James Hadley Chase (aka, René Lodge Brabazon Raymond, James L. Docherty, Raymond Marshall, R. Raymond, and Ambrose Grant) was a British writer of thrillers. He wrote 90 novels and 50 of them were made into movies.
Chase’s first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), became an international best seller. It established the style Chase would employ in his other thrillers: plenty of action, amoral characters, and violent villains. Common elements of a James Hadley Chase novel are a tough protagonist, a beautiful woman, deadly villains, a few fistfights, and manic shootings.
All of those elements are prominent in I’ll Get You For This (1946) and the movie version I’ll Get You for This,, Lucky Nick Cain, with George Raft and filmed in Italy(1951 ). Gambler Chester Cain, travels to Paradise Palms, a coastal community seventy miles from Miami, to start a new life after killing five men in four months in New York City. “It got so bad that I was driving around in an armored car, putting newspapers on the floor around my bed so no one could get at me without waking me, and toting a gun, even in my bath.” (p. 14)
Cain gets involved with the bodacious Miss Wonderly, a former showgirl who attracts men and danger. Both Cain and Wonderly get framed for the murder of John Herrick, a reform political candidate, and go on the run. Part of that escapade takes Cain into a woman’s prison for some of the most grizzly and creepy action in all of Chase’s oeuvre. GRADE: B+
The Paw in the Bottle (1949) is both a novel about a heist gone wrong and the story of obsessions. Julie Holland is motived by wealth and power. Julie becomes involved with Harry Gleb on a plan to steal valuable fur coats from a rich woman. The heist goes wrong, there’s a murder, and Julie is faced with life-altering decisions: continue the dangerous schemes to seize the valuable furs, or take some safer, less lucrative options.
Although the heist failed and everything went wrong with the gang-leader arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, Julie still emerged from the botched crime with a thousand pounds of income per year and a swanky Mayfair flat. But…that’s not enough for Julie. Greed leads to a shattering conclusion. GRADE: B
James Hadley Chase’s noirish thrillers are doom-laden anthems of contemporary life.
Back in my teens, I was drawn in by Chase’s catchy 2nd-person titles. Alas! it seemed that the books themselves always went downhill from there.
I think I read somewhere that Chase had never lived in—or even visited—America when he wrote the bulk of his States-set work. Once you know that, it’s hard to read his tales of American gangsters & vamps without noticing their uneven execution. Perhaps THE PAW IN THE BOTTLE would be smoother as it’s apparently set in England. Also, such an interesting cultural time-capsule: imagine living in an era where criminals designed heists around fur coats!