A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Picked this up in a used book store for a few bucks. Didn’t recognize the title, although I was hunting down Thompson tomes. I haven’t memorized his works list yet, but I knew a few to look for. This one, A Swell-Looking Babe, never gets a mention. Now I know why.
I shouldn’t compare one book to another, but I do it all the time anyway. And I’m no keen scholar Thomson scholar, yet, but this one seemed a bit meager. I mean, Thompson’s got this reputation for a real crackling suspense writer, and the other stuff I’ve read so far lives up to that. But not Swell. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot better than other books I’ve forced my way through. But it’s not up to Thompson snuff, in my opinion.
The plot is complicated, and gets a bit confusing in places with Thompson’s thin prose style. There’s some characters in there that don’t come across as very consistent. There’s some situations that have this kind of forced tension and I’m not sure where the tension is supposed to have come from.
I feel like a fella who’s sitting down to a four star meal and starts complaining about how it’s only three stars. Three is still pretty damned good. Three will fill you up and if all you ever ate was threes, you’d be dining fine. But if you were expecting four…
Then again, if a body’s going to read everything by a writer, a body has to read everything. The man wrote a couple dozen novels, and I guess they can’t all be cracker jacks. So my advice—if you’re just getting into Thompson, don’t start here. But if you’re plowing through all his stuff, plow through this one too.