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One for Hell
The quintessential bad cop novel from 1952.
"A boxcar bum named Willa Ree enters a small town with the intention of picking it clean, and in the process all kinds of secrets and corruption come to light. It’s a fine noir story with a powerful ending that Jim Thompson would have been proud to have written.” Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine
"A boxcar bum named Willa Ree enters a small town with the intention of picking it clean, and in the process all kinds of secrets and corruption come to light. It’s a fine noir story with a powerful ending that Jim Thompson would have been proud to have written.” Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine
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First published October 15, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 31, 2018
Jada M. Davis wrote two pulp novels in the 1950s. The first, One for Hell, was published by Gold Medal in 1952, and was then reprinted by Stark House in 2010 as part of their Noir Classics series. The main protagonist is a hustler named Willa Ree. Ree is a rough and clever man who is riding the rails while attempting to determine where he might land next. When the train stops in the booming oil town of Breton, Texas, Ree hops out of the boxcar and decides to look over the town.
Almost immediately, he senses its possibilities. Not long ago, Breton was a small town, but the population has now exploded as a result of the oil boom. It's rough, raw, and ripe for the picking. Soon after landing in town, Ree hooks up with Ben Halliday, who is one of the town leaders. Halliday would like to exploit the town's possibilities as well, but to his view the current chief of police is not compliant enough to maximize the graft for the town's leaders.
Halliday contrives to place Ree in the police department as the new chief of detectives. The plan is that Ree will gain control of the town's prostitutes, gambling dens and other vice, forcing the practitioners to pay a cut to Ree who will then pass most of the spoils up the chain to Halliday and his cohorts.
Ree is just the man for the job, except for the fact that he quickly proves to be too independent. The only person Ree is interested in is Willa Ree himself, and as he attempts to maximize his own opportunities, Breton may well be turned upside down and inside out.
If not a true pulp classic, this book is a good example of the hundreds of such novels that were published in the middle of the last century. There's plenty of violence; there's a lot of sex, although given the restrictions of the day, it's anything but explicit. Virtually everyone in the book is on the make in one way or another, and like a lot of pulp literature, this novel paints a pretty depressing picture of society as a whole. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who occasionally likes to dip into this genre.
Almost immediately, he senses its possibilities. Not long ago, Breton was a small town, but the population has now exploded as a result of the oil boom. It's rough, raw, and ripe for the picking. Soon after landing in town, Ree hooks up with Ben Halliday, who is one of the town leaders. Halliday would like to exploit the town's possibilities as well, but to his view the current chief of police is not compliant enough to maximize the graft for the town's leaders.
Halliday contrives to place Ree in the police department as the new chief of detectives. The plan is that Ree will gain control of the town's prostitutes, gambling dens and other vice, forcing the practitioners to pay a cut to Ree who will then pass most of the spoils up the chain to Halliday and his cohorts.
Ree is just the man for the job, except for the fact that he quickly proves to be too independent. The only person Ree is interested in is Willa Ree himself, and as he attempts to maximize his own opportunities, Breton may well be turned upside down and inside out.
If not a true pulp classic, this book is a good example of the hundreds of such novels that were published in the middle of the last century. There's plenty of violence; there's a lot of sex, although given the restrictions of the day, it's anything but explicit. Virtually everyone in the book is on the make in one way or another, and like a lot of pulp literature, this novel paints a pretty depressing picture of society as a whole. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who occasionally likes to dip into this genre.
July 9, 2022
There is no question that Ree is going to hell. The only question is who's going to fix his wagon. Bad cops can’t make a lot of money without making enemies. Ree's crimes are piling up: burglaries, frame-ups, vice pay-offs, double-crosses, beatings, murder, rape. Every time he tries to fix things he gets into deeper trouble. All the while, Ree talks to himself:
"... gotta stay cool, stay cool all the time and think. The thing to do is think and use the old brains. Because that’s what they’re for, to use."But Ree is better with his fists than his brains. The plotting is a little sloppy, the writing is a little silly at times, but it doesn't matter because Ree is such a bang-up bad-guy.
June 3, 2025
Jada M. Davis wrote only a handful of novels in his lifetime, which is unfortunate because his voice was quite powerful. Set in an out of the way Texas oil town, “One For Hell” is a title describing the lead character, strangely named Willa Ree, an ex-con who was riding freight trains to get somewhere, anywhere, and lands in this little Texas town, Breton, where he is sized up quickly by one of the powerful men who ran the town, Ben Halliday, and promoted without so much as a background check to the office of police detective. “This time it would be different from last time and the time before and the time before that and the time beyond that time. No more slipups, no more mistakes, he promised himself.” Halliday, though, has sized up Ree and thinks he needs a man like Ree around. And, he wants to promote Rees to be chief because the current one just won’t play ball and they needed someone who was going to run things how they wanted.
Ree’s job on the force he was told appeared to be collecting graft. He had a good idea of what was expected of him. “The town was ripe, dead and juicy ripe, and he was ready for the plucking.” Ree sees it as a dumb town full of suckers. “Fruit on the tree, ready for plucking. Everybody out to fill their sacks and too busy to protect the other fellow’s sack.”
In the meantime, to occupy his time, he took to burglarizing almost every business in town. It is the story, as so often these crime pulps are, about the meteoric rise and fall of a man and how the fall from grace is so rapid, he cannot get out of the way of everything that comes his way.
Davis draws complete portraits of all the characters and their foibles. Halliday, the powerful man who ran the town, was frustrated with his wife, Martha, who he thought was having an affair, and Halliday spent evenings with her best friend Nora Byrd seeing as how Sam Byrd was too drunk most evenings to satisfy himself, let alone a woman like Nora.
Laura Green, the preacher’s daughter who every man in town simply referred to as “Legs,” became Ree’s girlfriend. She was frustrated because no man in town wanted to woo the preacher’s daughter, but Ree walked arrogantly, and he was a challenge to her. “At night, in his room, he thought of her walking down the street, hips swaying, legs flashing as her heels click-clicked on the pavement. Her legs were golden-honey colored, and when he thought of her, at night in his room, he could see the flashing of the legs as she click-clicked down the walk.” Still, he realized, that she was a “man trap,” and should have acted accordingly.
Ree is no Lou Ford, though, as no one in town is fooled by his appearance. He is a tough, no-nonsense opportunist, but just as much a sadist as Ford ever was. He guns down his partner in nighttime robberies. He beats his deputy who steals the hidden loot. He beats Laura to a pulp when she tries to interfere. He beats a news reporter in a bar in front of witnesses and, when a stink is made, pays off the waitress and the cook. He throws people down a well to rot.
Ree has no loyalty to anyone or anything. He is just going to strip this town down and run off somewhere, although readers of this type of literature know he’ll never escape the town, not with a penny, not even with his life. “It would be a joke if he could figure out ahead of time just when the pincers would close and time would run out- and be gone just ahead of the deadline.” But Davis offers no hope for Ree. In the end, everything he touches turns to crap and everyone he thought he had under his wing wants to kill him. He is all alone in the end, crawling through the wreckage of what he built.
“One For Hell” is a Texas noir in the best of the tradition and well worth a read.
Ree’s job on the force he was told appeared to be collecting graft. He had a good idea of what was expected of him. “The town was ripe, dead and juicy ripe, and he was ready for the plucking.” Ree sees it as a dumb town full of suckers. “Fruit on the tree, ready for plucking. Everybody out to fill their sacks and too busy to protect the other fellow’s sack.”
In the meantime, to occupy his time, he took to burglarizing almost every business in town. It is the story, as so often these crime pulps are, about the meteoric rise and fall of a man and how the fall from grace is so rapid, he cannot get out of the way of everything that comes his way.
Davis draws complete portraits of all the characters and their foibles. Halliday, the powerful man who ran the town, was frustrated with his wife, Martha, who he thought was having an affair, and Halliday spent evenings with her best friend Nora Byrd seeing as how Sam Byrd was too drunk most evenings to satisfy himself, let alone a woman like Nora.
Laura Green, the preacher’s daughter who every man in town simply referred to as “Legs,” became Ree’s girlfriend. She was frustrated because no man in town wanted to woo the preacher’s daughter, but Ree walked arrogantly, and he was a challenge to her. “At night, in his room, he thought of her walking down the street, hips swaying, legs flashing as her heels click-clicked on the pavement. Her legs were golden-honey colored, and when he thought of her, at night in his room, he could see the flashing of the legs as she click-clicked down the walk.” Still, he realized, that she was a “man trap,” and should have acted accordingly.
Ree is no Lou Ford, though, as no one in town is fooled by his appearance. He is a tough, no-nonsense opportunist, but just as much a sadist as Ford ever was. He guns down his partner in nighttime robberies. He beats his deputy who steals the hidden loot. He beats Laura to a pulp when she tries to interfere. He beats a news reporter in a bar in front of witnesses and, when a stink is made, pays off the waitress and the cook. He throws people down a well to rot.
Ree has no loyalty to anyone or anything. He is just going to strip this town down and run off somewhere, although readers of this type of literature know he’ll never escape the town, not with a penny, not even with his life. “It would be a joke if he could figure out ahead of time just when the pincers would close and time would run out- and be gone just ahead of the deadline.” But Davis offers no hope for Ree. In the end, everything he touches turns to crap and everyone he thought he had under his wing wants to kill him. He is all alone in the end, crawling through the wreckage of what he built.
“One For Hell” is a Texas noir in the best of the tradition and well worth a read.
November 12, 2017
One For Hell by Jada M. Davis was published in 1952 and tells the story corruption and of Willa Ree, yes, Willa. At first, Willa appears to be a train riding vagrant, but as the story develops, the reader learns he is much more than that.
Ree slips into the town of Breton, where almost all people through the local government seem to be taking pay offs and are as corrupt as any can be. Ree soon starts acting as the main puppet master to entrench himself as the local kingmaker and the story goes from there.
This is classic crime noir from the 50's. I would imagine back then when it was published it was more timely and shocking, but with time, it probably has lost some of its luster.
Recommended to those that enjoy this type of two-fisted writing and fans of Jim Thompson.
Ree slips into the town of Breton, where almost all people through the local government seem to be taking pay offs and are as corrupt as any can be. Ree soon starts acting as the main puppet master to entrench himself as the local kingmaker and the story goes from there.
This is classic crime noir from the 50's. I would imagine back then when it was published it was more timely and shocking, but with time, it probably has lost some of its luster.
Recommended to those that enjoy this type of two-fisted writing and fans of Jim Thompson.
September 1, 2021
This 1952 Fawcett Gold Medal noir has been lauded by readers as a lost masterpiece and it was deservedly brought back into print by Stark House Press in 2012. Jada Davis was a talented writer who decided that life as a fiction writer was more work and less profitable than other careers and he only published one more novel in his lifetime. ONE FOR HELL tells the story of a corrupt oil boom town that employs a charismatic drifter as a strongarm only to lose control of him as his sociopathic tendencies are revealed. The strength of the novel is in the characterization of the drifter - detailing his lies, deceit, and manipulations that keep piling up into a fragile house of cards that force him to escalate the violence to keep it from falling down, and taking his corrupt town partners with it. The subplots detailing the personal affairs of the townsfolk seems superfluous and I was glad when the narrative returned back to the drifter. Plenty of terrific dialog and several interesting characters although the drifter really shines as one of the most fascinating noir characters that I’ve ever read. Lost masterpiece? Sure, I’m on board and give it a solid five stars.
July 1, 2013
It's weird how, after so many years of reading paperback original noirs from the '50's, I'll still occasionally stumble across something I had no previous knowledge of. It's even weirder when it turns out to be something as remarkable as ONE FOR HELL, by Jada M. Davis.
How this one stayed under my radar for so long, I couldn't tell you. The only real review/synopsis I've found of it on line came from James Reasoner's blog, a couple-three years ago, when Stark House first re-issued it. But I can tell you this: the book belongs on the top tier of unsung classics of noir. It's great stuff.
The story follows a pattern most readers of this kinda stuff are familiar with-- an amoral protagonist (in this case, a drifter named Willa Ree) rolls into town, insinuates himself into it nicely, and then proceeds to take over. And it ends in tragedy, not just for the protagonist but for everyone he comes in contact with. But where ONE FOR HELL really stands apart is in the author's willingness to push it beyond the bounds of reader comfort; Will Ree is more than just amoral, he's thoroughly despicable. Over the course of the story, he robs, lies, rapes, kills. Without regret (except when things start closing in, of course, and even then it's only regret that he didn't cover his tracks better), and without a thought for anyone but himself.
Willa Ree belongs on the list of all-time most villainous noir sociopaths, up there with Roy Martin (AKA Drake) in Dan Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH, or Jim Thompson's Lou Ford and Nick Corey or Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley. And he's actually LESS likable than any of those characters.
Why then, was I so wrapped up in it, so on edge, as Willa Ree's world starts to spin out of control? Because Jada M. Davis is just THAT skilled a writer. The suspense of the last fifty pages or so is very nearly unbearable as Willa scrambles to save his ass, and you know, you just KNOW, that it's a lost cause. It's a real shame Davis didn't write much more. From what I understand, he only produced one other published novel in his entire life, and I don't know if that one was a noir of this caliber. Fortunately for fans of dark crime fiction, ONE FOR HELL is enough to cement Davis's reputation as a master of the form. Highly recommended.
How this one stayed under my radar for so long, I couldn't tell you. The only real review/synopsis I've found of it on line came from James Reasoner's blog, a couple-three years ago, when Stark House first re-issued it. But I can tell you this: the book belongs on the top tier of unsung classics of noir. It's great stuff.
The story follows a pattern most readers of this kinda stuff are familiar with-- an amoral protagonist (in this case, a drifter named Willa Ree) rolls into town, insinuates himself into it nicely, and then proceeds to take over. And it ends in tragedy, not just for the protagonist but for everyone he comes in contact with. But where ONE FOR HELL really stands apart is in the author's willingness to push it beyond the bounds of reader comfort; Will Ree is more than just amoral, he's thoroughly despicable. Over the course of the story, he robs, lies, rapes, kills. Without regret (except when things start closing in, of course, and even then it's only regret that he didn't cover his tracks better), and without a thought for anyone but himself.
Willa Ree belongs on the list of all-time most villainous noir sociopaths, up there with Roy Martin (AKA Drake) in Dan Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH, or Jim Thompson's Lou Ford and Nick Corey or Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley. And he's actually LESS likable than any of those characters.
Why then, was I so wrapped up in it, so on edge, as Willa Ree's world starts to spin out of control? Because Jada M. Davis is just THAT skilled a writer. The suspense of the last fifty pages or so is very nearly unbearable as Willa scrambles to save his ass, and you know, you just KNOW, that it's a lost cause. It's a real shame Davis didn't write much more. From what I understand, he only produced one other published novel in his entire life, and I don't know if that one was a noir of this caliber. Fortunately for fans of dark crime fiction, ONE FOR HELL is enough to cement Davis's reputation as a master of the form. Highly recommended.
February 19, 2025
Woke Willy Ree: One for Aitch, Eee, Double-toothpicks
This is the story of a man with the courage to be un-racist way back in 1952.
Early in the story, from a sound respect for CRT and the pure wokeness of his heart, Willy offers a ride to a Squeegee Worker.
And later he shows his support for Single Mothers, Defunding the Police, and opposition to capital punishment.
Who'd have thought -- in 1952 -- that Davis could have foreseen the George Floyd tragedy and warned us off it?
My White Privilege usually denies me the the opportunity to read truly un-racist books. So I am grateful for this chance.
What's more, this should be first on the reading-list for the youngsters' next Drag Queen Story Hour.
This is the story of a man with the courage to be un-racist way back in 1952.
Early in the story, from a sound respect for CRT and the pure wokeness of his heart, Willy offers a ride to a Squeegee Worker.
A Negro youth shuffled down the middle of the dusty street, and Ree coasted to a stop beside him and said, “Get in.”
The youth gasped, started to speak, but Ree opened the car door. The boy got in.
And later he shows his support for Single Mothers, Defunding the Police, and opposition to capital punishment.
As he stepped into the glaring sunlight he saw the old Negro woman. She was thin, stooped, with deep-lined wrinkles covering her face, for all the world the spitting image of an aged simian. Krinkly gray hair frizzled her head, and she was crying.
“No, suh, please, suh,” she was mumbling. “They can’t hang my boy! They ain’t goan to hang my boy, no! He’s a good boy. Yas, foah God he’s a good boy! Yes!”
The deputy, the young one with the blonde good looks, was leaning against the door.
“That’s right, mammy. I told you we’d hang him next time he got in trouble.”
The old woman’s body shook and trembled as she sobbed. “No, suh, please! They ain’t goan hang my baby! He’s my baby boy, yas, and he’s good!”
Ree put his hand on the deputy’s shoulder. “Tell the woman you’re not going to bother her boy, Blondie. Tell her you were playing a joke.”
Who'd have thought -- in 1952 -- that Davis could have foreseen the George Floyd tragedy and warned us off it?
My White Privilege usually denies me the the opportunity to read truly un-racist books. So I am grateful for this chance.
What's more, this should be first on the reading-list for the youngsters' next Drag Queen Story Hour.
February 21, 2022
Great book about a drifter gets off a freight train in a small West Texas town, where he settles down, gets a job as a police officer and quickly works his way up to police chief, even though he has a criminal past.
September 24, 2017
Pulp
Fast paced, bloody, sexy, in its time, this is classic fifties hard boiled , Texas noir. Tough corrupt cops, sexy dames..the whole thing. Read it.
Fast paced, bloody, sexy, in its time, this is classic fifties hard boiled , Texas noir. Tough corrupt cops, sexy dames..the whole thing. Read it.
October 11, 2018
3.5 stars.
July 14, 2011
Excellent crime noir. Very dark and gritty.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews