Lee Scarborough, the down-on-his-luck narrator of A TOUCH OF DEATH, doesn’t like to waste time. Neither does Charles Williams, who wrote the book in 1953. By page 11, the plot has already been established and moving at full speed ahead.
While attempting to sell his car, Scarborough meets Diana, a beautiful young woman who offers him an opportunity for a big score: $120,000. The cash in question was embezzled by a local banker who’s since gone missing, but Diana believes the money remains hidden in his home; they just have to find out where. This task would be easier if the banker’s wife, Madelon, wasn’t in the house at the time, but it’s made even more difficult when she’s nearly murdered during Scarborough’s break-in, by an unknown assailant, and he has to save her, thus blowing his cover. Convinced Diana set him up, he and Madelon are forced to go into hiding until he can unravel all the players and their true intentions.
Given that A TOUCH OF DEATH has been reissued by Hard Case Crime, you know Scarborough’s going to have a hell of a time of it. As befitting of that era’s first-person hardboiled heroes, Scarborough spouts choice dialogue, and harbors a slight misogynist attitude so antiquated that it comes off as charming and a little nostalgic today (“She put a cigarette in her mouth and waited for me to leap up and hold the lighter for her. The hell with her.”). He’s from that time when “no dice” was part of the everyday vernacular and “lesbian” came capitalized.
In other words, it’s vintage Williams, perhaps best known for HELL HATH NO FURY (filmed as THE HOT SPOT) and DEAD CALM. Making it seem so effortless, his genius is fooling you into thinking that he made it all up as he went along, but when the final twist comes at the end, you’re shown startling evidence to the contrary. –Rod Lott
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A TOUCH OF DEATH reads like a forgotten Film noir. Despite using every trope and convention of that genre, Williams creates a story that grips you in the narrator’s felonious nightmare.