One day there will be no more Charles Williams for us to read, and that’ll be sad, but his books, like good wine, are something you have to treat yourself to regularly even as the stock dwindles. His 1958 novel All the Way, which is the source material for the 1960 movie The 3rd Voice, is typically solid Williams work.
It has a fascinating plot at its center. A vengeful woman enlists a fugitive to help her steal her former lover’s identity, then impersonate him for weeks afterward so nobody will suspect when he disappears that she’s actually killed him. The reason people are supposed to assume a disappearance instead of murder has to do with paranoid schizophrenia in the ex-lover’s family, and the fact that the fugitive impersonating him has been faking its rapid onset, publicly and loudly.
With the ground laid in this way, a disappearance will be the logical conclusion, and since the man is rich, the fact that a hundred seventy grand is missing from his bank accounts merely indicates he’s never coming back—not that an imposter has withdrawn the cash. The scheme is convoluted, but the genius femmes who come up with them are a staple of pulp literature. Williams gets the job done again, as does Ernest Chiriacka, who painted the cover art.
No man who dumps her ever lives to regret it.