'There's Always a Price Tag' by James Hadley Chase - 4 stars

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

Solid thriller from 1956, almost forgotten today with only 270 ratings, but well worth a visit for fans of the noir genre.

‘What do I care? I’ve had fun. I’ve travelled. I’ve owned a Rolls. I’ve married the loveliest woman in Hollywood. What more can I guy want? Now it’s time to pay up; that’s okay. I’ll pay what I can, and they’ll have to whistle for the rest of it.’

Erle Dester is one of the Hollywood big boys: a successful producer, living in one of the best neighborhoods, married to one of the hottest women in town. And he has been drinking himself into an early grave for the past year or so, right after his marriage to the bombshell Helen.
In an opening gambit that looks ‘borrowed’ right out of a Raymond Chandler story [The Long Goodbye], Dester barrels out of a night club soused to the gills and is saved from being run over by a passing car by Glyn Nash, a stranger in the right place at the right time.
Nash takes the drunk millionaire home in the fellow’s sky-blue Rolls Royce and puts him to bed, not before Dester waking up and offering him a job as his chauffeur.
Glyn Nash, an unsuccessful free-lance advertising salesman who worries where his next meal or the rent money will be coming from, jumps at the chance of steady employment, even before he lays eyes on his employer’s wife Helen.

Have you ever fiddled with an electric fitment and got a shock up your arm?

‘Sensational’ is the word that comes to Glyn Nash’s mind on meeting this redhead avatar of the ‘femme fatale’ template. That electric jolt he feels deep in his bones should have been a warning to steer clear of the icy beauty that destroyed Erle Dester’s life, (view spoiler)[ foreshadowing the electric chair waiting in the wings of the plot (hide spoiler)] , but Nash thinks of himself as a tough guy and a lady-killer so he mentally says: ‘bring it on!’