BOOK REVIEW "The Woman Chaser" by Charles Willeford, Carroll & Graf, New York, 1992 (first published 1960), paperback, 192 pp., $3.95, ISBN: 088184-556-6 The blurb quoted from a Village Voice review calls Charles Willeford (1919-1988) "the pope of psychopulp"; while this extravagant term is hardly adequate to describe Willeford's work as a whole, it does capture well the essence of "The Woman Chaser". Older friends tell me that this is the sort of book that used to be considered "soft porn" in the fifties - a quaint notion to readers of the nineties. The late Willeford, after first achieving cult status in restricted circles, has come to be widely regarded as a master of crime fiction - which, alone, would lend value to this reissue. Fortunately, the book has considerably more than historic interest. This is the story of Richard Hudson, a used-car salesman who is sent to Los Angeles by his San Francisco company in order to start a branch there. Honest Hal, his boss, has given him carte blanche to pick a lot, hire employees, and buy and sell cars - in other words, control of the purse. For years, Richard has had the secret desire to make a film, and his return to Los Angeles and money at hand ignite that desire to the point of obsession. Enter Hudson's mother Alexandra, a sexy ballet dancer who looks and acts much younger than her age, and whom he has not seen for years. She is married to Leo Steinberg, a talented film producer and director who has fallen out of favor with Hollywood; Leo spends his days brooding and waiting for a phone call that never happens. The household, into which Hudson moves, includes also Leo's attractive teenage daughter Becky. The pawns move as follows: Hudson has a quasi-Oedipal attraction to his mother (with whom he eventually dances Bartok's "The Miraculous Mandarin" in the basement); young Becky virtually begs Richard Hudson to take her virginity, which he does with brutal disdain; Hudson admires Leo as an artist and father figure, eventually convincing him to try a comeback as a producer - with himself as scriptwriter and director. Initial financing consists of money borrowed by Hudson from the company and of Leo's sale of a valuable painting - all he has left. The film, to be written and directed by Hudson and supervised by Leo, is taken on by a studio for production. The remainder of the book is the story of the making of the film and its subsequent fate; the narration adopts a cinematic, suspenseful style as well. As the film is written, actors are chosen, and shooting starts, the atmosphere becomes distinctly darker; the protagonist's obsessions and fragile state of mind create a sense of impending disaster, amply confirmed by the final, apocalyptic fate of the film and its protagonist. Whatever its place in the history of innocence in America, this is a wonderfully trashy and suspenseful book. Minor Willeford it may be, but I would argue that it is still indispensable in order to understand the author's strangely porous artistic continuum (just like minor Truffaut is an integral part of that filmmaker's oeuvre). Even a casual reader will notice that the virtues of the plot in "The Woman Chaser" are primitive - which is not to say that they are not virtues. Yet primitive themes can yield considerable results when in the hands of a master, and so it happens here. Willeford apparently had an unlimited supply of quirky, unusual, dark-funny characters; he was also a master of lurid, outlandish yet completely believable dialogue and situations. By virtue of his incantatory powers as a narrator, trash is turned into gold for 192 pages. "The Woman Chaser" is a minor masterpiece in the noir style. Reviewed by Mario Taboada Copyright (c) 1997 Old Dominion University taboada@math.odu.edu - # RARA-AVIS: To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" # to majordomo@icomm.ca