Just Finished Reading: The Last Match by David Dodge

After leaving the Army in Germany the main character [I don’t think he actually has a name] decides to try his luck as a gigolo in the South of France. Down on his luck he drifts into petty crime and finally smuggling across the Mediterranean. Arrested on arrival back in France he serves a few months of a long sentence only to be released into the custody of a young and beautiful heiress who thinks she can reform him. Not ready to be caged he departs for the Middle East and them onto South America scamming anyone he comes across and always staying one step ahead of Interpol and the heiress.

I bought quite a few Hard Case Crime novels a year or so ago hoping that they would be the literary equivalent of Film Noir. After less than half a dozen books I have been disabused of that idea. Apart from one or two OK novels the rest have been pretty dire. Maybe this explains why most of the other Hard Case Crime books on my Amazon Wish List are no longer available. Anyway, this book was readable – just – and I did manage to finish it. The only real character was the central guy who is apparently based on the author. Everybody else was, at best, a cardboard cut-out and pretty soggy cardboard at that. His women characters were so offensively drawn as to be laughable. In effect the whole book was a teenage wet-dream fantasy which had brainless women throwing themselves at the main character and him, more often than not, throwing them back after he’d had his way with them. This was only just on the right side of being terrible and looking back on it I struggle to think why I even finished it. Avoid.