NIHW & River Girl by Charles Williams

Nothing in Her Way by Charles Williams tells the story of multiple confidence games, perpetrated for the purpose of revenge. It's like The Sting (the great film with Paul Newman and Robert Redford) but much more complicated. And, like The Usual Suspects, which deceives the audience, this book deceives the reader, but does so several times. 

Also, perhaps surprisingly for a book written in 1953, the plot is driven by a woman who is smart, strong, and determined. Not a femme fatale, she's comparable to the character played by Barbara Harris in Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot.  The story is told in the first person by her partner in crime, who scrambles to keep up, as does the character played by Bruce Dern in Family Plot. 

River Girl is simple and straight-forward by comparison. A man dissatisfied with his life becomes obsessed with "another woman" and creates a scheme to run away with her. The story consists of all the things that go wrong and his struggles to keep his scheme going. The suspense is among the best I've read.

As I read these novels, I was thrilled to discover an author comparable to Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain.   The I read the introduction by Rick Ollerman included in this volume from Stark House Books and saw that Anthony Boucher made the same comparison in his review of Williams's Hell Hath No Fury. 

Ollerman's introduction is an excellent way to discover this author who, as many have said, ranks with the best mid-century crime writers but never achieved the same recognition as Woolrich, Cain, Highsmith, and others. Possibly this is because none of the film adaptations of his books was as high-profile as Rear Window (Woolrich), Double Indemnity (Cain), or Strangers on a Train (Highsmith).