{"id":732,"date":"2013-08-23T13:43:56","date_gmt":"2013-08-23T21:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=732"},"modified":"2013-08-23T13:43:56","modified_gmt":"2013-08-23T21:43:56","slug":"review-a-swell-looking-babe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/23\/review-a-swell-looking-babe\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Swell-Looking Babe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/246692\" style=\"float: left;padding-right: 20px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net\/books\/1347875379m\/246692.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"A Swell-Looking Babe\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n      <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/246692\">A Swell-Looking Babe<\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/author\/show\/7621\">Jim Thompson<\/a><br \/>\n      My rating: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/702208235\">3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n<p>      Picked this up in a used book store for a few bucks. Didn\u2019t recognize the title, although I was hunting down Thompson tomes. I haven\u2019t memorized his works list yet, but I knew a few to look for. This one, <i>A Swell-Looking Babe<\/i>, never gets a mention. Now I know why.<\/p>\n<p>I shouldn\u2019t compare one book to another, but I do it all the time anyway. And I\u2019m no keen scholar Thomson scholar, yet, but this one seemed a bit meager. I mean, Thompson\u2019s got this reputation for a real crackling suspense writer, and the other stuff I\u2019ve read so far lives up to that. But not <i>Swell<\/i>. It\u2019s not bad, don\u2019t get me wrong, it\u2019s a lot better than other books I\u2019ve forced my way through. But it\u2019s not up to Thompson snuff, in my opinion.<\/p>\n<p>The plot is complicated, and gets a bit confusing in places with Thompson\u2019s thin prose style. There\u2019s some characters in there that don\u2019t come across as very consistent. There\u2019s some situations that have this kind of forced tension and I\u2019m not sure where the tension is supposed to have come from.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like a fella who\u2019s sitting down to a four star meal and starts complaining about how it\u2019s only three stars. Three is still pretty damned good. Three will fill you up and if all you ever ate was threes, you\u2019d be dining fine. But if you were expecting four\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Then again, if a body\u2019s going to read everything by a writer, a body has to read everything. The man wrote a couple dozen novels, and I guess they can\u2019t all be cracker jacks. So my advice\u2014if you\u2019re just getting into Thompson, don\u2019t start here. But if you\u2019re plowing through all his stuff, plow through this one too.<\/p>\n<p>      <a href=\"http:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/702208235\">View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Swell-Looking Babe by Jim Thompson My rating: 3 of 5 stars Picked this up in a used book store for a few bucks. Didn\u2019t recognize the title, although I was hunting down Thompson tomes. I haven\u2019t memorized his works list yet, but I knew a few to look for. This one, A Swell-Looking Babe, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/23\/review-a-swell-looking-babe\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Review: A Swell-Looking Babe&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-bO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}