Mystery Review: A Swell-Looking Babe is a misleading title, but not in the way readers might think. Bill "Dusty" Rhodes is just a night shift bellboy, a college dropout, caught in a red-baiting lawsuit, has no interest in women, an invalid father, a dead mother, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. He's not a bad guy so much as just a not very nice guy with a certain moral ambivalence. It's hard to root for him to get out of his mess. He's about to make a few mistakes, have a few accidents, and he's soon spinning into the vortex of oblivion. The more he struggles to get out of his predicament the tighter the coils entwine about him. While passable, A Swell-Looking Babe is not as good as some of Jim Thompson's other books, lacking a strong narrative through line, the usual obsessive menace, or any characters to care about. He also throws in certain psychological elements as a wild card. The reader, as does Dusty, gets tossed about from one plot point to another without being too certain what's going on at any given time until all embroils in an existential ending. Thompson fans will certainly find something to enjoy in A Swell-Looking Babe, but it won't make too many top-ten lists. [3★]
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