coming soon from Stark House Press-Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams

Charles Williams: The Best Known Unknown Paperback Originalby Rick Ollerman
Is there anyone out there as justly famous yet frustratingly unavailable as Charles Williams? He wrote 22 books, worked on numerous screenplays and short stories, had most of his books translated into languages such as French, Italian, German and Spanish, and is in the top ten list of sales of all Gold Medal writers, ahead of the likes of “The King of Paperbacks” Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer. There has been only one book written about him, a Spanish biography called La tormenta y la calma (The Torment and the Calm) by Hernán Migoya (Glénat,  2001), but even that has been out of print for years.Williams’ long-time agent and friend, Don Congdon, who also represented writers like Ray Bradbury, Jack Finney and William Styron, described him as “a hard luck kind of guy. He was much better than many writers who really made it. Not that he’d ever tell you, of course. He was genuinely modest, maybe a little down on what he wrote. You could never be sure if he thought what he did was quite respectable. He was, after all, writing paperback originals, and this was still in the 1950s.”John D. MacDonald, number one on the Gold Medal sales list, said that Williams just never got that break he needed and was perhaps better than all of them, meaning the paperback original thriller writers. When sales of paperbacks began to flag at the end of the sixties, it was suggested to Williams that he write about a series character, but he thought that would be boring for him. He did give two pairs of sequels, the first narrated by a seven year old boy and was comprised of The Diamond Bikini and Uncle Sagamore and His Girls. The second, a seagoing pair written in the third person made up of Aground, and one of his most popular novels, Dead Calm, later filmed twice but only once released, with yet another version on the way.Between 1951 and 1960, he published seventeen of his twenty two novels, three more during the rest of the sixties, and his final two in the early seventies. Then, tragically, he took his own life.
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In 1953, we get what many consider to be the ultimate Charles Williams book: Hell Hath No Fury, re-titled The Hot Spot in Great Britain and filmed under that name by Dennis Hopper in a fine neo-noir film starring Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly.In keeping with the last book, the perfect crime is exactly that, at least for a while. Williams does a wonderful job of painting a thoroughly thought out and executed crime, all from the perpetrator’s point of view, only to have a few threads gradually picked away until the entire scheme begins to unravel. Just as he does new things with each book, he carries some elements along that he’s used before.Harry Madox, as amoral as any of Williams’ male leads, has placed his neck in an irresistible noose. When he finally finds someone who makes him want to be a better man, so to speak, he’s already in too deep with his perfect crime. It comes undone much like Jack Marshall’s scheme in River Girl only this time it’s helped along by that classic noir element: the femme fatale, the woman he can’t leave alone and whose pride won’t allow it. Once she’s had him he belongs to her and she’d rather lose everything than be given up by her man. Pride overrides sin.Madox is an aimless, casual troublemaker type on the run for some minor offenses in Houston. When he meets a man in a restaurant who says he needs a salesman, Harry claims to be one and gets the job. His entire life consists of taking whatever shortcuts he can find, legal or not, and usually with whatever woman will have him at the time. This is not a long range career path for him.A fire in town changes everything. Harry conceives of a plan, foolproof of course, that will net him a lot of money and set him up for his next move, whatever that may be. But what he thinks is a casual dalliance with a (married) woman turns into something that he can’t run away from; she simply won’t let him. Harry brushes it off and goes on planning his perfect crime.There are two things he doesn’t see coming, though: he meets another woman, someone he can actually fall in love with, someone he can see himself marry and make a life with. The second thing is the focus of the other woman’s obsession.The crime comes off, though, almost without a hitch, but there’s more afoot and as Harry finally gets to the bottom of it, he sees that what he’s done is bound up with the fortunes of his new love. To help her he can’t afford to get himself caught. Unfortunately for them, together they’re firmly clutched in the grip of Harry’s femme fatale, and when she enlists the help of a local grifter, Harry and his girl have nowhere to run, and no way to get out from under unless it means going to prison for them both. Harry’s short term gain turns into a long term prison sentence of its own, a private hell that he can’t get away from.