The Woman Chaser by Charles Willeford Review

SPOILERS

A used car salesman pursues his dream of making a movie. But when he finally makes his movie, and doesn’t get the deal he expected, he decides to enact a brutal revenge…

I genuinely don’t know what to make of Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser - it’s unlike any other novel I’ve read before, but only because it’s so nonsensical and bizarre!

I guess our main character Richard Hudson is a bigshot used car salesman only as a plot device to get his hands on ready cash to help finance his bonkers movie, but did we need to spend so long on his career as a used car salesman - couldn’t we just skip over the finer details? Or better yet, considering he also uses his stepfather’s expensive painting to fund the movie, jettison it completely, as it’s an utterly superfluous addition to the novel, and just say the painting’s sale paid for the whole budget?

It’s strange details like this that make up the novel and I can only think that this, along with other decisions, was done to beef up a page count and/or play to the pulp audience (the novel was first published in 1960). Like, why is Richard’s defining characteristic that he’s a “woman chaser” - what’s that got to do with anything? He’s a sleazy guy but you get that from pretty much every other action the man takes - you don’t need to also know that he slept with his teenage step-sister or has this unsettling incestuous relationship with his mother.

Richard’s more than a sleazy guy though; he’s a complete scumbag. This is a man who literally punches a woman in the gut after she tells him she’s pregnant with his baby to induce a miscarriage. But then this was also the 1950s so maybe by those standards he was just an average guy? (I’m joking, I’m joking!)

My point is: what’s the point? Are we meant to empathise with Richard on some level - are we meant to like this guy somehow? Because that’s a massive failure on Willeford’s part if so - only a sociopath could think Richard a stand up dude. Maybe the one thing we’re meant to understand about him is his desire to make art and transcend his otherwise mundane existence for a stab at immortality.

And it’s another really weird choice - not making a movie, but the subject of the movie itself: about a trucker who accidentally runs over a kid, then drives off, only to have cops chase him and die in a roadblock. Wha - huh? Why THAT story? I can’t tell if the novel is meant to be a comedy or not. He literally casts his leading lady by stalking a woman - a completely random woman - at a supermarket, following her home, and telling her she got cast in his movie (and of course he sleeps with her because he’s a “woman chaser”). She goes along with it all of course because… that sort of thing happened all the time in the ‘50s?!

What interested me in the novel initially was the promise of the protagonist going off on one after his dreams are dashed. I was expecting some insane John Wick-style rampage but less martial arts-y. And what I got was a remarkably quick scene right at the end, almost like an afterthought, before the inevitable ending. Very disappointing. There are vastly more pages devoted to the irrelevant selling of used cars than a much more interesting plot point.

So, I really don’t know what to make of it. If it’s a satire, I don’t know of what. If it’s a comedy, it needed to be more funny than dark. I guess it’s a decent example of the pulpy novels being published around that time, though only of its trashy nature than anything else. The main character is a reprehensible cretin and a pointless womaniser doing a pointless job then making a pointless movie starring random people and telling a pointless story who then throws his life away doing something pointless.

The Woman Chaser is easy to read - Willeford was a fine writer and the prose is still accessible and clear. And the novel is unpredictable at the very least, and original. But its biggest impression is also that of one big baffling shrug of a story - I wouldn’t recommend it even to Willeford fans. At best, it reads like a long forgotten in-joke or piss-take between him and someone else who’s also long dead. If you haven’t read them yet, his Hoke Moseley novels are much better, and also more coherent, than this forgettable earlier effort.