Utterly absurd. Like, seriously: the sort of novel that made me hoot "Really?" on certain pages.

And yet I couldn't put it down. The plot is a hot mess about a shady car dealer who becomes a filmmaker and gets into trouble because his perfect script is great at either 200 pages or 63 pages, but nowhere in between, and he refuses to compromise. Nutty, right? And then there's his behavior with women, which is equally awful and ridiculous.

It's all super-overheated melodrama and fun to read as an example of how, in the early sixties, a potboiler was written.

A guilty pleasure I'd recommend to no one else. Despite which, I'm going to pick up and read another of his books, The Cockfighter.

I'd read the first two Hoke Mosely books, but nothing in them prepared me for the uncompromising darkness/hilariousness of this. The fact that this rather brutal little novel about the downward spiral of a used-car dealer arrived in the guise of a '50s crime pulp paperback called "The Woman Chaser" (title has nothing to do with the story, unless by "chase" you mean "punch a pregnant woman in the stomach" -- yes, that happens, that's the kind of thing we're dealing with here) is pretty incredible. The hero of the used-car dealer's film, "The One That Got Away," doesn't get away, and neither does the dealer himself. A bleak, funny and utterly compelling vision of '50s Los Angeles and how artistic ambition can give rise to madness.

Art imitates life..... or is it life imitates art?

Charles Willeford really writes like no one else - no single genre can encapsulate his work. Like most of his books, the protagonist isn’t a “good” guy but generally I like them. In this book, Richard Hudson is a creep but you still kind of root for him, until the final blistering pages really show you how unhinged Richard truly is.

Another great read by a master.

Finished it up today. Having just torn through two other Willefords before this one, The Woman Chaser had more explicit philosophical reflection than those others. Not saying that either "Wild Wives" or "High Priest" are not deep books. Both are full of Willeford's wit and wisdom; but the riches of his thought are better hidden in those shorter yarns.

Here in The Woman Chaser, the narrator Hudson will stop himself from time to time and ask deep questions about his motives and emotions. He'll ask the reader those questions retrospectively, years on from the main timeline he's narrating; but thankfully he never dwells long on the deep thoughts and feelings. As soon as he asks one, he answers it by diving right back into the narrative and recalling some insane act of his.

Such as an improvised infanticide.

I wish I could explain to you how funny this book is, but it would defeat the point in some ways. Check out this scene, where the main character is on a road trip searching for a man in Santa Barbara.

“Where can I find him?” I asked the bartender.
“Today’s Tuesday, isn’t it? He goes to art classes on Wednesday mornings, so I suppose he’s at the grove today. But he might be hard to find though. Mrs. Larson bought him a horse and he rides it all over hell and gone.”

“We’ll look for him. Where’s the grove?”

“What do you fellows want Chet for, anyway?”

“His aunt in Glendale died,” I said, “and left him a million dollars.”

“He can sure use it,” the bartender said.

“Where’s the grove,” I asked impatiently, as Milo laughed.

The line about $1 million got me laughing hard, but then the bartenders reply was also funny, and the impatient question really capped it off.

I found a passage in this book that's a kind of nutshell of everything I've seen so far from Willeford:

Some of my story is too personal to write in the first person, and some of it is too personal to write in the third person. Most of it is too personal to write at all.

This is also my exact feeling about talking with other people about my life, although it also applies to writing.

“When a man knows the troth it is no longer necessary to search for it. As I see things now, in retrospection, the only thing the matter with me was my compassion for others. I felt sorry for the Feebs, and that was fatal. Down inside myself, in some hidden pocket of a fold in my heart, compassion lay for the poor ignorant slob. It was too bad.”

Really surprising read. Used car salesman with artistic pretensions. And he's a violent sociopath to boot. A section just lights up in the middle when the narrator goes into this reverie about creating something; making something to last. Kinda blew my mind; I had to read everything that Willeford wrote.

What a weird fucking book and an absolute, sociopathic piece of shit.

Willeford is the poet of the pulps.

Clever, darkly humorous, and brutal, I couldn't put down this inaccurately named, delightfully repulsive novel. The sexist, monomaniacal "artist" at its center will stick with me for a long time.

Masterpiece!

Fun pulp from 1960. The hero is a sexist, racist, likable jerk. An amusing plot involving an ace used car salesman who dreams of using his insights as a capitalist whore to write and direct a movie so America can gain from his cynical, cruel perspective on life.

Willeford is one of my favorites but I couldn’t connect with this one. A send up of the movie industry in the same way his Burnt Orange Heresy is a send up of the art world, it has the sarcastic tone and dark humor but lacks Orange’s energy and quality ending. I get the point he was trying to make with the character and the script but it still felt incomplete. Or at least wasn’t reaching me.

A used car salesman pursues his dream of making a movie. But when he finally makes his movie, and doesn’t get the deal he expected, he decides to enact a brutal revenge…

I genuinely don’t know what to make of Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser - it’s unlike any other novel I’ve read before, but only because it’s so nonsensical and bizarre!

I guess our main character Richard Hudson is a bigshot used car salesman only as a plot device to get his hands on ready cash to help finance his bonkers movie, but did we need to spend so long on his career as a used car salesman - couldn’t we just skip over the finer details? Or better yet, considering he also uses his stepfather’s expensive painting to fund the movie, jettison it completely, as it’s an utterly superfluous addition to the novel, and just say the painting’s sale paid for the whole budget?

It’s strange details like this that make up the novel and I can only think that this, along with other decisions, was done to beef up a page count and/or play to the pulp audience (the novel was first published in 1960). Like, why is Richard’s defining characteristic that he’s a “woman chaser” - what’s that got to do with anything? He’s a sleazy guy but you get that from pretty much every other action the man takes - you don’t need to also know that he slept with his teenage step-sister or has this unsettling incestuous relationship with his mother.

Richard’s more than a sleazy guy though; he’s a complete scumbag. This is a man who literally punches a woman in the gut after she tells him she’s pregnant with his baby to induce a miscarriage. But then this was also the 1950s so maybe by those standards he was just an average guy? (I’m joking, I’m joking!)

My point is: what’s the point? Are we meant to empathise with Richard on some level - are we meant to like this guy somehow? Because that’s a massive failure on Willeford’s part if so - only a sociopath could think Richard a stand up dude. Maybe the one thing we’re meant to understand about him is his desire to make art and transcend his otherwise mundane existence for a stab at immortality.

And it’s another really weird choice - not making a movie, but the subject of the movie itself: about a trucker who accidentally runs over a kid, then drives off, only to have cops chase him and die in a roadblock. Wha - huh? Why THAT story? I can’t tell if the novel is meant to be a comedy or not. He literally casts his leading lady by stalking a woman - a completely random woman - at a supermarket, following her home, and telling her she got cast in his movie (and of course he sleeps with her because he’s a “woman chaser”). She goes along with it all of course because… that sort of thing happened all the time in the ‘50s?!

What interested me in the novel initially was the promise of the protagonist going off on one after his dreams are dashed. I was expecting some insane John Wick-style rampage but less martial arts-y. And what I got was a remarkably quick scene right at the end, almost like an afterthought, before the inevitable ending. Very disappointing. There are vastly more pages devoted to the irrelevant selling of used cars than a much more interesting plot point.

So, I really don’t know what to make of it. If it’s a satire, I don’t know of what. If it’s a comedy, it needed to be more funny than dark. I guess it’s a decent example of the pulpy novels being published around that time, though only of its trashy nature than anything else. The main character is a reprehensible cretin and a pointless womaniser doing a pointless job then making a pointless movie starring random people and telling a pointless story who then throws his life away doing something pointless.

The Woman Chaser is easy to read - Willeford was a fine writer and the prose is still accessible and clear. And the novel is unpredictable at the very least, and original. But its biggest impression is also that of one big baffling shrug of a story - I wouldn’t recommend it even to Willeford fans. At best, it reads like a long forgotten in-joke or piss-take between him and someone else who’s also long dead. If you haven’t read them yet, his Hoke Moseley novels are much better, and also more coherent, than this forgettable earlier effort.