Richard Hudson has a Midas touch when it comes to making money. He knows what makes people tick and knows exactly how to use their desires to enrich himself. His latest venture, running a used car lot in Los Angeles, soon bores him. His keen observation of human nature drives him into pursuing a scheme to direct a movie. His movie won't be just something to sit and eat popcorn to, however. It's going to be a M-O-V-I-E! A spotlight on the human condition as he sees it. And pursuing his goal will involve a sexy dimwitted teenage stepsister, an icy secretary, a retired Army man, a failed producer, and a bizarre obsession with having car salesmen dress like Santa Clause. This is exactly the kind of novel I love.

Poor edition, so many spelling errors, come on! an early work with good moments, but an exaggerated too fantastic of a story line, maybe on purpose, who knows?.

bad santa

A brilliant used car salesman decides to try and make himself immortal by creating a piece of art (a movie), but ends up destroying himself and all of the relationships in his life. Pretty bleak stuff and brilliantly written in the vein of a movie outline/treatment.

01/2021
From 1960
This book would be edgy and outrageous in the 21st century. It seems at the end that Richard Hudson has gone insane and is retelling what happened to him as a movie. So that's what's been going on... Extremely "meta" they would say now. Especially since what happened to him involves making a movie. Layers of reality? He is naturally a very untrustworthy narrator. And an utter horror.
Before or originally this novel was titled The Director. Why is it called The Woman Chaser? Is this another example of his false vision of himself?

01/2013
The Pope of Psychopulp. Okay, I read that on the first page. The 3rd book I've read by Willeford, and I liked it the best. Awesome. Weird.

Ingenious packaging, in the sense that this is to some extent presented as a faux film-script, but otherwise this is the same old Willeford. His protagonists are nearly always unpleasant misogynists, as is the case here, although there is some merit to this as 'crime fiction without much in the way of actual crime'. I suppose this is somewhat in the terrain of Jim Thompson, but where Thompson's narrators are hysterical and often genuinely disturbing, Willeford's are normally just low down and mean.

Originally titled: The Director

One of Willeford's most gleefully perverse romps, to be sure.

Floja novela de Willeford, con una trama descabellada que no conduce a ningún sitio. Lo que siempre es un placer es leer este tipo de novelas pulp o serie B, macarras y de bajo presupuesto, el equivalente literario a esas películas americanas de los sesenta y setenta hechas para televisión como la del rodaje que se narra en la novela.

Willeford has a knack for getting inside creep's heads. And, that's exactly what he does with Richard Hudson in The Woman Chaser. Hudson is the star salesman of Honest Hal's San Francisco dealership and has mastered the art of swindling the feebs, the suckers, the ordinary 9 to 5 cookie cutter men and women. Now, he's heading to Los Angeles to open a second dealership. He walks onto an ailing used car lot and makes the owner an offer on the spot for the whole kit and kaboodle.

But, once you leave a guy like Hudson alone to run things his own way, his slick creepiness comes out of hiding. See, Hudson comes from Los Angeles and grew up in a creepy old house with his prima Donna ballerina mother who he oodles over, thinks she's the best mother in the world, likes to dance with her in costume in the basement studio, and likes to stare at her bare breasts. Hudson's creepiness further comes on display in his dealings with his sixteen year old stepsister who has a teenage crush on her thirty year old stepbrother. He takes it upon himself to teach her the facts of life and then casts her aside. But that's Hudson who plays the same game with his secretary, firing her the next day.

Hudson though thinks the car business is too easy and decides that he wants to be an artist and make a Hollywood movie with his stepfather, a washed up producer with nothing going on now. Obsessed with making the greatest movie ever, he loots the car business and focuses all his energy on his masterpiece.

But we all have to answer to someone and for Hudson that means answering to "the Man," who runs Mammoth Pictures. And "the Man" wants to change Hudson's masterpiece, not letting him issue a 63 minute film in a world of 90 minute movies. That's when Hudson throws his tantrum.

It's an odd portrait of a creepy narcissistic guy through his eyes where everything he does is somehow justified. Not exactly a crime novel in the traditional sense, but a pulp paperback study of a guy slowly losing it and his world collapsing around him.

So what is this book about?:
a. Richard Hudson, the used car dealer who tries to write a very bitter, cynical and dark humoured movie about hard working people and the flaws of the American Dream.
b. Script writer Richard Hudson who wrote a very bitter, cynical and dark humoured movie script about a used car dealer trying to make a movie about hard working people and the flaws of the American Dream.
c. Author Richard Hudson who tries to write an autobiographical book about writing a very bitter, cynical and dark humoured movie script about a used car dealer trying to make a movie about hard working people and the flaws of the American Dream.
d. All of the above.
e. Neither, it's a structurally different storyline all together.
f. Shut up, little man! You're overthinking it!

Well, this was weird...changing tones and perspectives all the time. One time being told as "first person", switching to "third person" midway and sometimes landing somewhere in the middle with the voice of Charles Willeford himself shining through. It's marketed as "crime pulp" and while being very "noir-ish", harsh, violent, bleak, bitter and way way funny in the way of the doomed loser characteristics of Jim Thompson it defies clear genres all together. You would have to call it "soapy satire psychothriller loser-noir comedy". There, I did it: bullshit.

It's confusing, but amazing. I already said too much. Read it if you like rotten-, doomed characters, bleak atmosphere and pitchblack humour.

Putting this in my "favorite books" shelf. Will eventually need to buy a physical copy and read it again and again. Already looking forward to that. I'm watching the movie next week. Should be good, i love Patrick Warburton's acting and delivery.

3.5

My second try with Willeford's work, having recently started into it by way of 'Pick-Up' (published 5 years prior; so this is still early stuff). 

First, the whole misnomer of 'The Woman Chaser'. Apparently Willeford wanted to call his novel 'The Director' (... crickets ...)... but if you're an enterprising editor looking to sell a novel, you won't let it out on the city streets with the offer-defying title 'The Director'. Of course not; you'll jazz it up, so that other, noir-seeking editors will sit up and take notice. 

~ you'll make it sound sleazy; like it's dripping with sex. Call it 'The Woman Chaser', even if not a single woman is chased. ~ and there's only maybe one paragraph of actual sex. 

Willeford's shaggy dog tale is much more entertaining in its first half (certainly more entertaining than 'Pick-Up' at any given point). This is largely due to protagonist Richard Hudson; kind of admirable as a snappy-yapping go-getter who gets things done (in this case, rising up in the world of used cars) but, though not dumb, he is still something of a doofus.

Richard is the kind of late 1950s, sexist chump (just a t-a-d more sensitive; he reads poetry) who has no real sense of women (outside of weirdly wanting to save them from guys even more of a dope than himself) and really only loves his mother (a still very in-shape ex-dancer). For the life of him, Richard is perpetually unable to fathom why a woman who embraces her femininity would also want to be intelligent.   

~ but he spends as little time as possible pondering that. Richard has dreams of being a movie writer / director. He feels life can be something of a repetitive slog if a person isn't tapping into his creativity. He actually breaks down crying in a parking lot, thinking about how men become "prisoners... they were also their own jailers!":n  

Our lives are so short and there is so little time for creativeness, and yet we waste our precious time, letting it dribble through our fingers like dry sand. But that was it. Creativeness. To create something. Anything. I pulled myself together, wiped my streaming eyes with my handkerchief. One thing. That was all. One little thing.

n'TWC' becomes a paean to that creative urge; to those who risk everything in the service of something artistic. 

Richard does get his movie made - and the way Willeford breathlessly describes that process (esp. the hunt for his 'unknown' leading man) makes for fun reading for movie fans. The author also serves up some sympathetic supporting characters (as well as one surprisingly savvy one) along the way. 

Weirdly, though, the novel begins to lose steam once Richard achieves his goal in a manner that is ultimately frustrating for him. The narrative simply, sadly, then has nowhere to go. Still, it's sort of fun while the fun lasts (and it gets an extra half-point for the kooky way Willeford sets up his tone).