexuality, gritty violence an unrepentant nature of the central character were probably quite a shock to readers when this book was first published in the early 1950s. It will, however, seem fairly tame to modern readers. A quick read at 185 pages, it is the novel equivilent of film noir from the era of its publication, and can be enjoyed the same way those films are today.

'A Hell of a Woman" clearly falls right into Jim Thompson's turf: where a somewhat psychotic loser falls in love with Ms Wrong, then getting himself in deep trouble, and finally realizes that once again he hasn't moved forward in life at all (..but rather is worse off than when he started). Like is famous/notorious "The Killer Inside Me", Jim Thompson makes clever us of first-person narration including little slivers of where our 'loser' tells us his inner thoughts. Very chilling.

Bottom line: good story, well-written, fine characterizations. No complaints.

This is not your average noir crime book. There are no detectives or mobsters just a small crime on the edges of society and how it can drive a man to madness. Jim Thompson is a dark master who plunges the depths of human darkness. Hell of a Woman shows the lengths to which one man will twist the truth in order to rationalize his own evil actions. If you love twisted crime books look this one up.

Like so many other Jim Thompson novels, A Hell of a Woman dares to push the envelope as it not only defies convention but in fact shatters it. The story's narrator and protagonist (if that's the correct term) is an amoral sociopath with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, not one.

Frank "Dolly" Dillon works in the unenviable world of door to door sales and collections. A world where he routinely chisels from others even as he himself is being chiseled. Of course, since Dolly is the sole narrator of this rather improbable tale, we have only his word as to the truth of his own victimization. And since Dolly freely and often changes the description of events depending on which version is most advantageous to him at any given moment, his word is worth very little.

Conversational, folksy and informal, the narration itself provides a disturbing contrast to the shocking tale of greed, murder and endless duplicitity it describes. A Hell of a Woman is an excellent example of Thompson's use of unconventional storytelling as a means of revealing humanity's dark underbelly. Recommended to readers unafraid of catching a glimpse of the seamier side of life.

I think this is one of Thompson's best books. He may use the basic Cain formula, but he takes us a lot further inside the mind of his narrator; in fact, a little too far for comfort.