Customer Reviews

Soft Touch (Gold Medal 1-3957)

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The lead character is trapped in a loveless marriage to a girl who spends her life drinking, he works for her father's company and yearns for the secretary.

Enter an old war buddy who has a proposition for him, they are going to steal some money and become wealthy. He can leave his wife and job and run off with the secretary. Sounds too good to be true.

As usual, things don't go to plan and Macdonald briskly tells us what happens when there is greed involved in ones life.

The book is solid, very much like some written by Jim Thompson and David Goodis (which is a good thing), maybe a smidgen too brisk as developments take a life of their own as the 160 pages unfold.

Meet Jerry Jamison, age 36, a typical law abiding suburbanite. Soft Touch starts out with Jerry contemplating divorce from Lorraine, his spoiled lush of a wife. It's the 1950s and, except for Hollywood actors, the idea of divorce is rather radical. Still, it's fair to say that Jerry is a pretty average middle class kind of guy.

Now meet Vince, an old Army buddy whom Jerry has not seen or heard from in thirteen years. Vince is a soldier-of-fortune type who makes his home in an unnamed South American country. Out of the blue, Vince pays a visit to the Jamisons in their tastefully appointed suburban home. Once Vince gets Jerry alone, he offers his old pal a business proposition. One that Jerry cannot bring himself to turn down.

Vince knows that a large amount of illicit cash will soon be arriving at the far off Tampa airport and he has a foolproof plan to steal it. All he needs is someone he can trust to drive the getaway car. That's where Jerry comes in. And for his trouble, Jerry stands to earn at least 1 million dollars, perhaps significantly more.

I won't give away any more of the plot but suffice it to say here's where things start to get really interesting. With each successive chapter, Jerry's circumstances steadily deteriorate until he ultimately finds himself trapped in a hellish nightmare of his own making.

Pulp fiction really doesn't get any better than this. The plot is an interesting one and features a number of unexpected twists. MacDonald's descriptive prose is consistently first rate; evocative and at times almost poetic. Soft Touch is a masterfully written tour de force. Very highly recommended.