17. There's Always a Price Tag by James Hadley Chase

I am not a huge James Hadley Chase fan, though always on the lookout for different editions of his famous No Orchids for Miss Blandish.  I found a small set (I think 3) of these great Corgi super 70s photo covers with the excellent big font of his name and I had to have them.  So far his books are always entertaining, but also slightly mechanical and derivative, so I have been parsing them out slowly.  I'm on a reading roll this early 2023 and working on cutting down my on-deck shelf, so it was time.

The story here is told from the perspective of Glyn Nash, a smart, good-looking guy down on his luck in a dead-end advertising job in L.A.  He is sitting in a bar when he sees a guy stumble out and blindly walk into traffic.  Nash saves him from getting hit by a car and then offers to drive him home.  The man turns out to be Erle Dester, a famous once-successful movie producer who is on the verge of drinking himself to ruin.  He offers Nash a job as his chauffeur and dogsbody for quite a good sum. Nash is reluctant until he meets smouldering hot Mrs. Dexter.  Against his better judgement, he takes the job.  He soon learns why the house has no other servants, why most of the rooms are closed off and covered in dust clothes and why Mr. Dester is drinking himself to a stupour.  Mrs. Dexter, as soon as she learned that her husband had taken out a massive life insurance policy on himself in her name, became "frigid".  And now Nash strongly suspects she is waiting for him to die.  Even more against his better judgement, he decides to try and team up with her.

This is a very procedural and more complicated take on Double Indemnity.  We have the super smart, relentless insurance investigator, but he only really comes around late in the game when everything is already going to shit.  This isn't really a morality play and if there is any kind of deep theme it's that planning an insurance scam that involves murder (even if in this case, it doesn't actually involve murder) is incredibly complex and almost certainly will fail.  The enjoyment of this book is following Nash in his planning and then stressing along with him as little things keep going wrong here and there, each not enough to totally derail the plan, so that he keeps going along with it until things of course finally do not work out at all.  The fun part is that one of the crucial elements in the plan is to put Dester's body into a deep freezer so they can take it out later and fake the actual time of death.  There is a lot that is preposterous about this plan, but it is still quite enjoyably goofy.

The ending petered out a bit as he basically just gets caught (no spoilers because he foreshadows it at the beginning) though there is a minor ironic twist a little before the very ending.  

Also, I am not sure if it is me or if Chase was relaxing his American cover a bit by this time (written in 1958) but it felt more english in style to me.  First of all, I don't think anybody was called "Glyn" in America (nor "Erle") but mainly there was a "should" instead of a "would" in the first page.