All the Way (Charles Williams, 1958)

It doesn't exactly start with a bang. Williams opens the book with a merciless unleashing of his blue-water noir: outriggers, halyards, gimbals, free spools, ground swells, etc. Relentless shit, it just doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker and complete fishing ignoramus, I spent more time googling these terms and laughing my ass off while decypring them using this nautical slang dictionary.

Luckily, as soon as the first chapter concludes, we’re back on terra firma. And we’ve got ourselves a femme fatale - one with a serious axe to grind with her ex-boss/lover. She’s a woman scorned, and hell hath no fury, right? So she makes our clueless hero fall for her, then pulls him into a perfect crime scheme. And... as cliched and tired as it sounds, it works and it’s just great! Even though the plot requires some suspension of disbelief, it hardly matters - the pace is so frantic that the reader (at least this reader) doesn’t have time to spot the plot holes. It also doesn’t hurt that the writing is superb.

The ending’s cool, too - sort of subversive in that it refuses to deliver a shocking twist. The twist is the lack of one. Our duo pulls off the perfect crime and gets to keep the loot, but they break down psychologically and emotionally. I usually go for more hard-boiled stuff, but it’s actually refreshing to see this kind of conclusion now and then. Still noir-ish and dark as hell. 

Probably the best Williams I have read so far.

4.5/5

Facts:

Hero:

However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”

Dames: 

Exquisitely feminine, nicely moving Miss Marian Forsyth:

Too slender, I thought, to attract much attention among all the stacked and sun-gilded flesh lying around on Florida beaches, but she was smart-looking and exquisitely feminine and she moved nicely. She appeared to be around thirty.

Location:

All over the US. Most of the action takes place in Florida, in several cities where our guy is establishing his air-tight alibi, but he also flies briefly to New York. Towards the end, he is in San Francisco, then spends some time mourning in Mexico, and finally ends up in New Orleans, where it all began.

Body count:

One proper murder and one suicide.

The object of desire:

Marian wants to kill her ex-lover and steal 170k bucks from him. Or is it the other way around? 

She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.

Blackouts:

/

References:

I was lying in bed around eleven reading The Hidden Persuaders when the phone rang.

Title:

Fitting as they both indeed do go all the way. But it could also be titled something like "Concrete Flamingo". Jerry buys one of these statues (God, the things you people sell to tourists!) so that he can weigh the body to keep it underwater. Once the search for Chapman's body starts, this concrete flamingo catches the morbid public fancy.

Edition:

Dell First Edition #A165, First Printing - September 1958

Cover:

Nice Kim Novak illustration by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka. It depicts our pair's farewell scene, see the "cool lines" section below.

Cool lines:

“Good night, Marian.” I looked back from the open doorway, and, as always, she reminded me of something very slender and beautifully made and expensive—and utterly wasted—like a Stradivarius in a world in which the last musician was dead. I closed the door and went on down the hall.