12. A Touch of Death by Charles Williams

Charles Williams is quietly but strongly lauded by fans of the pulp genre as being one of the better if not the best of the Gold Key authors.  His books are very hard to find.  Of course, Dark Carnival had this Hard Case reprint as well as at least one (maybe two, I can't remember now) other reprint in a larger format.  I kind of wished I had bought it after having read this one.  I am not ready to say he is the best or anything, but this was a really solid, efficient read with a great ending.

It starts in medias res, the way I like it.  Lee Scarborough, looking to sell his car, accidentally meets a sunbathing beauty at the back of the apartment complex.  Coincidentally, she too is looking to buy a car.  Or is she?  In the first few pages, we learn the Lee is an ex-college football star whose bum knee kept him out of the pros and is now getting down to his last dollar.  He picks up quickly that she is feeling him out for some other reason.  After the fake test drive, she gets down to business.  She has inside info about a missing businessman and what may have happened to the $120,000 with which he disappeared.

What starts out for Lee as a simple break & enter gets messy quick and gets messier and messier right up to the disastrous end.  What I particularly enjoyed about this book was that while the storyline was simple, the actual plot underneath it was somewhat complex and keeps you guessing until the end. And—despite that complexity—it never loses steam.  There is a lot of action and you have a nice rhythm of straight up action and then tension and questioning.  The tension in the last act is almost unbearable, with Scarborough and a fantastic femme fatale character holed up together and hiding in his apartment as the dragnet tightens and each doesn't know where the other stands.  Good stuff.

I think I must have purchased some early publisher's version.  My copy looks exactly the same as the image above, except the tagline reads "It Began As ...AND END AS A NIGHT" which is just weird and wrong.  The inside back cover has what looks like promotional copy and info for a book store to order it, so maybe it is some kind of advanced copy.  Otherwise it all looked pretty legit.  I was just thrown by that bizarre tagline.

Here is a much better and fuller review, if you don't mind spoilers and want to get a better sense of what makes this book so great without actually reading it.