The Professor

“The hell with all dizzy women, anyway.” Ex-footballer Lee Scarborough tries flogging his Pontiac to sun-bathing twenty-something nurse Diana James. She has other ideas. What follows involves $120,000, a world of trouble for Scarborough and a lot of fun for us.

This tale will be a good friend to any red-blooded male outmaneuvered by a designing female. Every page is studded with lines to either make you go “Ha!” or to underline as pure pulp goodness: “If she wanted ice water, I thought, all she had to do was open a vein”; “She was chromium plated and solid ice both ways from the middle”; “The hours passed as the hours must pass in hell”. Lee Scarborough’s story is age old – destiny is desire – and Williams dutifully enmeshes the poor sap in a fiendishly constructed spider’s web built not by that sun-bathing nurse but by one Madelon Butler whose banker hubby, *it is claimed*, has gone bye-bye with $120k. Burglarising the banker’s house in search of loot Scarborough ends the night holed up in a mate’s empty house with…Madelon Butler who puts whisky away like Oliver Reed and relentlessly, and rather wittily, trolls him. Bitterly aggrieved assailants mount murderous attacks on them and – Scarborough wondering how the hell he’s got himself into all this – they eventually hatch an inadvisable plan to head back to her place despite the heat to pick up the keys to three safe-deposit boxes stuffed with cash. That little endeavour ends in gunplay, arson and two bodies. Scarborough goes on the run with Butler and that proves to be a test of his mental health that some chaps might find rather familiar.

This is a short, taut, well-written novel and it belts along. Everything counts, it’s all muscle, and there are many reveals and volte faces. I particularly enjoyed Scarborough having the sense to walk right away from this caper the moment he hears of it – bright boy, we think, chap after my own heart – until he reviews his finances and has all too understandable second thoughts. The two women he crosses swords with are, natch, va-va-voom knock-outs but amusingly Scarborough and Butler rub each other up the wrong way right from the start. Sure, he’s a red-blooded male and snatches the odd kiss but the two of them have some great poisonous badinage. Scarborough is no schmuck – he certainly thinks more clearly than I would in his shoes – it’s just that we know he’s going to get royally shafted but we read on to find out how.

Off the top of my head the closest filmic companion to all this would be that nineties neo-noir “The Last Seduction” which is just as delicious and leaves the protagonists in similar positions at the end of play. Linda Fiorentino would be an absolute shoo-in for Madelon Butler. Plus – since Scarborough is an ex-footballer – I’d pay good money to see David Beckham or Vinnie Jones dropped into all this mayhem and have them totally out-played, wandering around punch drunk, trying to fight their way out of the swamp they’ve found themselves in. "A Touch Of Death" is a great read – right book, right time, for me – and while Madelon Butler may have ice water in her veins at the end you are rather cheering her on. As for Lee Scarborough…well, he should have stuck to flogging cars. “Baby, I thought, if only you knew.”