John and Rae Ingram are on their honeymoon, sailing across the Pacific towards Tahiti in their private ketch, Saracen. Stuck for days in dead calm, twelve hundred miles from land, they spy another craft, Orpheus, listing on the horizon. John Ingram, an experienced sailor, can tell by the sluggish way Orpheus rights itself in the rolling swell that she has taken on water. He fires up Saracen’s auxiliary engine and heads toward the other boat to see if anyone needs help.

Before he gets there, he encounters a young man rowing furiously toward him with all his strengh. When Hughie Warriner reaches the Saracen, Ingram and his wife pull the young man aboard. He appears to be in shock, as if fleeing some terror.

Williams is one of the great underappreciated American crime writers of the 20th century. A Touch of Death, first published in 1953, bears the hallmarks of many of his other works: a down-and-out guy around thirty years old who’s not as smart as he thinks he is, a very smart and practical woman who’s more interested in getting things done than in sticking anyone else’s ideas of morality, and a seemingly simple caper that turns out to be vastly more complicated than it first appears.

Charles Williams’ The Big Bite is very good crime/noir thriller, though it’s not quite up there with his brilliant 1953 noir The Hot Spot .

Harry Madox has drifted in and out of a number of jobs, and has one failed marriage and some unspecified debts under his belt. When the story opens, he’s just landing a job as a car salesman in 1950’s small-town Texas. He’s not in town long before he meets two women. The young, sweet Gloria Harper brings out the best in him, against his nature and sometimes against his will. And then there’s the boss’ wife, Dolores Harshaw, who has a knack for getting him into and out of trouble.