“The Woman Chaser” (1960) is not a good title for this book. The book is not about chasing women, though Richard Hudson does some of that. But he’s really chasing success, or self-actualization.

Richard Hudson comes to LA to start a used-car dealership for his boss in San Francisco. Hudson is great at selling cars, and he experiences success pretty quickly.

He also moves in with his mother and her new husband, Leo, a washed-up film producer who is 20 years younger than she is.

Richard, restless, decides to launch into the film business. He’s got an idea for a movie, which he wants to write and director and everything else–and Leo’s inside knowledge puts him on his way.

“The Woman Chaser” is told first-person by Richard Hudson, whose ego and delusions of grandeur come through loud and clear.

There is no real plot–no mystery to solve, no destination to arrive at. In that way, the book is similar to Willeford’s “The Pick-up,” or Jim Thompson’s “The Grifters.” You’re just carried along as you follow Hudson from one thing to another, and eventually the book stops.

I read this book not because of the title, but because of the author. Willeford is good. I enjoy reading his work. “The Woman Chaser” is the fifth Willeford book I’ve read.

Willeford was born in Arkansas, but grew up in Los Angeles. In 1935, he began a 21-year stint in the military, serving in various roles. During World War 2, he was a tank commander who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and he earned the Silver Star, Bronze Star for outstanding bravery, and Purple Heart. He left the military in November 1956, a few weeks after I was born. But by then, he had already published three novels–in 1953, 1955, and 1956.

A high school dropout, after leaving the military Willeford worked as a boxer, actor, horse trainer, and radio announcer, and studied painting in France for a while. Quite the Renaissance Man. He entered college in 1960, and by 1964 had a Master’s.

Willeford’s most famous novel is “Miami Blues” (1984), the first of five books featuring Detective Hoke Mosely. I read “Miami Blues,” and really need to get to the others. I just think he’s an excellent writer who doesn’t adhere to any formulas. Willeford died in 1988, but left some good reading behind.

Previous Willeford reviews: “Miami Blues” and “The Cockfighter,” and “Pickup”, a book whose ending I’ll never be able to forget.

”This period of my life should have been a happy one, and suppose it was, in a weird, unrealistic way. Wasn’t I making money hand over fist, as the saying goes? And isn’t the making of money the reason for existence? Isn’t it?”

n  n

Richard Hudson believes he is the best used car salesman in California. He may be right. He has made Honest Hal so much money on the San Francisco car lot that Hal has dispatched Hudson back to his hometown to open an Honest Hal car lot in Los Angeles. Soon Hudson is making money hand over fist.

Hudson’s expenses are minimal. He moves in with his mother, who was once a professional dancer, and who still dances every day in front of the mirror instead of for audiences. She loves him in an ”absent minded way.” She is married to Leo Steinberg, a producer who is on the skids and has a blossoming teenage daughter, Becky. Leo is only a few years older than Hudson, but Hudson loves to call him Pops anyway. They are an odd gathering of people who have all washed up on the same shore together. Becky is trying desperately to get rid of her virginity and she has decided that Hudson is the man for the job. Leo is desperately trying to get back into Hollywood. Hudson’s mom is one grand jeté away from flying off into the atmosphere.

Hudson is irritated. He should be happy, but the more money he makes, the more dissatisfied he becomes. He wants something more, but what?

”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.”

Hudson decides he needs to make a movie. Not only will he make a movie, but he is going to write and direct it. If I were Hudson’s friend, I would have been shaking my head and explaining to him...that isn’t the way things work in Hollywood. I would have laughed at his naivety and then watched in amazement as the SOB pulls it off. ”Self-doubt is the worst thing that can happen to a man. It tightens the stomach muscles, freezes the intellect. But worst of all it causes men to stay in dead-end jobs all of their lives because they are afraid to try anything else, afraid of failure, afraid to lose their stupid security. Afraid, period.”

Well, Richard is not afraid to fail. He is more afraid to never try.

Selling is selling, and once you’ve learned to sell used cars, you can pretty much sell anything. He has Leo and he has Leo’s connections. They decide THE MAN at Mammoth Productions is the guy to approach about using his film lot for a piece of the action. All Hudson needs is THE MAN’s objections so he can overcome them one by one.

This is not only the funniest Charles Willeford novel I’ve read but also the most psychotic. On the cover of the book is the very fitting tagline…The psycho-pulp classic.The characters are all odd, fascinating creatures. They are the satellites circling around Hudson’s descent into madness. Hudson isn’t a man to take even his madness lying down. He does even that in spectacular fashion. The title is a bit nonsensical because he spends a lot more time chasing cars or dreams than he does women, but of course, a title like The Woman Chaser, emblazoned across a pulp paperback cover, will have a lot of guys digging the four bits out of their pockets.

n  n

Don’t get me wrong, Richard Hudson gets laid, but it is not the burning desire in his life. He must create something or destroy everything.

In 1999, the director Robinson Devor made a movie based on the book, starring the hilarious Patrick Warburton. The movie script actually follows the book very closely and lifts many pieces of dialogue straight from Willeford. It is interesting for me to notice what they change and what they keep. I suggest reading the book before watching the movie because it certainly increased my enjoyment of both.

If you need a hardboil fix, this one will have you sweltering in the LA heat and picking some grit out of your teeth. It is fantastic.

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Not my favorite Willeford. But I still enjoyed it as a send up of the American Dream.

The system sucks. Become too cynical and push back too hard, you'll find yourself on a lonely, dark road heading towards destruction.

Willeford is worth checking out - he's an underrated writer of the 1950s-1980s. He wrote mostly hard-boiled stuff but with a humorous touch. He's great on what it's like to be poor and hungry for work. This is one of my favorite L.A. novels.

Strange combination of hard-boiled pulp and black comedy from the early '60's about a sleazy, sociopathic used car salesman who becomes obsessed with writing and directing a low budget explotation film he came up with titled "The Man Who Got Away".

COUNTDOWN: Mid-20th Century North American Crime
BOOK 35 (of 250)
I can't think of a more misleading title, and then on the inside cover the Village Voice writes that this author "is the pope of psychopulp". I'm pretty sure Willeford completely owns the genre of "psychopulp", and there is only one book in this genre: this one.
HOOK - 4 stars: "START HERE. Using the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, get a little slack and pull the film through this little thingamajig. Clamp here. Leave a small loop so it won't flutter...If the sound is loud enough the incidental slithering of the film won't bother you a bit..." Now we know what this book MIGHT be about: film-making. Then the author quickly switches to the counting of cars at an intersection. Odd and interesting.
PACE - 5: One-sit read.
PLOT - 3: A used-car salesman decides to make a movie. And he does. The author takes us through the process: sets, casting, budgets, etc., and our salesman has affairs here and there. The 'chapter titles' are from typical screenplays, like "Cut to" and "Dissolve". It's an interesting construct, but often I couldn't figure out what the title had to do with the section. And this salesman buys his own lot and forces his staff to dress as Santa Claus...to sell more cars...in the summer. He thinks he is a bad-ass Hollywood big-time producer...oh, this sorta feels like the first treatment for the mid-60s film, "The Producers" in which very stupid people think they can outwit Broadway (the film later made into the stage musical with Lane and Broderick then into the film musical).
PEOPLE - 3: For a 'psychopulp' novel, we don't learn much about the people. Then again, what did we expect?
PLACE - 5: Movie-making in L.A. The story HAS to take place in L.A: this is a perfect case of atmosphere matching plot. The title? What director/producer would even bother with a script entitled "Used Car Salesman Makes a B-Movie"? Better to call this "The Woman Chaser"!
Oh, and I loved this PERFECT description of Southern California (I've lived there) housing in 1960:
"This suburb of Van Nuys was the 3-bedroom-den-section, a step above the 2-bedroom-den section, and way above the 2-bedroom-no-den section"
Now, move forward to 1994 Southern California housing, you could choose:
A) The 2-story pink stucco, red-tiled roof, 4 bed, 2.5 bath with upstairs master bedroom OR
B) The 2-story pink stucco, red-tiled roof, 4 bed, 2.5 bath with downstairs master bedroom.
I bought plan A, but on a stupendously large plot: why, it was almost 1/10th of an acre!
SUMMARY: 4.0. Good plot with great atmospheric touches and a true page-turner: yes, the best "psychopulp" novel EVER! You disagree? Okay, name your favorite "psychopulp" book.

One of my favorite books ever.

Disappointing. Thoroughly dislikable main character that is never interesting. I kept waiting for the book to get somewhere, but it never did.

Richard Hudson is a pure sociopath and Willeford writes him compellingly. Not my favorite of CW’s novels, but it might be the best example of what it is he does, a skeleton key for his other work. Hudson is an obvious bad guy from the first moment you’re with him. This is not always the case with CW books. In this sense, it’s helpful. I know when I first read CW, I would balk at certain character decisions that felt uncouth or dated. I get it now, and it took me a couple novels to really understand. I should have read this one first. If one were to teach a class on CW, this would be a perfect introduction. It’s brutal in parts, funny in parts, chilling in parts, just really really good stuff. Undeniably a cut above other crime/pulp writers, even the deified Elmore Leonard. I definitely recommend it as a first foray into his writing. The style is heavier than some of his other books and parts are more focused and brutal, but diving into the Hoke Moseley series after reading this or something like Understudy for Death, would help the reader more quickly grasp the tone of those novels and the inner lives of those characters.

One of the best and most under-rated noir writers of all time. An artist, a magician. Read Cockfighter. Brutal and unforgiving. He'll never be accused of being PC either.

The Woman Chaser (1960) by Charles Willeford is a curiously titled novel since most of the woman chasing by the protagonist Richard Hudson is away from him. Perhaps, it was a marketing ploy, but this novel is more about artistic integrity and the used car industry than it is about womanizing, although there is some of that. It is a kind of a crime noir for sure with its bleak worldview about “straight society.” Hudson is a successful used car salesman who feels the need for more in life, but it is not a family that he longs for, rather he feels that the need to create in order to truly be alive. So he decides to make a low-budget film with his stepfather, a former studio director. However, Hudson is unwilling to compromise, either to pad the film to make it longer for theatrical release, nor is he willing to trim it for airing on TV (cable would have solved this problem today). His partners decide to air in on TV and Hudson spirals into anger and depression, wrecking havoc on anyone who crosses his path. Yet, another entertaining early novel from Willeford.

Three and a half. Solid, sordid, Hollywood story from CW. Now we know what would have happened to Chili Palmer if things hadn’t worked out so well for him in Get Shorty.