Charles Willeford's noir profiles, plus more stupid critical descriptions

In a different time, under different circumstances, Charles Willeford might have written lifestyle profiles for the New York Times rather than crime novels.

High Priest of California is the first of Willeford's early noir novels I've read, and it's less an unfolding plot than it is a grittier, funnier version of those retch-making Times pieces about where young urbanites like to do their produce shopping on a weekend.

The urbanite in this case is Russell Haxby, and the premise is the simplest of any novel I've ever read: Haxby, who likes to seduce married women, seduces a married woman.

And that's it.  But the details are so perfect, and, occasionally, so surprising, and they are so deftly revealed and at just the right time, and Haxby's cruelties so casual, and the simplicity of the plot and the brevity of the book (fewer than 100 pages) enable so tight a focus on Haxby that I felt as if I'd come to know the man and his world. Maybe High Priest of California is more like those book-length profiles by John McPhee, notably A Sense of Where You Are.

Some of Haxby's observations are hysterically funny, which reminds me one again how undervalued humor is in popular fiction. My current reading, Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, contains some excellent satirical gibes, but the review snippets quoted on the front and back covers ignore these and instead include such descriptions as "A prismatic story ...,"  "Epic," and, inevitably, a "tour de force."

Do these reviewers look down on humor? Are their solemnity and reverence signs of their own security about popular fiction's behavior in the company of its literary betters?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Jim Thompson's take on Agatha Christie; plus Willeford and Schow

1) Is The Kill-Off Jim Thompson's version of an English village mystery: Get a bunch of warped characters together in a small town, let each tell his or her own story, and let the reader figure out which of the suspects is likeliest to have killed the local gossip?

2) Funniest bit so far in Charles Willeford's The Way We Die Now:

"There were two bologna sandwiches wrapped in oil paper and two hard-boiled eggs in the sack. [Tiny Bock] unwrapped one of the sandwiches, noticed that the lunch meat had turned green on the outer edge. He rewrapped the sandwich, put it back in the sack, took one of the hard-boiled eggs."

followed a couple of pages later by:

"Bock folded the bills and put them into his back pocket. `There’s a couple of bologna sandwiches left in the sack if you want ’em.'”

3) Early chapters of David J. Schow's Gun Work (2008) suggest he's a pretty good successor to the hard-boiled writers of the past.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Books to Die For, Part I

I've begun my reading of Books to Die For with the essays by Scott Phillips on Charles Willeford, Adrian McKinty on Patricia Highsmith, John McFetridge on Trevanian, Mike Nicol on James McClure, Qiu Xiaolong on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Elmore Leonard on George V. Higgins.

In each case but one, the essay is by a crime writer whose work I've read and the subject is another crime writer (or writers) whose work I've also read. In that exceptional case, the setting of the novel under discussion is my home town, so I feel that I can bring multiple perspectives to all six essays.

Each of the six probably says at least as much about its author as about its subject, with the possible exception of Nicol's on The Steam Pig, first of James McClure's six Kramer and Zondi novels set in apartheid-era South Africa. I can think of no author whose work looms larger over his country's crime fiction than McClure's does over South Africa's. Perhaps it's no wonder, then, that Nicol's fine summation of the great McClure seems to me more self-effacing than the other essays I read.

Scott Phillips (lower left) simulates
a larcenous act as, from left,
John McFetridge, your humble
blogkeeper, and Declan Burke
look on. (If this were a newspaper
rather than a blog, McFetridge,
Y.H.B.K. and Burke would not
just be looking on but also
sharing a laugh.) 

Elsewhere, McFetridge on Trevanian's novel The Main offers the same keen eye for social history that I know from McFetridge's own books. And Scott Phillips' observation that Charles Willeford's heroes "cheat, brawl, lie, and seduce their way, unencumbered by notions of fair play, through a postwar American landscape Norman Rockwell never painted" reminded me of nothing so much as the unsentimental but very funny world of Phillips' own novels.

And now, as Bob Dylan said, the hour is getting late. So I'll leave you with the thought that I see no reason Books to Die For and its editors, Declan Burke and John Connolly, ought not to be considered for next year's Edgar, Dagger, and other crime fiction awards in the critical/non-fiction categories.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The real world meets The Shark-Infested Custard

I copy-edited a story this week at work about new rules governing the number of consecutive hours physicians can work during the residency stage of their professional careers.

The new rules say 16 rather than as many as 30 without a break, and not everyone is happy about the change. I thought of this when I came to a passage in Charles Willeford's novel The Shark-Infested Custard. The viewpoint character is Hank, a pharmaceutical salesman who muses upon the tendency of doctors to abuse drugs:

"`I can handle it,' they thought, and they would pop a bennie to get through a six a.m. operation, and then another bennie at ten a.m., to get through their hospital rounds, and then, because they were bone-tired, and beginning to get sleepy by one or two p.m., and they had an office full of waiting patients to get through, they would take a couple of more bennies that afternoon. And so it would go, with emergency calls at night, and the first thing they knew they would be hooked--on bennies, or dexies, or nose candy, and eventually, on horse."

My early impressions of this book are that Willeford does a stunning job of portraying the lives of working men in the United States, and that he paints a convincing picture of Miami. (The book would make a nice companion for Stuart M. Kaminsky's Lew Fonesca stories, set in Sarasota, Florida.)  The prelude to Hank's attempted seduction of a woman who is not what she seems goes on a bit too long, but that's a quibble.

Here's a bit about Willeford at Wikipedia. And here are your questions: Who else has written about working men in ways that make you say, "He's got it!"? David Mamet? Donald Westlake? And has any novel ever had a better title than The Shark-Infested Custard?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011