One hell of a cautionary tale, and a highly entertaining one, while at the same time having one of the bleakest endings in the history of noir fiction.

“The only defense I had was the fact that I was a good soldier during the war. My lawyer passed my medals around the jury box, and they were closely examined. They didn’t help a bit.”

A very short book - a novella, actually. The beginning was good, the middle sustainable, but the ending was not to my liking. Jake Blake, a struggling PI, who lives in a hotel, where he works from a room, gets an assignment from a 27 year old rich spoilt daughter (or so she said) of a tycoon to help her disappear from the body guards arranged by her 'father'. The same day, he had received a job application from a 15 year old girl, which he foolishly accepted, as she was willing to work without pay. Both these incidents leads him to deep trouble and the need to flee after being at the scene of death of the tycoon. It read like a book published in the early 20th century, but later I came to know it was published in the 21st century, and is supposed to be of the genre "noir"

Certainly not nearly as good a story as Pick-Up. Borrows a few elements from the former to little effect. Much less sympathetic protagonist than Harry from Pick-Up. Madness referred to, shown, but not probed. Coasts along nicely for a while then crashes. But a nice quick read.

I love fiction that's based in San Francisco. Dashiell Hammett, Jack Kerouac, I love it all!!!

An early Charles Willeford I found in a used bookstore, and all the early ones are pulpy noir experiments that seem initially like trashy Dashiell Hammett knockoffs--and they mostly are--though in the end he tries to disrupt your expectations, make you see he knows just what he is doing. Jake Blake might be the name of a slick Hollywood detective, but he’s really just another part of what Tony Hillerman calls Willeford’s “asocial trash” in a back cover blurb. There are no good guys or gals with conscience in these books.

So Wild Wives, a novella coming in at around 100 pages, from the title and cover you expect will be a drunken orgy of a tale where everything goes wrong, and you are not that far from the mark, though since it is 1956 it is not that explicit, and thus not quite so wild.

Jake is living in a cheap hotel where his crummy office is also located:

“Behind me was my single window with its excellent view of the airshaft.”

A hot dame (required for any pulpy noir) named Florence walks into his office wanting to get two bodyguards off her trail for a couple hours. Her Daddy thinks she is bad and gives her no room to breathe. Blake knows what to do with those two hours with her:

“She wasn’t the type who is hard to get; she was anxious to get!”

Haw! And yeah, so much of the early parts of the book seem played for cheap laughs, but then we
meet Flo’s gay brother Freddy, and violence ensues, so we firmly establish our Jake is a (homophobic) snake. And then when Flo’s Daddy confronts Blake we find he is not actually her Daddy. . . but her husband. Oops! And Daddy falls down, goes boom, we are on the run, the road to ruin. Turns out Flo just got out of a mental hospital and is a little. . . unbalanced still. Example: If Flo tells you to turn off the radio, you turn off the radio, bud! Or she takes off her high heel and smashes it to bits!

She drives them 100 miles-an-hour across the desert so they can get married in a pretty funny Vegas “wedding” at a cheap motel. Flo says she has plenty of cash stashed in various places from her rich hubby, including Vegas, so they want to get to Mexico and start a new life together, the sweet couple. Love! You can't beat it! And things not surprisingly go south for the young sleazeballs, though not quite in the way you expect.

This is not Hammett or Chandler; this is quick pulpy gutter trash written with a sardonic poison pen, in the manner of Willeford’s own Pick Up, Cockfighter, or The High Priest of California, before he figured out how to make some real money in Hollywood with his funny schleppy Detective Hoke novels and the films that followed.

A quick and dirty private detective book that’s full off sleaze. It’s not raunchy, mind you, there’s a difference. It’s not vulgar, but it’s seedy.

It’s also a lot fun that holds up really well.

A bit thin for my taste, but pretty wild.

“No more playing around with Florence for me.” A dame, a death, a dash for dough and a dupe. Florence’s reckless driving was never going to end well. This has a last minute, nicely set up, ironic twist which, although it isn’t novel, raises “Wild Wives” up a notch from the mundane and demonstrates Willeford’s ability to make everything matter, even little girls firing water pistols. However, “Wives” is very much minor Willeford, he’d scale greater heights elsewhere. It’s perfectly readable, anticipates “Badlands” (if you’re feeling generous) and is short enough to be downed in one satisfying gulp but it’s very run of the mill. It certainly makes a case for requesting a review of your partner’s mental health as part of a pre-nup, though

“Pick-Up” – Willeford’s previous novel – felt more sophisticated than “Wild Wives” which makes me wonder whether this short novella was exhumed from a bottom draw at the behest of Willeford’s publisher. Your standard unsuccessful, hotel-based, investigator Jake Blake – eventually likened to a snake – gets hired to help one Florence Weintraub evade the goons her father (it says here) has sicked onto her to keep her under control. Booze, grub, dancing and a little fire escape ooh-la-la inevitably occurs, Florence turns out to be not quite the standard wayward daughter she claims to be (“an ex-inmate of a booby hatch”) and the predictable mayhem ensures. Meanwhile, an encounter with sixteen year-old Barbara Ann sets up the local lawmaker’s antipathy towards Blake and art collector Jefferson Davis appears and disappears, apparently only to supply Blake the opportunity to demonstrate his violent tendencies when Davis’ “wife” Freddy Allen tries to insert a fire extinguisher into him. Even the central murder is fairly meh. Willeford hints Florence might be more designing than she lets on and certainly the pay off at the end demonstrates Willeford has been keeping a close eye on all the plates he set spinning but there is a schematic feel to this romp and not enough characterisation to really lift it.

This – after “Pick Up” and “The Burnt Orange Heresy” – is the third Willeford I’ve read which features some link to the art world. This fixation seems to have disappeared by the time Willeford hit pay dirt with “Miami Blues”. One shot tales like “Wild Wives” served two purposes back in the day, apart from making money: to satisfy the salacious tastes of the male readership and to elicit a wry smile when the rat at the centre of proceedings gets either brought down by his own designs or by Lady Fate. In 2020 you’re more likely to see such stories as “chapters” in something like “Red Dead Redemption” or done on a grand scale as in “Breaking Bad” or “Sin City” but personally, I still like the prose fiction versions best and a sub-par Willeford isn’t going to change that. “That’s a good word for it. Unfortunate.”

Damn, this thing is short. It's one of those pulp novels that were all the rage during the depression - hastily written, cheaply produced. I'm glad I got the opportunity to read one, but I'm really surprised how short it is, not more than 50,000 words.

This one's about a private detective who gets involved with a woman trying to elude the bodyguards her husband's set on her. Meanwhile, there's a subplot about some beatnik chick trying to become his apprentice, and he blows her off sending her on some wild goose chase. Then there's some murder, and some escaping, while he realizes the hot piece of ass he's been hitting is really psycho and unreliable, saying what she wants to get what she wants. She's set him up to think he murdered her husband, when she's really the one who did it. Reminds me a little bit of "McTeague" by Frank Norris.

It's a short read and a bit of history. It's not boring, and it's not spectacular. It's pulp. I recommend it.

Interesting novel, utterly bleak and delivered in pithy prose style by Willeford. The narrative is punctuated by moments of excess: casual scenes of dialogue explode into savage violence. A conversation between the protagonist/narrator, his client/lover and her husband is interrupted by her incessant screaming and a close-quarters bout of fisticuffs between the two men. It's hard to tell if this is a cruel fantasy or a deadpan satire of the hardboiled genre (Spillane et al). Given the qualities of Willeford's later work, I'm edging towards the latter.

The protagonist, like Willeford, is a veteran of WWII, and the climax is structured like a PTSD flashback (to use the parlance of our, not Willeford's times), beginning with the protagonist's memory of seeing his first dead body by a roadside whilst traveling in a column in Europe, and ending with him crawling through a ditch, flanking an 'enemy position', in mimicry of his military service.

A fascinating novel.

Hilarious entertainment, read it in a few hours. The 'violence' is not prurient at all...it's funny in a way that I haven't yet been able to classify. (Probably futile to try.)

I don't know how, but Willeford managed a wry sendup of a hardboiled detective story that can also be enjoyed straight. I didn't really have a choice about interpreting what the narrator said. If he wanted to be serious, I took him seriously. If he wanted to clown himself, that was the only reading that parsed.

Going to reread. One thing I'm going to watch for next time is the little hints of 'Florence' in 'Barbara'. Most of the things that Barbara does in a minor way, Florence later does in a major way. That's because Barbara is both a minor (in terms of age) and a minor character.

Nak bagi dua bintang asalnya tapi penamat yang bijak melayakkannya dapat tiga bintang. Saya akan terus membaca Charles Willeford di masa akan datang.