Bill “Dusty” Rhodes has it tough - he’d like to go to college but, with his mother out of the picture, he’s got to support his mentally-ailing, recently unemployed father by working nights at the local swanky hotel as a bellboy. There, he has to put up with a difficult manager, but meets interesting people like the gangster Tug and the beautiful Marcia Hillis, a newly-arrived guest at the hotel and an older woman who’s taken a shine to Dusty. Will she be the respite he craves from his life of unending drudgery?
While not up there with Jim Thompson’s best novels, A Swell-Looking Babe (if you can’t tell from the title, it was published in 1954) is still a decent read with perhaps Thompson’s most shocking character turn - this is only my fifth Jim Thompson novel so he might have more in others - which makes this a notable book.
Bill’s nickname is a puzzling one to me. I know Dusty Rhodes, The American Dream, was a famous wrestler but he didn’t begin his career until the ‘60s and didn’t become famous until the ‘70s - and this book was published in the mid-50s. Is Dusty Rhodes the name of someone else who was famous around or before the time of this novel? No idea. It might just be the nickname for anyone with that surname, as a pun for “dusty roads”.
This story is the slowest burn out of all the Thompson novels I’ve read. Normally he gets things going quickly and continues upping the stakes like the quality thriller writer he is - in this one, the pacing is quite leaden as we learn about Dusty’s dreary life. We meet his grasping, annoyingly incompetent father who leeches money out of his tired son. We see the way people in his life treat him poorly - the manager, the doctor - and hear about the shyster lawyer working on his dad’s shaky legal case.
Dusty is initially presented as this squeaky-clean, daww shucks kinda fella and that’s not an interesting protagonist. Nor is the premise of seeing whether or not he’ll get off with the sexy older lady at the hotel. But then - and true to Thompson’s own saying that there is only one story in all of literature: “nothing is as it seems…” - things start to change and a desperate crime plan starts to form.
Even then though, the events that follow from the halfway point on were only mildly entertaining. Rather than the plot, I was more taken with other aspects of the story - finding out who Marcia Hillis really was, what she was doing in that hotel, and the brilliant characterisation of the lawyer Kossmeyer - especially the increasingly complex portrait of Dusty himself as Thompson reveals why he’s fascinated with older women, and the reality of his world, which is very different from what we were initially presented with.
The crime story is only ever middling and often felt convoluted but Dusty’s character development buoyed up the narrative and his turn made the earlier, slower buildup of Dusty’s world all the more understandable - for Thompson to flip it upside down later on. And Thompson’s prose is faultless in how effortlessly easy it is to read - it’s such a breezy narrative despite not being as entertaining as Pop. 1280 or A Hell of a Woman.
And while it’s not one of Thompson’s best books, I don’t think anyone would be too disappointed with A Swell-Looking Babe either because, like all of his novels, it has its own unique attributes to recommend it. An unexpected and quite inspired character turn, a charismatic lawyer character, punchy dialogue, and slick prose, even non-fans of Thompson could get something out of this lesser-known book. For me, I remain impressed with this author who manages to bring at least one special something to each of his books, even his lesser novels like A Swell-Looking Babe.
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