Customer Reviews

The Woman Chaser

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have read several novels by Charles Willeford. His latter works from the 1980s, such as Miami Blues, are a blend of crime/humour with a south Florida setting ... stuff that I like. His earlier works from the 1960s/1970s, such as Cockfighter, are rather broodingly serious pieces ... stuff that I don't like. The Woman Chaser is a very early piece from Willeford, written in 1960. To my surprise it is by a wide margin the best of Willeford I've read.

Firstly, The Woman Chaser is not about chasing women. The story is actually about a rather cruel, warped used car salesman who wants to break into films. He abuses everyone to achieve his goal. While this might sound like a trite story Willeford structures it very cleverly, and it is written in the style of Jim Thompson ... in the first person with brutal language. Fortunately the book is not too depressing, and at times there is some humour.

Bottom line: a terrific little book by Willeford. A must read.

Charles Willeford wrote psychopaths better than any sane man should. This book--written, I believe, when he was still in the Air Force--is an examination of a soulless car salesman who wants to create something more permanent. Something lasting. And decides on making a misanthropic movie that will shock and shame the audience. A great, if not THE great, American novel.

Without revealing the plot (!)---The main character is a gritty used-car salesman par excellence, and the storyline deals with him becoming aware of his life's limitations, and his subsequent response to this wake-up call for greater meaning. Ironically, the book is not about a woman chaser, per se...

Willeford uses his main character's view to point out a number of human failings, and the brisk plotline and well-developed supporting cast are more than willing to reveal some of life's bitter ironies. The result is an enjoyable and quick read, filled with tinges of sarcasm and understated dark humor.

The Woman Chaser is a great read. Dark, funny, troubling, REAL, just like life. Willeford is an unrecognized American genius, read The Woman Chaser and find out for yourself.

I love this book. The ending is so damn brilliant, so startling. Any one who loves noir needs to read this book.

Dave Zeltserman, author of In His Shadow

An amusing, short novel about a used-car dealer who attempts to join the creative class and make a low-budget film. Richard Hudson is something of an antihero--he's not at all virtuous, but he is often likable, and the book contains a fair amount of black humor. Hudson is a guy with all the answers, who knows all the angles, who's always in control, and it shouldn't be too much of a spoiler to say that he eventually gets kicked in the teeth and gets a richly earned comeuppance at the end of the novel (though the book wisely avoids him learning any "life lessons"). The book also possesses some keen social insight into postwar America, which is inevitably teeming with odd and misplaced sexuality, hubris, and incuriosity, but also with hope, optimism and opportunity. In short: good little book, well-written and highly readable.

I have read about Charles Willeford for a long time, but this was the first of his books I have actually read. My wife got me a very valuable (and expensive) first edition of this book for me for my birthday. It was originally published in 1960 as a sleeze paperback, and is very difficult to come by today. Not wanting to take a chance on it getting messed up when I read it, I picked up this edition. This edition suffers from some nagging problems, such as no indication of when the book was written, many typos, and a lame cover. You should see the one on the first edition!

The book is amazingly well written, and the main character, Richard Hudson, is as blunt and brutal a character as you are likely to find anywhere. The story is told from his perspective, and it leaves you pretty drained by the end. His way of handling an unwanted pregnancy is something that will haunt me for years to come. For fans of of the noir tale, I think you'll like this one.

Bizarre story. A used car dealer decides to make a motion picture. As he's going about it, he manages to french kiss his mother and do despicable things to a few other people. Along the way, Willeford gives us his opinions on the movie business, screenwriting, hiring ex-servicemen, and various other things. The ex-servicemen part would appear to be autobiographical. It appears that the publisher let Willeford do whatever he wanted to do for this one, then gave it a semi-lurid, inaccurate title to help it fly off the drug store book racks.

None of which is to say you shouldn't read it. It is Willeford, after all. This was made into a movie in 2000. If I decide to subscribe to Netflix again, I'll have to add it to my queue.

I'm a big fan of Jim Thompson and The Woman Chaser could easily have been written by him. It's that psychotic and hilarious! It takes a chapter or two to get into because of the jarring narrative style but it grabs hold of you after that and is pretty much impossible to put down. Charles Willeford did a superb job on this novel, much better than his more famous but depressing Pick-Up. In fact, The Woman Chaser is probably his best novel. It was turned into an unsatisfying 1999 movie starring Patrick Warburton (available only on out-of-print VHS). I also enjoyed Willeford's later Florida crime novels featuring police detective Hoke Moseley (Miami Blues, etc.), a series which easily equals or outdoes anything by Elmore Leonard. If you're new to Willeford, The Woman Chaser or Miami Blues are a great place to start with this author.

This isn't a crime novel. I'm not sure why other reviewers have classified it as such. It's literary fiction, and it's not very good literary fiction. The plot has absolutely no tension in it, and there's not much in the way of conflict, either.

I guess it has vaguely "noir" elements, but a great deal of what happens here is strictly shock-value. I'd assume that the plot and its anti-hero are supposed to be allegorical, as the things that happen in this book are absurd and break credulity (a used car salesman just up and decides to get funding for a movie he hasn't written yet?).

The Woman Chaser is a basically an attempt at writing The Stranger from the perspective of a young Los Angeles psychopath. It aims for a bitterly poignant examination of postwar America, but it comes off as an MFA thesis written by a young author who can create a few interesting scenes and lines of dialog here and there but can't work a real narrative out of all of it. And then that author tries for grit but ends up going way overboard into gratuitous ugliness and mean-spiritedness. Not for me.