Willeford, Charles 1919-1988

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WILLEFORD, Charles 1919-1988

(Will Charles, Charles Ray Willeford III )

PERSONAL: Born January 2, 1919, in Little Rock, AR; died of congestive heart failure, March 27, 1988, in Miami, FL; son of Charles Ray II and Aileen (Lowey) Willeford; married Mary Jo Norton (a professor of English), July 1, 1951 (divorced, October, 1976); married third wife, Betsy Poller (a newspaper columnist), May 30, 1981. Education: Palm Beach Junior College, A.A., 1960; University of Miami, A.B. (magna cum laude), 1962, M.A., 1964.

CAREER: Writer and educator. U.S. Army, 1936–56, retiring as master sergeant; University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, instructor in humanities, 1964–67; Miami-Dade Junior College, Miami, FL, assistant professor, 1967–68, chair of departments of English and philosophy, 1968–70, associate professor of English, 1970–80. Also worked as a script writer, New World Pictures, Hollywood, CA.

AWARDS, HONORS: Beacon Fiction Award, 1956, for Pick-Up; Mark Twain Award, Mark Twain Society of America, 1973, for Cockfighter. Received Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Luxembourg Croix de Guerre.

WRITINGS:

Proletarian Laughter (poems), Alicat Bookshop Press (Yonkers, NY), 1948.

The Saga of Mary Miller (radio serial), broadcast by WLKH and AKAH, Armed Forces Radio Service, 1948.

High Priest of California (novel; also see below), Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1953.

Until I Am Dead (novel; also see below), Beacon Press, 1954.

Pick-Up (novel), Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1955, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Lust Is a Woman, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1956.

The Basic Approach (television play), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 1956.

The Black Mass of Brother Springer (later published as The Honey Gal), Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1958.

The Director, Newsstand Library Publishers, 1960, published as The Woman Chaser, Carroll & Graf (New York City), 1990.

Understudy for Death, Newsstand Library Publishers, 1961, reprinted as Understudy for Love, Dennis McMillan (San Francisco, CA), 1989.

No Experience Necessary, Newsstand Library Publishers, 1961.

The Machine in Ward Eleven (short stories), Belmont Books, 1963.

Poontang and Other Poems, New Athenean Press, 1967.

(Under pseudonym Will Charles) The Hombre from Sonora, Lenox Hill, 1971.

The Burnt Orange Heresy, Crown (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1990.

Cockfighter (originally published in 1962), Crown (New York, NY), 1972 reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1991.

A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided (autobiography), Star Publishing (Belmont, CA), 1977.

Off the Wall (fictionalized biography of "Son of Sam" killer David Berkowitz), Pegasus Rex (Montclair, NJ), 1980.

Something about a Soldier (autobiography), Random House (New York, NY), 1986.

Kiss Your Ass Goodbye, Dennis McMillan (San Francisco, CA), 1987.

New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction (literary criticism), Dennis McMillan (San Francisco, CA), 1987.

Charles Willeford Trilogy: High Priest of California, Play, Wild Wives (Wild Wives originally published as Until I Am Dead), Re/Search Publications (San Francisco, CA), 1987.

I Was Looking for a Street (autobiography), Countryman Press (Woodstock, VT), 1988.

The Cockfighter Journal (diary from the filming of his 1962 novel), Maurice Neville (Santa Barbara, CA), 1989.

The Shark-Infested Custard (fiction; includes Kiss Your Ass Goodbye and a portion of Everybody's Metamorphosis), Underwood/Miller (Novato, CA), 1993.

Collected Memoirs of Charles Willeford: I Was Looking for a Street: Something about a Soldier, Disc-US Books (Sarasota, FL), 2000.

Deliver Me from Dallas!, Dennis McMillan (San Francisco, CA), 2001.

The Second Half of the Double Feature, (short stories), Wit's End, 2003.

Also author of Soldier's Wife, 1958, Born to Kill (screenplay based on his novel Cockfighter), 1974, and Everybody's Metamorphosis, 1988. Columnist for Village Post and Miami Herald. Contributor of fiction and nonfiction to periodicals, including Books Abroad, Saturday Review, Playboy, Writer's Digest, Sports Illustrated, and Air Force. Associate editor, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, 1964. The "Hoke Moseley" detective novels have also been published in Denmark, England, France, Sweden, Germany, and Japan.

"HOKE MOSELEY" DETECTIVE SERIES

Miami Blues, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1984, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2004.

New Hope for the Dead, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1985, reprinted, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (New York, NY), 2004.

Sideswipe (Mystery Guild selection), St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1987, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2005.

The Way We Die Now, Random House (New York, NY), 1988, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2005.

ADAPTATIONS: Cockfighter was made into a 1974 film released under several different titles (Born to Kill, Wild Drifter, and Gamblin' Man), directed by Roger Corman, produced by Monte Hellmann, with Willeford playing the character of Judge Ed Middleton; Miami Blues was made into a film of the same title, released by Orion Pictures Corporation in 1990, directed by George Armitage and produced by Jonathan Demme; Robert Redford has bought the film rights to New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now.; High Priest of California was adapted for the stage in a production directed by Leo Farley for New York City's 20th Street Repertory, 2003; Curtis Hanson has purchased the film rights to the series of novels featuring Hoke Moseley.

SIDELIGHTS: Prior to his death in 1988, Charles Willeford had recently begun "attracting national attention," according to a Los Angeles Times obituary. The popularity of Willeford's "Hoke Moseley" series earned him numerous comparisons to giants in the detective thriller genre, yet his earlier work also collected many adherents. Sybil Steinberg noted in a Publishers Weekly interview with Willeford that while "his peers, notably Elmore Leonard, Joseph Hansen and Lawrence Block, have been hailing Willeford's mastery of his craft for years, Willeford's novels for a long time earned him only a cult following." Throughout his writing career, "Willeford continually experimented with genres and forms, and his canon runs the gamut from naturalistic melodramas to violent revenge scenarios, a hardboiled detective story, a western, war stories, and the genre-blasting police procedurals that would finally bring fame into his life," commented Richard Gehr in the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Gehr believed that Willeford's novels "provide nothing less than a nonbohemian (yet aesthetically charged) alternative history, a moral history, of America's past 40 years, from bust to boom and back again." In a London Times review, Marcel Berlins declared that Willeford's "extraordinary descriptions" of character and setting as well as his successful management of plot and timing "put him in the Elmore Leonard class."

Willeford's first three novels—High Priest of California, Until I Am Dead (later retitled Wild Wives), and Pick-Up—comprise "his San Francisco trilogy of bleak, noir novels," stated Steinberg in Publishers Weekly. Known by many critics as a pulp novelist because of his early work, Willeford told Steinberg how he wrote High Priest of California: "'I was stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, so I drove to San Francisco every weekend and holed up in a room at the Powell Hotel until I finished a book.'" Eventually, Willeford "segued into the police procedural format that seems finally to have made his name familiar to a wider audience," explained Steinberg.

Homicide Sergeant Hoke Moseley is the protagonist of Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Janet Maslin described Hoke Moseley in a film review of Miami Blues in the New York Times as "the antihero of Charles Willeford's crackerjack series of crime novels, written in the droll, unpredictable manner of Elmore Leonard but graced with a sharply evoked seediness all their own." She further characterized Moseley as "no ordinary detective. He's a broke, beleaguered veteran who loves shocking suspects by taking out his false teeth in their presence, and whose wiliness generates many other tricks for catching criminals off-guard." The Village Voice Literary Supplement's Gehr wrote: "In the Hoke Moseley tetralogy, Willeford combined Elmore Leonard's flair for dialogue combined with James Ellroy's penchant for irrational violence. Hoke himself is a toothless, prematurely aged Vietnam vet in his early forties…. The divorced father of two teenaged daughters who eventually move in on him, Hoke eats, drinks, and smokes to an unhealthy degree…. He is thoroughly immobilized, thoroughly modern, save for his strict yet realistic police detective's morality." The Hoke Moseley series explores the "minutiae of life in Florida's depression-belt," asserted Berlins of the London Times.

The Way We Die Now, which was published shortly before Willeford's death, is the final Hoke Moseley novel. Marshall Jon Fisher, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, noted that the book "took his success to a new level." In a brief review in Booklist, Bill Ott noted that the novel may surpass all of the author's other efforts and noted it reflected the author's view of a violent world in a "most uncompromising … grimmest … unwavering" way." In another review of the book in Booklist, Ott and Brad Hooper noted that the novel "may be the best of a classic quartet."

Although Willeford gained a wide audience with Hoke Moseley stories, he also wrote numerous other books. In The Black Mass of Brother Springer, Willeford tells the story of a white man named Sam Springer who disappears from his previous life and wife by becoming a minister of a Black church in Florida. Fisher noted in the Atlantic Monthly that "Springer is a characteristically Willefordian amalgam of selfish mercenary and well-meaning drifter." Fisher also commented that the plot contains a story line that "is also an early depiction of the civil-rights revolution in the South." Willeford, who studied painting in France and Peru, provides a satire of the art world in his book The Burnt Orange Heresy. Although the plot, involving a freelance art critic, includes a murder, Fisher noted that "the real violence is Willeford's attack on artistic pretension." Writing on the Brothers Judd Web site, a contributor called the book "a deftly rendered crime novel" and "a devastatingly funny send up of Modern Art."

In The Shark-Infested Custard, which was published posthumously, the author presents another tale focusing on the darker side of human nature. This time he tells the story of four male swingers in the 1970s whose lifestyle seems little more than selfish until the author, as noted by a Publishers Weekly contributor, reveals how each one "is corrupted, stripped bare and revealed as utterly corruptible, weak, misogynist and lost." The reviewer went on to note that readers should expect "a dark ride." Another novel, The Woman Chaser, originally published as the The Director, focuses on a self-centered, successful used car salesman who decides to make a movie using money that his boss has given him to start a car dealership in Los Angeles. But making movies is no easy business and the car salesman eventually becomes a cruel psychopath who goes so far as to punch his pregnant girlfriend in the stomach.

Deliver Me from Dallas! was first published as Whip Hand and attributed to W. Franklin Sanders. The story revolves around an ex-cop on the run from Los Angeles who ends up in Dallas, where he becomes involved with kidnappers and a woman proficient with a bull whip. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted, "This hardboiled yarn is remarkably well constructed." A collection of the author's short stories and autobiographical writings is available in The Second Half of the Double Feature. Frank Sennett, writing in Booklist, noted that the author "delivers indictments of human nature more wry than withering." The reviewer went on to comment that "the memoir sections prove most satisfying."

Charles Willeford once told CA: "The turning point in my career occurred in October, 1959, when my long short story, 'The Machine in Ward Eleven,' was published in Playboy. Prior to that time I had been advised by editors, writing teachers, and by other writers that it was impossible to have an insane person as a sympathetic hero. I did not believe them, because I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and a normal condition for Americans living in the second half of this century. The publication of The Machine in Ward Eleven and its reception by readers confirmed what I had only heretofore suspected. Since then, of course, it has been reconfirmed for me many times, and by many contemporary writers and films and plays; but the acceptance of this condition does not mean that I am overjoyed by it. Happiness as a writer is still hard to come by in a nation where tranquilizers like valium outsell aspirin. At any rate, it was the understanding and the acceptance of the madness of our times that enabled me to write my best novel to date, The Burnt Orange Heresy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Willeford, Charles, A Guide for the Undehemorrhoided (autobiography), Star Publishing, 1977.

Willeford, Charles, Something about a Soldier (autobiography), Random House, 1986.

Willeford, Charles, I Was Looking for a Street (autobiography), Countryman Press, 1988.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic Monthly, May, 2000, Marshall Jon Fisher, "Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction: Although His Detectives Do Precious Little Detecting, Charles Willeford Sparked the Modern South Florida Mystery Craze," pp. 117-121.

Booklist, June 1, 1994, Bill Ott, review of The Way We Die Now, p. 1779; May 1, 2000, Bill Ott and Brad Hooper, review of The Way We Die Now, p. 1602; September 15, 2003, Frank Sennett, review of The Second Half of the Double Feature, p. 217.

Library Journal, September 15, 2004, Michael Rogers, review of Miami Blues, p. 91.

New York Times, April 20, 1990, Janet Maslin, review of Miami Blues, (film).

Publishers Weekly, February 6, 1987, Sybil Steinberg, "Charles Willeford," interview with author, pp. 78-79; March 1, 1993, review of The Shark-Infested Custard, p. 43; January 1, 1996, Norman Oder, "Willeford Returns Darkly, via Dell," p. 36; July 9, 2001, review of Deliver Me from Dallas!, p. 49.

Times (London, England), May 20, 1989, Marcel Berlins, review of The Way We Die Now.

Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1988, review of Swideswipe, p. 731; November 24, 1989, review of Kiss Your Ass Goodbye, p. 1312.

Variety, April 22, 2002, "Lurid Florida Tales Lure Hanson," discusses purchase of movie rights to author's novels, p. 5.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, March, 1989, Richard Gehr, "The Pope of Psychopulp: Charles Ray Willeford's Unholy Rites," pp. 30-31.

Washington Post Book World, May 15, 1988, review of The Way We Die Now, p. 8.