Customer Reviews

A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime)

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It's too bad the characters in crime novels don't read them, because then Lee Scarborough would know better than to get involved with the seductive Diana James on a get-rich-quick scheme involving an empty house and $120,000 of embezzled bank funds. Lucky for us he doesn't, though, because A Touch of Death is the best novel yet to come out of the Hard Case Crime archives.

A Touch of Death is a reprint of a 1953 novel by Charles Williams, who also wrote the books that inspired the films The Hot Spot and Dead Calm. (Orson Welles had attempted to adapt the latter novel, but that film was never finished.)

Ex-college football star Lee Scarborough is just looking to sell his car for some much needed cash when he runs across Diana James on a visit to a potential buyer. Something about her topless sunbathing makes him ignore what he came for, but the mention of an easy sixty grand sharply focuses his attention. It seems Diana knows where the money is and wants Lee to go look for it -- somewhere in the embezzler's house -- and split the proceeds.

The widow, Madelon Butler, is expected to be away for a few days, so it should be a piece of cake. Soon, Lee finds himself rummaging through the house in question -- whereupon he runs smack dab into Madelon Butler! So he does the only thing he can think of to do, given the situation. What happens from then on is a complex melange of twists and turns that results one of the most shocking (yet completely organic) endings I've come across. This is one you'll be reading into the night.

Williams writes the silkiest prose I've ever come across. I slipped into A Touch of Death's combination of sex, scissors, and shady simoleons -- with not one but two femmes fatales -- like a warm oil bath. I usually take notes while reading in order to jot down specific details to include in my reviews, but this novel had me gripped from its first sentence. It didn't let go until I was fully swept up in its nightmarish ending like something out of Poe. And all told with such ease and confidence that it feels like it could have been written in one sitting, though I know it takes a lot of effort to make it look like that.

When a half-naked woman offers Lee Scarborough half of $120,000 to break into a home and steal a bag of money, he can't refuse. However, he soon discovers the woman was hiding secrets and that he is not the only one after the money.

Double- and triple-crosses ensue. However, while the plot of the missing money is very engaging, the real story here is Lee himself. He continues to overstep his boundaries and violate his conscience in oh-so-tiny steps, until the lure of the money causes him to lose his moral compass completely. A fascinating tale of greed and self-deceit.

If you were offered an opportunity to walk away with $120,000 free and clear, how far would you go to get it? The money has already been stolen from a bank. The thief who took it has already been murdered. All you need to do is search an empty house to find it and half of it is yours.

When the offer is made to Lee Scarborough, he decides to take the whole Easter Basket and go all the way to the very verge of madness to get it. The only thing standing in his way is Madelon Butler. Madelon is the wife of the bank's vice president, the guy who stole the money in the first place.

Before the age of identity theft and extortion of funds by wire transfer to offshore accounts, before the crime novel turned to psychopathic stalkers and serial killers with abused childhood's that made them who they are, there was the hard-boiled crime novel. The characters in these stories didn't need high tech gimmicks to help them, or social workers to explain away their actions. Greed, avarice, revenge and human emotions were enough to see them through the day.

The men in these stories were tough, resourceful, and daring. Their heads were made of concrete. Sap one down and all it took to get him back on his feet were two or three stiff shots of straight bourbon. The women were clever, cunning, and resilient and usually upstaged the men.

I'd give Charles Williams' A Touch of Death, five shining stars. It's a gem of the genre and a great entertaining read.

Sure, the plotting of A Touch of Death by Charles Williams isn't 100% airtight. But that's easy to forgive in view of the wonderfully hardboiled dialogue and the compellingly captivating and suspense filled narrative.
It wasn't too many years ago that Lee Scarborough was a college football player of some renown. But today he's a down on his luck salesman looking for a break. When he learns that there's $120,000 in embezzled bank funds ripe for the plucking, he decides to go after it. Little does he realize he is about to cross paths with Madelon Butler, an aristocratic beauty with ice water where her blood should be.
Lee naively believes he can outsmart Madelon. Trouble is, he's playing checkers while Madelon is playing three dimensional chess. As the fast paced story unfolds, Lee's straits become more and more dire and he finds out the hard way that crime doesn't pay (at least not for him).
Charles Williams was a great writer and A Touch of Death is one of his best efforts. Highly recommended.

From the instant Lee Scarborough spotted Diana James sunning herself sans bikini top, he should have known she meant trouble. The ex-football star was trying to sell his car to pay rent money. Diana James just happened to live in the same building as a prospective buyer. And she recognizes a useful pawn when she sees one: the healthy, athletic Scarborough has all the tools she needs to pull off a caper.

Diana invites him up to her apartment, tests her mark, and then lays out what seems like a simple plan. A banker had embezzled $120K of currency and then hidden it in his estate home... just before turning up up dead. Diana knows the embezzler's wife and intends to take her on a drinking binge up the gulf coast while Scarborough enters the home and locates the dough. Scarborough and James agree to split the $120 grand after they pull off the caper.

Soon Scarborough finds himself in the dark and cavernous home, scrounging around for the bankroll. One little problem: the widow, Madelon Butler, is in the home, drunk as a skunk. And, to complicate matters, someone else is also in the house...

As the tale unfolds, you'll find yourself startled and impressed with the crafty Ms. Butler -- who plays all of the characters around her like fiddles. Charles Williams has created an elegant, captivating story of exceptional quality: built like a Swiss watch, the plot just keeps unwinding... along with Scarborough's life. This is a tremendous story and one that should be optioned into film, just like Williams' Hot Spot.

A decade after college-football glory, Lee Scarborough has fallen on hard times. With a paltry $170 in his kick, he's sold everything but his car. When the prospect of a cool $120,000--to be picked up after he performs some shady, quick work involving modest risk--is dangled before him, he bites. And that's the setup to this ferociously entertaining 1953 thriller by the prolific Williams, whose minimalist style brings with it enough excrutiating detail to keep you in a mesmerized state located somewhere between a fever dream and the bughouse. Like his fellow Gold Medal-original author, John D. MacDonald, Williams plumbs the psychology of his protagonist with grim insight--a neat trick when the protagonist is also the book's narrator. Scarborough isn't stupid, but his imagination is limited. To him, nothing matters but the money. When things begin to break bad, and the modest risk becomes a whole catalog of enormous ones, Scarborough keeps his eye on the prize. He's plenty cognizant of the mess he's in. Trouble is, the money always seems more real than the mess. Scarborough steps off the cliff completely when he gets mixed up with un-grieving widow Madelon Butler, a babe so beautiful she can stop traffic. Circumstance glues the pair together, which wouldn't be all bad from Scarborough's point of view--except that Madelon is an uber-sociopath. She's one of the great inventions of crime fiction: alluring, funny, and horrifying. Oh, yeah, she's smart, too. Way smarter than Scarborough. Chuck Pyle's period-perfect cover painting for this Hard Case Crime reissue captures Madelon in an oddly significant moment. The painting is faintly disturbing on its own terms, but look at it again--hard--after you read the scene in context. It'll scare the hell out of you. A Touch of Death might be the best title yet from the folks at Hard Case.

Simply terrific! I read this between 1am and 4am, just taking breaks to go to toilet. Couldn't put it down until I finished it! Great writing, terrific plot with no holes in it, a wallop of an ending and best of all no sappy sex scenes to detract from the suspense. Buy it!

A superb little 1950s thriller. This book is a quick read, with crisp prose, simply written--but without making me feel talked down to like so many of today's thrillers. In today's world where each new blockbuster movie needs to top the one previous with natural disasters and explosions and gimmicks, it's nice to see a book that keeps it simple, and relys on character to built suspense. Reading as the protagonist breaks into a pitch-dark house only to find out he is not alone, or as he stands in a cabin trying to outwit an unseen rifleman out in the woods, or as he flees from the cops late at night while driving through back-country roads and small towns--all the while falling into a downward spiral--was a pleasure. It reminded me of a darker version of the Hardy Boys books I read as a kid.

I also recommend Little Girl Lost by Richard Aleas, another book in the Hard Case Crime line.

Lee Scarborough is a young man who almost had it all and that's his problem. After a bad knee ruins his chance to go to the NFL he sinks into sullen bitterness. He apparently has no family, no close friends and no rich alumini boosters to give a former football star a job after college.

When he runs into a sunbathing beauty named Diana James it seems like a dream come true becuase Diana has a fascinating story of love, death and revenge to tell. She also has a simple plan for retrieving $120K in stolen money. If Lee plays along with her he could walk away clean with half. But of course since this is a pulp crime novel the plan falls apart when our anti-hero meets Mrs. Madelon Butler, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She looks like an angel but is tougher, smarter, and meaner than Lee or Diana can even imagine. And to make a dangerous situation even more so there are a pair of blonde siblings hanging around who would also like to get their hands on the money and are willing to kill to do it. Lee is totally in over his head but greed, pride and a fixation on Madelon prevent him from walking away.

A Touch of Death has one of the most complex plots you'll ever find in a Hard Case novel. People smile and lie and triple cross each other left and right. The ending was a complete shock and it's perfect. If you've never read any of the Hard Case series this a great one to start with.

Imagine Edgar Allen Poe on crack, toss in a dash of hardboiled crime, and you'll have some idea how unsettling yet satisfying this story is. You'll question your sanity and never look at a beautiful woman the same way ever again.