Charles Williams is, without question, one of the top writers to come out of the fifties. The Big Bite is typical of the excellence of his writing.

It is a story about a down-on-his-luck professional football player, who just can't seem to turn as quickly since he was rear-ended by a drunk. The doctors say his leg is all healed, but it just isn't the same and his career is over. "They'd stuck it back on, all right, and it looked like a leg, but something was gone." This isn't good. As the narrator, John Harlan, explains, "The only thing I'd ever owned in my life was a mechanism that ran like something bathed in oil and now it had been smashed and when they put it back together, something was gone." He's cut from the team and goes on a binge. "It was a honey and lasted a week." He wakes up in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere with some girl whose name he didn't recall and "She seemed to think something terrible was going to happen to her if she ever sobered up."

Five months after his injury, something about the incident is causing a private investigator to look into it again, off the record. The trail of intrigue leads Harlan to get involved in a blackmail scheme. What else does he have to lose? Why not? He should've had a long professional career and that's now all down the toilet. The blackmail leads him to get involved with a sexy siren that likes of which could barely be described.

The story is filled with tension. It is great from page one all the way to the bitter end. There is not one thing I would change about it if I were editing it. It is that good.

Who is the dish he is blackmailing? Why none other than the widow of the drunken jerk who ran him off the road and flushed his career down the drain. She is, in Harlan's mind, none other than the brown-eyed Fort Knox and he is going to get that woman to open up the vault and pour some gold out. But when he meets her, his mind starts melting: "She was a construction job from the ground up without being overdone about it anywhere - just medium height and rather slim and with only a touch of that overblown calendar-girl effect above the sucked-in waist." "It was her eyes, however, that could throw the match in the gasoline." And, "You had the impression that if she ever really turned them on you with that sidelong come-hither out of the corners and from the lashes she could roll your shirt up your back, like a window-blind." Is John Harlan over his head when he tries to work Julia Cannon? "She was a cool devil in most ways, but when she was after fun she took it
fervently and unbuttoned."

I highly recommend this excellent pulp-era thriller. It has everything in it that you could want, murder, blackmail, fishing, football, intrigue, and the smartest, craftiest femme fatale to grace the pages of fiction.
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