A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson Review

Frank “Dolly” Dillon is a down-on-his-luck door-to-door salesman who happens across an even more desperate young woman who tells him a life-changing secret: her horrible aunt has a hundred grand in cash stashed away in their house! All Dolly has to do is murder the aunt and take the girl away with him - a helluva easy payday for a scumbag like him! But where did the money come from…

THIS is what Crime and Punishment should have been. It has the same premise - desperate loser murders an old woman for her cash - but Jim Thompson realises the excitement, the tension, the entertainment of the setup that Dostoyevsky was incapable of providing. Jim Thompson’s the “Dimestore Dostoyevsky”? What an insult - Dostoyevsky wasn’t half the writer Thompson was! A Hell of a Woman is another banger of a novel from this superb novelist.

Thompson sets things up so quickly and gets the story moving right out the gate that the reader gets swept up into the narrative immediately. Besides Dolly, the first person unreliable narrator who’s also a crazy murderer (Thompson’s specialty), there’s his floozy wife Joyce, his sleazy boss Staples, his simpleton customer Pete Hendrickson, the supposedly innocent Mona, and her hag of an aunt, Mrs Farrell. It’s a cynical, drab world that Thompson sets his stories in but they’re so vivid and exciting for its unrelenting darkness.

The one part of the story that I didn’t like was when Dolly was setting up Pete to carry the can. It’s a lot of convoluted, uninteresting pages that don’t even make any sense (possibly intentional, to put the reader in the same confused state of mind that Dolly wanted Pete in). Worse, Pete’s dialogue is written in eye dialect (“Better I had not. Such a bum I look, and your vife vould not like. If you could chust - vell, a dollar or two - chust until I find vork…” - I guess Pete’s from Dracula country?) - I hate when authors do that. Please just write it normally!

Beyond that part, the story gets better and better as it progresses, with one surprise following another, messing up Dolly’s plans and, like in Pop. 1280, ending on a high. Satisfying endings - especially memorable endings - are so rare and Thompson manages them effortlessly. I’m beginning to think this guy was a genius.

I do wonder who the woman in the title is meant to be. There are three female characters in this book, and the aunt is decidedly the worst of the three, but she’s also a minor character - and Dolly is by far the worst human being in the book, so you’d think if anyone was a hell of an anyone it’d be him! Then again, I feel like this book, which was originally published in the 1950s, was probably marketed for the pulp fiction audience of the time, so his publishers probably wanted him to hint at a femme fatale to increase sales, even if it has no real bearing on the story.

And even if Jim Thompson has been classed as a genre writer, he’s too good a writer to have his books labelled simply “crime” or “thriller” - I would argue that, like Pop. 1280, there’s evidence of more sophisticated writing happening here beyond telling a ripping yarn. There’s a scene where Dolly teases Mona about sex and her face changes, revealing the deep emotional scars left on her from years of abuse beginning as a child. Or the scene in the bathroom where Frank hides out from Joyce, who’s trying to get him to talk about where he got the money, and he simply stays there, drinking - and in the silence you get a powerful image of a man realising what he’s done and how badly he’s messed everything up. There is surprising depth here amidst the masterful, fast-paced storytelling.

But it is first and foremost a first-class entertainment and if you’re after a genuinely compelling, albeit very dark, crime story, you can’t do much better than this hell of a novel, Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman.