The Professor

“Well, you haven’t set the world on fire so far or you wouldn’t be in this place.” Two women, a lot of anger and a bank with rubbish security. Right from the start the reader is asking “Which way is this going to go south?” and most satisfyingly it does too.

Car salesman Harry Madox, low on cash and “full of a black restlessness and angry at everything” gets sweet on buttoned-up office bomb Gloria Harper while getting it on with his boss’s va-va-voom wife Glenn Close….er, Dolores Harshaw. Madox is a sarcastic so-and-so, very enjoyably taking no nonsense from his boss and Williams hints, hints, hints at the dodginess of his character, setting up a get-rich-quick wheeze and having Madox commit to it before pulling back the veil and getting thrillingly specific on the details of his backstory. It’s a moment of delicious craft. Harry Madox is actually a rather good salesman, runs the business well when his Boss goes fishing and pays attention to the fine details. He’s partial to midnight swims and wins Gloria’s heart by rescuing her dog (“I watched her, thinking how it would be, the way you always do, and how pretty she was”). He’s no monster, he genuinely falls for Gloria (“And then they dynamited the dam…”), he’s just a red-blooded guy hurtling over the edge. He’s a bit like Donald Westlake’s Parker in his attention to detail and the delicious suspense of this novel is watching him allllmost get away with his schemes. Unfortunately for him the cops are no slouches, there’s some hill-billy blackmailing his sweetheart and Dolores Harshaw is clearly a sandwich short of a picnic.

Stupidly, Maddox is played by Don “Miami Vice” Johnson in Dennis Hopper’s film adapation and he’s a) 10 years older than Madox (Johnson was 41 at time of filming, Connolly 20) and b) the lead of “Miami Vice” when Madox self-describes as frightening women off and Harshaw herself says “You’re a big ugly bastard with a face that’d stop a clock, but you’re sweet”. His wheeze when he breathes because of a boxing injury is a plot point and it doesn’t work in the film. Virginia Madson – a dead spit for Gillian Anderson – plays Dolores Harshaw a notch too trashily while Connolly is such a beauty it threatens to nuke the plot, making one wonder why the hell would Madox fool around with Harshaw and therefore making him deserving of everything he consequently gets. In the novel, we hear his inner dialogue and he’s more conflicted, although still imprisoned by his libido. Dennis Hopper’s steamy, erotic thriller, 18-rated movie version (swearing, boobies and smoking, all of which are in the novel minus the swearing) is otherwise a remarkably faithful adaption, however, right down to dialogue (“What was my batting average so far in staying out of trouble when it was baited with that much tramp?”), the ice-cube tray, the plot-relevant shoes, Gloria’s lesbian dalliance and much else. A foot-tapping soundtrack, too. The novel wins though, with its great sequences of gathering tension and suspense – Madox meticulously building the fire-bomb – and then in the final rain-sodden, pitch black escape from Sutton’s cabin, a bravura sequence of insane, real world, details threatening to bring a man to the end of his tether. Williams is a really great writer and jettisoning anything from a novel this well constructed (with this many quoteable lines) would have been a great shame.

After “A Touch Of Death” and now this novel, that’s two for two when it comes to Charles Williams novels and my outstanding question is why the hell haven’t I heard of him before? Hollywood and crazy old Dennis Hopper obviously had (as had the makers of “Dead Calm”). Still, my bad. Something I intend to rectify. “You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.”