A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson

A Swell-Looking Babe Reviews

• 
  James Thane

  Dusty Rhodes is one seriously screwed-up dude. Of course when this book was first published in 1954, no one would have thought to call him a "dude," but no one would have disputed the fact that he was a young man with some pretty nasty problems--in other words, just the sort of protagonist that you'd expect to find in a novel by Jim Thompson.
  
  Dusty has a little bit of college behind him--how much is not exactly clear--and he had once hoped to go to medical school. But he had to drop out of school after his mother died and his father lost his job at the local high school. This is back in the days of the Red Scare, and the local crusaders have accused the elder Mr. Rhodes of signing a petition upholding the right of free speech in America. And back in that day and age, such an accusation was more than enough to get one fired from a position of such responsibility, at least in a small conservative town in Texas where the story is apparently set.
  
  Dusty thus takes a job as the night bell boy at the Manton Hotel. He could have chosen another job at the hotel, but figuring the tips involved, this is the one that pays the most money and Dusty needs all he can get now that he's the sole support of both himself and his father who, in addition to being unemployed, is also in failing health.
  
  Dusty is a very attractive young man, but he's only ever loved one woman and that relationship turned out very badly. He's convinced that there will never be another woman in his life but then, early one morning, Marcia Hillis checks into the hotel. She's the most beautiful woman Dusty has ever seen and he concludes fairly quickly that she is now the only woman in whom he will ever be interested again.
  
  The Manton is a high class hotel, and they have very strict rules about bell boys fraternizing with the female guests. Up to this point, Dusty has never been tempted to chance breaking the rule, but he might make an exception in this case, especially after the delectable Ms. Hillis indicates an interest in him.
  
  Also residing in the hotel is a small-time gangster named Tug Trowbridge. Trowbridge befriends Dusty and tips him handsomely, and any well-seasoned crime fiction reader understands that the combination of the arrival of Marcia Hillis along with the friendship of Tug Trowbridge is bound to mean trouble for poor Dusty. Dusty ultimately realizes it too, but not before he takes that fatal first step down the wrong path that always spells doom for the poor mope who finds himself the main character in a noir novel.
  
  This book is not the equal of some of Thompson's better-known work like
  Pop. 1280 or
  The Killer Inside Me, but it's a lot of fun nonetheless. Watching poor Dusty unravel is as gripping as watching the evil schemes that some of the characters have plotted unfold, and to no one's great surprise, before long Dusty Rhodes may well rue the day he ever encountered a swell-looking babe like Marcia Hillis.
• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  Dave’s noir fest continues. A Swell Looking Babe is my fourth Thompson book, after The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet, all of which I liked a bit better, but this is still a book by the writer Stephen King said was his favorite. And this book was King’s favorite, so it is worth taking a look at if you respect King.
  
  A Swell-Looking Babe is a thriller with echoes of Oedipus Rex, focused on bellhop Dusty Rhodes and his crush on a beautiful woman. The American Dream? Watch Dusty’s pursuit of it down a dark and self-destructive road. The woman leading him down the road was Marcia Hills:
  
  “He had dreamed about her. Now, waking to the sweaty southern night, he found both arms clasped around his pillow, the cloth wet with saliva where his mouth had pressed against it, and he flung it away from him with a mixture of disgust and disappointment. Some babe, he thought drowsily, his hand moving from bed lamp to alarm clock to cigarettes. A dream boat--and that's the way he'd better leave her. Right in the land of dreams. “
  
  So, obviously Thompson/Dusty is over the top in describing this “ideal woman”:
  
  “Sure, he'd seen some good-looking women before, at the Manton and away from it. He'd seen them, and they'd made it pretty obvious that they saw him. But he'd never come up against anything like this, a woman who was not just one but all women. That was the way he thought of her, right from the first moment. All women--the personification, the refined best of them all. She was twenty. She was thirty. She was sixty. Her face, with the serene brown eyes and the deliciously curling lips; she was twenty in the face but without the vacuousness which often goes with twenty.”
  
  Marcia Hills also resembles Dusty’s mother, recently dead, a woman the Oedipal Dusty had nearly had sex with.
  
  He’ll need money to win this image-of-Mom babe. He also needs money to take care of his ailing father. How will he get it?! What are his priorities? And what are hers? I mean, a girl that beautiful, he can trust her, right? The resolution of this story is fun. It initially feels like the book is predictable, then it goes a bit deeper and darker, which makes him one of the best.
  
  I'd might rate this 4, but I round down just to distinguish it from the other three I liked a bit better.
• 
  Toby

  Not one of Jim Thompson's better outings. A tale of a bellhop seduced by the beautiful looks of a hotel guest, and how he gets mixed up with some criminal shenanigans. Pretty much the same set up as Charles Willeford's Sex is a Woman but written with a greater psychological insight and slightly more interesting sub plots and background details. Neither book were particularly amazing however. Just straight forward pulp crime fiction written to entertain for a few moments.
  
  Thompson adds a bizarre Oedipus complex twist to proceedings but largely it's all very perfunctory and obvious events drift towards their inevitable and frustrating conclusion. Thompson at his best offers nasty pieces of work that the reader can't help but root for, here he offers wastes of space that you have no sympathy for as they're dragged towards a predetermined oblivion just to satisfy a depressing plot.
• 
  Laura

  What a jerk for a main character! However, it was hard to look away. No promising attributes for this guy. My first by this author but definitely not the last. Rating somewhere between 3.5-4, so lets round up.
• 
  Josh

  Trademark Jim Thompson; a psychological crime pulp that delves deep into the confused and corrupted amid a mixture of violence, longing and sense of hopelessness that only Thompson can muster.
  
  The plot itself is simplistic, with the linear nature incorporating flashbacks to Dusty’s (lead character) childhood that justify his easy acquiescence to seduction in the forms of lust and crime. A Bell Hop at a hotel with actor good looks and a high intellect, Dusty is easily swayed by swinging hips and the promise of a perverted comfort. It’s his foray into the crime, gatewayed by a hotel guest that changes the dynamic, upping the story from pulp to crime in a splash of blood and twist of double/triples crosses.
  
  A Swell Looking Babe, while deviating somewhat from my presumption, does make for an entertaining read which at times meanders but delivers in the end.
  
• 
  Greg

  COUNTDOWN: Mid-20th Century North American Crime
  BOOK 43 (of 250)
  HOOK - 4 stars: "He dreamed about her...Some babe, he thought drowsily...A dream boat - and that's the way he better leave her...bellboys who attempted intimacies with lady guests invariably landed in serious trouble." Rhodes knows the rule: his mom has died, his dad had been fired, he'd had to drop out of med school to support his ailing father and that rule was: life is brutal and will cut you down fast. But knowing a rule doesn't save you...
  PACE - 3: It took me 3 days to read this, and that's one day longer than my average time to read a crime novel of average length. It's only 145 pages, but I have 4 pages of notes. The structure involves numerous flashbacks and I just wanted to make sure I could get everything and then 'figure it all out' before all is revealed. (No, I didn't figure it all out, after all.)
  PLOT- 4: Bill (Dusty) Rhodes works hard at a semi-sleazy hotel, the Manton. Bascom sees a beautiful woman, Marcia Hillis, enter the lobby and ask for a room. Hotel rules are that no single ladies are allowed to check in late at night, else the hotel gets the hooker business. But Bascom succumbs and Bill, the bellboy, takes her to her room. She slides a tip into his trouser pocket and leaves her hand there. Bill can't help himself, "his arms went around her, right around those smooth curving hips." But Marcia pushes him away and tells him to leave. As Bill exits she laughs. Then, Tug Trowbridge checks in with 2 male companions and pulls a thick stack of money from his pocket and ask Bascom to put it away in a safe. Bascom does, but intentionally gives Trowbrigde the
  wrong key. And here we go: Bill's life takes a turn for the worse amid much criminal activity.
  The final chapter is about the darkest chapter I've ever read, and therein lies the rub: it's only the final chapter that's great about this plot, but the rest is very good, for a 4 star rating.
  CHARACTERS - 5: Here lies the strength of this work. The above characters are beautifully realized, as are Bill's parents. Then there is "Castic" Kossmeyer, a lawyer working for Father Rhodes in a lawsuit against the company who had fired Rhodes. "He was like some small deadly bird, coaxing a clumsy prey within striking distance."
  ATMOSPHERE - 4: About Bill and his parents home: "It was a shabby, rundown house, a faded-blue cottage, in a block that was barely a half-block...It was bordered on one side by a vacant lot...a jungle of weeds..." Later, "Mr Rhodes was in the kitchen...His thin hair was damp from a recent shower...he had done the little that he could to make himself presentable, someone not to be ashamed of..." And so it goes, a kid/man raised on the wrong side of town. A house of people on the precipice of making it through life...or not...
  SUMMARY - 4.0. If Thompson had written this entire book as he did the final chapter, I'd rate this higher. As a reader, the ending floored me, I thought it one of the best in noir, but one scene does not make a classic. This is one of my favorite novels by Jim Thompson, but I gotta say this is an author that, often, isn't 'fun' to read.
  
• 
  Steven

  This is a strange little novel. The first chapter really baits the hook and then the narrative wanders for 35 or so pages, where I was wondering ok what is the point of all this? - although it will all become important by the end of the book - and then blammo, we are headlong into a blackmail and hotel robbery scheme. So there are two main threads involving Dusty, our noir protagonist, who is a bellhop at a hotel. He is "taking care" of his father who is in ill health. As the novel progresses this thread goes from what appears to be filler material to the primary arc of the novel. And then there is the hotel robbery as Dusty gets involved with gangster Tug and Marcia, the "sweel-looking babe" of the title. The robbery thread has all kinds of twists and turns, appears to be the primary arc, but by the end is actually a side plot. The close third-person narrative gets all inside of Dusty's manic head and that is what gives the novel all of its forward energy. The robbery plot doesn't always make a whole lot of sense and at times it seemed like Thompson was making it up as he went along, as if he added in the robbery as filler for the story he really wanted to tell about Dusty's relationship with his father. The ending was a bit confusing, and even after reading it a dozen times I'm still not sure what happened.
• 
  Malum

  In a fun twist of happenstance, I just got done watching the TNG episode "The Royale", where our heroes get trapped inside of a crime novel featuring a bellhop in over his head, a dame, and a murderous gangster right before picking this up.
  
  So, Star Trek similarities aside, this story has more twists and turns than a mountain road and a masterful example of an unreliable third person protagonist. The plotting and pacing are also perfect, with Thompson lulling you into a sense of security before dropping something heavy on you or making your reassess something you learned earlier.
• 
  Christopher

  Thompson is great at a bait and switch. He really does this with all three of the novels of his I have read so far. He sets up what seems like a pretty standard noir plot and then pivots into something totally unexpected and much deeper. In this case he sets us up for the "naive young man who gets involved with the wrong woman" plot. After making this set up he takes nearly a third of the book before returning to it because he is setting up something else, but you don't realize it at the time because you are waiting for the cliche plot you have been conditioned to expect.
  
  This book is Thompson's version on Oedipus. Other than that I won't say anything else, but it amazing how well he was able to make that story meld into a hard-boiled noir world, without doing a direct adaptation of it, which I could imagine a less talented writer deciding to do.
  
  This book was really close to getting five stars. I settled on four because there were a few things I thought could have been done better, the book feels a bit too short, certain things are maddeningly enigmatic even after we get through all the plot twists and the ending, while it worked for me better than some other reviews I have read, could have been a bit stronger.
  
  Sometimes I wonder how much my ratings of a book are effected by what I read directly before.
  "The Man Who Folded Himself" was such a perfect book that this one had a lot to live up to in order to meet that standard.
• 
  Samantha Glasser

  This book opens strong. Dusty Rhodes is a bellhop but only until he can save enough money to go to med school. While working at the Manton he makes big money, but he is warned to stay away from women. That's been no problem until she walked in. Now he's willing to do anything to get her, even to his own detriment.
  
  Thompson's writing flows very well so this is a quick and entertaining read. This is quite a feat because our hero is anything but the ideal subject of idolatry. The more we learn, the more dispicable he becomes but once you're hooked, you're in for the long haul.
• 
  Tenebrous Kate

  Jim Thompson is an absolute master of character-driven mystery. Weaving together elements of crime fiction, Southern Gothic, and sociological commentary, this book accomplishes A LOT within its slim number of pages. For those who like their pulps dark and nasty, this hits the spot.
  
  Covered in-depth on the Bad Books for Bad People podcast:
  
  http://badbooksbadpeople.com/episode-...
• 
  Gibson

  Edipo e il suo complesso
  
  Che il diavolo se lo porti! Anche scrivendo di un semplice fattorino d'albergo Thompson riesce a farsi apprezzare.
  Questione di stile, e non mi riferisco propriamente a quello letterario: si intuisce che dietro c'è un uomo che ne ha viste molte e con il talento di saperle raccontare in maniera semplice. E semplice non significa banale.
  
  Qui ci presenta Dusty, un ragazzo che per fronteggiare la perdita del lavoro del padre ha dovuto abbandonare l'università e impiegarsi come fattorino.
  Le scene si svolgono tra casa sua, è qui che avvengono le scaramucce con il padre, e l'albergo, luogo in cui una nuova cliente gli ha tirato un brutto scherzo.
  Le due situazioni si portano addosso un'ambiguità che presto diventa protagonista essa stessa, che piano piano ribalta i dubbi e le certezze di Dusty, che a loro volta sveleranno al lettore verità nascoste per le quali il giudizio sui personaggi cambierà prospettiva.
  Di personaggi ce ne sono una manciata e ognuno con le proprie peculiarità, e grazie a loro si compirà una sorta di percorso in cui Edipo ci avrebbe sguazzato.
  
  Siamo nel '54, Thompson ha già pubblicato L'assassino che è in me e di lì a qualche anno sarà co-sceneggiatore insieme a Kubrick in Rapina a mano armata e Orizzonti di gloria.
  
  So, long live Thompson.
  
  
  
• 
  William

  This is a strong noir, and all the elements are there. As the tale unfolds for our MC it seems to reach a point where he can better himself when of course they pull him back in. I try and judge a book by the time period when possible but some of the dialogue drives me crazy. Too many characters beat around the bush in their conversations. They need to pick up the pace. I don’t know if it would change much of the story, but if our MC is that dumb then he deserves his ending.
• 
  Rubén Vilaplana

  Excelente novela negra de un autor de culto como es Thompson. Te narra el devenir de un botones de un hotel y como las malas decisiones desencadenan en unos sucesos trágicos.
• 
  Andy

  Some nutty goings on in a hotel told from the perspective of a bellboy (not Jerry Lewis). There's cliche-type gangsters in there, too. Most of the action takes place indoors - Thompson should have turned this into a play!
• 
  David

  Following a hunch, I decided to make this Thompson book my bus book - something to catch off-and-on, on-the-run, back-and-forth to work. It worked. I've read enough of Thompson by now and something about his stuff told me he'd benefit from being in motion while being read.
  
  This particular tale is something of a departure for the author - which made it a pleasant surprise. ...Hmm... I just noticed I used the word 'pleasant' in describing a Thompson story. No, it's not a particularly pleasant story. It's pulp. It's noir. It's Jim Thompson.
  
  But this one is less psychotic - though it's certainly about yet another guy who's mixed-up. He's just more of an average guy - well, average for Thompson. He's trying to be more legit. He's trying to hold down a steady job as a bellhop (a reliable one). And, through no fault of his own, he gets mixed up in some trouble - y'know, the kind that tends to be spelled b-a-b-e. But there are mob guys too. And even the more-legit guys in protagonist Dusty's sphere are rather sinister (in the sense of being overly suspicious of him - but, ok, it's not like he has the sunniest disposition). It seems Dusty just hasn't had much of a real break (especially emotionally) since he was born. Even that was a bust; he was put up for adoption. ~which ultimately resulted in an unsettled psyche.
  
  We're very much in Dusty's head throughout - as he (often) tries to get a grip on what's real, what's not, and what he realizes could very well be his own active imagination. This is probably the most compassion I've felt so far for one of Thompson's leading characters.
  
  This kind of heightened reality occasionally begs for some license - but that, of course, is in the service of pulp storytelling. The tension builds... the paranoia mounts... and the finale packs a wallop. This is among Thompson's stronger work.
• 
  Jim

  If you've never read a
  Jim Thompson novel before, you have a surprise coming. Dusty Rhodes is a bellboy at the Hotel Manton in
  A Swell-Looking Babe. College-educated, he is held back by taking care of his aging foster father. He moons over a beautiful guest and gets too involved with a local gangster, also a guest at the hotel. When the guest plans a heist of the hotel during horse racing season, Dusty gets sucked in; but things do not happen as he expected -- neither with the robbery, the girl, or his foster father. Regardless how good a predictor you are, the ending will come as a surprise.
  
  
• 
  Thomas Ray

  PS3539 H6733 S86 1986 Memorial Library
• 
  Mike Nemeth

  Maybe it's the era this was written. Maybe it's that I'm too far removed from the time in which this gritty tale takes place. I don't know. The writing is punchy and solid. The story engaging. However, the babes are babes and a cigarette in every mouth thing got old. Reminded me of afternoon movies on TV where I wished it was Humphrey Bogart and I got some no-name actor in a bad drama trying to be a low-budget version of the thin man. "A Swell-Looking Babe" takes place in an aging hotel staffed by down-on-their luck people catering to a low-rent clientele. A woman comes in late. She's pretty. She's startlingly hot. The two hotel workers drool. She's bad news. Of course. But Jim Thompson's prose makes it clear that his characters are too stupid or predestined by the events that overshadow their lives to avoid making catastrophic decisions clearly not in their best interest. I need this? My opinion was, "Not really." Life is crappy enough without having to some moron bellhop into dingbat land. I did like the writing. Thompson knows how to set a scene and draw on the emotions of his readers. In my case, that emotion was negative. My best friend loves Thompson and so do many famous contemporary authors. I don't share their enthusiasm. If I want something of this genre, I'll go to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer.
• 
  jennifer

  The Oedipus Complex, Thompson-style.
  Young college drop-out Bill "Dusty" Rhodes is working as a bellboy at the Manton Hotel until he can get his life situated so he can go back to school. But the money is good and the job is easy and Dusty has his sick old father to support. He loves his dad but doesn't understand where the old man spends all the money Dusty gives him. Then the swell-looking babe, a gray-haired older woman, checks into the hotel and Dusty can't stop thinking about how beautiful she is and how much she reminds him of his deceased mom.
  Another hotel guest happens to be the local mob boss who Dusty owes a favor to and dad's lawyer, a wily little guy, keeps popping up.
  Everybody wants something, and in Thompson's books you know they'll get what they deserve. I enjoy his books because Thompson could delve into taboo subjects, which was really his forte, in a way that fit in with the pulp writing of the time while still writing clearly enough to shock modern readers. In his novels he went back to the subject of insanity over and over again while giving each character their own reason for their insanity and their own warped perceptions. While this novel is good, The Killer Inside Me is Thompson's best.
• 
  Hex75

  mettiamola così: se la vita è fa schifo jim thompson ne è il suo più grande cantore. perchè nei romanzi di thompson ogni cosa andrà decisamente male, non c'è speranza e il destino già scritto dice che ogni cosa che potrà andar male andrà malissimo. qui poi abbiamo un protagonista che avrebbe bisogno di una seduta o due dallo psicologo, una femme fatale ambiguissima, di un gangster crudele eppure al tempo stesso patetico e di personaggi di contorno non meno problematici: tutti sono più o meno perfettamente delineati con poche ma efficacissime frasi, tutti sono più o meno verosimili, reali, mai banali. non è uno dei suoi capolavori -"colpo di spugna" se lo mangia- ma questo "l'altra donna" funziona benissimo e si lascia divorare pagina dopo pagina.
• 
  Matthew

  150 pages of slowly revealing how the main character is a massive piece of shit.
  
  Nicely done crime novel, with a pinch of gothic influence.
  
  **Daniel Polansky recommended this book to me. Thanks, Dan!**
• 
  Stephen

  Good stuff.
  
  Watch out for the pretty ones. They'll be the death of you.
• 
  Thomas

  Made me feel icky and miserable, like a good crime novel should.
• 
  M Griffin

  Even one of Jim Thompson's lesser novels is worth a read.
• 
  Joanne Renaud

  Wow, this was depressing.
  
  Thompson is a brilliant author, and he writes psychologically twisted noir starring some fascinatingly twisted protagonists-- like THE GETAWAY-- but this book really just bummed me out.
  
  So, BABE started out as something Chandler-esque-- about a bellboy named Dusty in a hotel and a femme fatale patroness-- but then it goes into really dark territory when you find out about his relationship with his parents. It can be argued that the mom was passively sexually abusing him, because she has NO boundaries, how she insists on sleeping with him up to the point that he turns eleven, and there's bits where she's breast feeding him when he's much too old for it, and holy God I'm getting GAME OF THRONES flashbacks. It’s super creepy. He ends up having to look after his invalid father, and it’s clear he hates the guy for a variety of reasons. Dad adopted him, plus he never seemed to form any emotional attachment to the guy. Also, he has NO friends. None. I found it depressing and upsetting.
  
  Also, there’s this character of a lawyer, Kossmeyer, who clearly thinks of the protagonist as being this evil, terrible juvenile delinquent who is abusing his dear old dad, and it reminded me how in the 1950s people were so quick to think the worst of kids, and to absolve the parents of all blame, i.e. the whole so-called epidemic of “juvenile delinquents.”
  
  So yeah, Thompson is so amazing at characterization. He really gets deep into the head of his protagonists; but for me, seeing Dusty crack into a million pieces, when I feel like he really needs some stable relationships and a shrink, makes me feel angry and sad.
  
  Is Dusty a sociopath who hates his fine, upstanding father? Or is he an unstable young man destabilized and traumatized by years of sexual and emotional abuse? I would tend to go with the latter, but Kossmeyer would probably think I was the sort of bleeding heart type satirized in West Side Story's "Gee Officer Krupke."
  
  The 1950s sucked. I need a drink. Thanks, Jim Thompson!
  
  
• 
  ?0?0?0

  If "A Swell-Looking Babe" is considered by most to not be one of Jim Thompson's finest works, that speaks highly for this man's material. I enjoyed this novel far more than another Thompson book I rated four stars, "The Getaway", and found it difficult to put down. Reviewers on this website, and in the introduction written by Duane Swierczynski, dismiss Dusty, the protagonist, as someone, like every other character in the novel, to not be likeable--I disagree. Apart from Dusty's dealings with his adoptive family, the guy has plenty one can relate to: qualified beyond his current job, stuck in a decent paying position for numerous reasons, and just trying to find a way out of the "greyness" of life and having neither the ideas or friends to help him out. So it's natural he's approached to commit a crime in his place of business, and it's natural for him to long for more from people he foolishly believes could lend a hand, and it's realistic he'd arrive where he does at the end of the novel. It's a melancholic tale set in a dark, nihilistic, and hopeless world where even a suggestion, a blink, of a promising delusion is tainted before he can hold on to it long enough to find a second of ease, release, or safety in his doomed world. And while it leans on the nighttime setting, in landscape and in mind, this book never weighs the reader down, for Thompson's lovely sparse prose keeps the reader turning the pages until Dusty's tale ends. A book where no one knows anyone and if they do, they're told lies or go after what they perceive a person to be, not who the person is, making the whole affair really damn lonely, to say the least.
  
  
  Duane Swierczynski
• 
  Nathaniel BB

  Definitely loving this year of Thompson-heavy reading. It's excoriating and relentless but deeply engrossing at every turn, and this read was no exception. Yet another wait-what of an ending, capping off a charmingly lean concoction of pulpy crises and shifty schemes.
  
  Two main characters die in less than half a page toward the end. Oedipus rears his head in a big way all of a sudden toward the middle, yet such a structure was always looming over proceedings without ever calling attention to itself, leading to what I believe Kubrick called "the thrill of discovery go[ing] right through the heart." Too true.
  
  Shiver-inducing but so extremely Thompson, and grimly satisfying to boot. Favorite author.