A typical Chase potboiler, but one that felt more depressing
than strictly fun. The title of the book is too much of a giveaway, even by
Chase standards, where one usually knows who the criminal is. The cat-and-mouse
chase has an interesting survivalist trope to it, hidden in the vast 1940s
California wilderness and mileu. I loved the initial part of the story, with a
down-on-his-luck private detective, like that of Raymond Chandler’s books
already having trouble with the cops, making a shady deal with likely criminal.
Hadley Chase does a good job of making you hate all the wrong people initially,
and while they all have shades of grey, the real ‘bad guy’ is revealed with a
twist.
Some parts are not so believable, like the convenient bombs
that go off without hurting the hero, the ferocious guard dogs that do not
bite, and the oh so convenient hideaway that is waiting to be used by the
fugitives on the run. But this just shows the hardy, ‘make what you can of the
situation’ luck that the Hadley Chase’s criminals seem to have.
What struck me, interestingly, is that the survivalist theme
also showed up in another book I was reading around the same time. In a similar
twist, in Thomas Perry’s The Old Man, the fugitives also make use of a
hideaway in the Californian mountains near Los Angeles. Funny how that happens,
although Perry’s fugitives are in a luxurious hideout, while Hadley Chase’s are
in an abandoned and beat up cabin.
One thing I always find great about James Hadley Chase’s
books, which I have commented on before here, is how easy it is to visualize
the scenes he describes, and how that is a mark of great writing. This happened
again, and I was left imagining whether the hideaway that the fugitives in The
Old Man use, at a much later point in time, is the same place from You
Never Know With Women, just refurbished for Luxury.
Or it is just my wild imagination.
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