Have a Nice Night is the first James Hadley Chase crime novel I’ve read. It’s a straightforward caper novel, or rather a double-caper novel, as two very different teams of crooks target the same posh Florida hotel.

The book’s strengths are equally straightforward: Chase is a good storyteller, with a knack for quickly sketching memorable characters. The story drives forward smoothly; reading this 175-page novel was quick and fun, almost like an extended short story.

So what were the problems? Sadly, what bugged me here were editing and language issues that should have been easy for a competent editor to solve. Chase had no clue what to do with commas; he’d clearly never heard of an appositive, since it seems as if there’s not a single one set off properly in this book. Also, being a Brit placing his story in a very American setting, Chase suffered badly from ‘misapprehended vernacularitis’, i.e. putting British idioms and slang into the mouths of his purely American characters. The book is simply lousy with these solecisms: characters are ‘ill’ instead of sick or injured; they eat ‘apple pies’ instead of pieces of apple pie; they go out for a ‘burger snack’; one character has 'a cancer'; and so on. There are also odd factual errors, e.g. a revolver used in one of the capers is identified as a ‘3.8’ – surely Chase means a .38? Given that this was one of Chase’s later books, coming at the end of a long and successful run of crime writing, surely someone might have been available to clean up these annoying mistakes?

On the whole, therefore, this was a diverting read, but it’s not up to the standards of Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake. Read them first. ( )