First published in 1956, Wild Wives is a short but very entertaining novel from Charles Willeford, the author of Miami Blues and a number of other crime novels.

Jake Blake is a struggling San Francisco P.I. who lives in the same cheap hotel where he has his office. One slow afternoon, Florence Weintraub, the inevitable Hot Babe essential to the beginning of practically any classic P.I. story, waltzes into his office insisting that she's desperately in need of his help. Even though she's twenty-six years old, her father allows her absolutely no freedom whatsoever and has her accompanied wherever she goes by two goons who are allegedly there to protect her. She'd just like a couple of hours to herself, she says. Could Jake possibly help her lose the two thugs?

Well, of course he can, for twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses. And when the lovely Florence agrees to the terms, one thing inevitably leads to another. Florence is very attracted to Jake and once they finally elude her guardians, they go out to dinner, which Jake naturally adds to the expense account. Other more interesting activities accompany the dinner, and Florence insists that she'd like to see Jake again the following day.

Complications ensue and poor Jake soon finds himself entangled in a mess he never envisioned when he accepted Florence's seemingly simple assignment. It's an engaging story with plenty of Willeford's deadpan humor and enough action to propel the story forward at a fairly rapid clip. While not quite on a par with some of Willeford's better known books, it's still a fun read and will appeal especially to those who have read and enjoyed the author's other work.

Enjoyable, quick little read. Great cover!

Damn, so good. Got this for less than a buck from PlanetMonk Books. This is the kind of book that you won't find in Barnes & Noble anymore--100 pages with zero filler. Protagonist Jake Blake is a sexist, racist, homophobe sleazebag of a PI. But he's entertaining and the action in the book is nearly non-stop without ever feeling forced or repetitive.

Though sporting a catchy title that's a clear misnomer -- don't wait for multiple wives, wild or otherwise, to show up -- this is vintage Willeford. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Jake Blake is a hardboiled dick in a seedy, rundown office who gets lured into a messy situation by a femme, possibly fatale. But this is Willeford, so none of it plays out quite as expected. Instead, it's a dark, demented shaggy dog joke, as our brutal, opportunistic, amoral antihero tap-dances with his inevitable comeuppance, staying just one half-step ahead of much-deserved payback for his many failings. It's a James M. Cain style plot played for cruel laughs. Willeford breathes new life into his own grubby corner of the noir universe, populated by a menagerie of memorable grotesques.

Not his best work. This was pretty run-of-the-mill by Willeford's standards.

3.5 stars

Willeford's first foray into the hard boiled detective novel reads almost like a parody of the genre. It is great fun in its own unhinged manner

This was a very good read, written in 1956, Willeford was already on top of his game. Wild daughter quickly becomes wild wife in this caper. “ “Fuck yourself,” she remarked quietly and wandered over to the fireplace…”
“ We didn’t talk to each other, because we both had the same thing on our minds, and talking wasn’t necessary. How long would we have, and would there be enough time to do what we wanted to do before her father’s bodyguards caught up with us? After the kiss in the cab I could easily see why Milton Weintraub kept a guard on his daughter. She wasn’t the type who is hard-to-get; she was anxious-to-get!” Correction kept a guard on his wife.
Plenty of sardonic private eye humor to go along, “There was a letter from a woman in Mill Valley asking me how much I charged for handling divorce cases. I answered her letter with a postcard telling her I didn’t handle divorce cases. If her husband happened to get the mail before she did, there would be an interesting argument between them, I speculated” This sounds very Hoke Moseley, Willeford too

At 93 pages, this book is more like a novella than a novel, which makes sense, as it was originally issued in 1956 as the second half of a double novel, with Willeford's "High Priest Of California" in front of it. Like a B-movie at a double feature, the second half of a double novel doesn't really have to be that long. Willeford's "Wild Wives" is also similar to a B-movie in that it has an action-packed plot, with lots of lurid sex and violence. Finally, like a B-movie, it spends a great deal of its rather short length making little coherent sense. Instead, we follow narrator Jake Blake, a small-time private eye who's always behind on his bills, through a few days of adventures that don't seem to have much connection to each other. Blake is the sort of amoral sociopath that occupies the main role in many of Willeford's early novels, and he rises to the occasion by lying to, beating up, or sleeping with pretty much everyone he runs into for the first half of the novel. Somehow, though, he retains our sympathy, or at least some of it, and when it seems like it all might come back around to bite him in the ass towards the end of the novel, other readers may find themselves, as I did, rooting for him to somehow get away with it all. It'd be wrong for me to comment too much on the climax of the novel, but I will say that it leaves you conflicted as a reader, and highlights Willeford's working-class existentialism. For a quickly-paced noir novel with plenty of subtext about the pointlessness of modern American society, you can't go wrong here. The only disappointing thing about "Wild Wives" is that it's a $12.95 trade paperback with, as I said, only 93 pages of text. You'd do better to hunt down the Re/Search reissue that pairs it with "High Priest Of California," but then again, it's out of print, and for all I know it commands collector's prices on the secondary market. You can't win.

Nutty as fuck sleaze from Charles Willeford, mixing noir with hepcat beatnikisms. The PI is named Jake Blake and he hangs out at the Knockout Club. The book is full of booze, babes and spankings, and reads smoothly like a good shot of straight rye. The "girlfriend who turns out to be a psycho" yarn is a noir shaggy dog story but Willeford does it better than most.

these kind of pulpy, 'hard-boiled' detective novels always make me giggle because they read like self-insert fanfics for grown men

It feels like Willeford banged this out under a tight deadline. On the plus side, there's hardly a dull moment.