Sun 7 Aug 2016
Mystery Review: JAMES HADLEY CHASE – We’ll Share a Double Funeral.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
JAMES HADLEY CHASE – We’ll Share a Double Funeral. Robert Hale, UK, hardcover, 1982. Corgi, UK, paperback, 1983 & 1988 (the latter shown). No US edition.
It’s a great title, and more than that, it’s appropriate too. It comes up in the course of the book more than once. The cover is very nice, too, not that it has anything much to do with the story, but when did that stop a paperback publisher from doing whatever they could to catch a would-be buyer’s eye?
As for the book itself, Chase was no wordsmith, there’s no doubt about that, but as always he’s as direct and single-minded in telling a story as he needs to be to keep the pages turning, and there’s nothing more complimentary I can say about an author than that.
The main protagonist in Double Funeral is Chet Logan, as ferocious a killer when he’s cornered as a rabid animal, and by the time he’s finally tracked down and killed in the final chapter, he’s taken nearly a dozen others with him. Taken as a hostage in a Florida fishing lodge is Perry Weston, a big-time screenplay writer for the movies who’s come down from New York City to get away from his much younger wife who’s been cheating on him, and who decides to come down herself to make up.
One paragraph is all it takes to sum it up, but when you finished reading all 176 pages of the paperback edition, you’ll know you’ve read the most hard-boiled book you’ve sped your way through all day. I guarantee it.
August 7th, 2016 at 10:02 am
Did you notice the gun the young lady on the cover is holding in her right hand? No? I didn’t think so.
August 7th, 2016 at 4:56 pm
Will someone get me her phone number?
August 9th, 2016 at 10:45 pm
She has a hand in the picture? Oh, yeah, there it is.
No less a writer than Graham Greene championed Chase as a writer, and it is fair enough to say he has a strong narrative drive. I can’t say most of his work lingers terribly long, he’s one of those writers whose work I can pick up and read half a book before I realize I read it before, but in fairness I usually finish it the second time.
While Chase isn’t quite in a class with the best of the first or second tier Gold Medal writers in my opinion he comes close in some books. One thing he does pull off that many of them did is that he can write an entire book without a single sympathetic character and still keep you reading to the end, which requires some effort for me.
He’s a writer I always wanted to know more about. Unlike Peter Cheyney, the other major Americanized British writer of vaguely the same era (starting out anyway), I don’t know of any biographies or studies of his work.
August 17th, 2016 at 12:01 pm
I have a great weakness for Corgi covers of Chase’s reissues.
An Argentine critic said Chase’s work was “the celebration of evil”. Is it so?
August 17th, 2016 at 12:30 pm
Based on only the handful of books by Chase that I’ve read, I’d say that that critic has exactly the right idea.