review of
Charles Willeford's The Shark-Infested Custard
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 8-9, 2023

YET-ANOTHER author I got interested in while reading Lee Server's Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. I was most interested in Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy but somehow I got this one instead. Even tho I found the writing itself to be somewhat generic I will say that Willeford has.. that special something, a sense of cynical 'dark' humor that's, ahem, 'well developed' - like the jaw muscles on an alligator.

Money's always a good thing to get into trouble w/:

"It started out as a kind of joke, and then it wasn't funny any more because money became involved. Deep down, ntohing about money is funny."

[..]

"Dade Towers is a singles only apartment house, and it's only one year old. What I mean by "singles only" is that only single men and women are allowed to rent here. This is a fairly recent idea in Miami, but it has caught on fast, and a lot of new singles only apartments are springing up all over Dade County. Dade Towers doesn't have any two-or three-bedroom apartments at all. If a resident gets married, or even if a man wants to bring a woman in to live with him, out he goes, They won't let two men share an apartment, either. That's a fruitless effort to keep gays out." - p 11

Imagine naming yr kid "Money". It wd really be a curse. Now imagine naming yr kid "Money Singles Only". They'd probably get plenty of one dollar bills given to them but it'd still be a curse. But what about Miss Moneypenny?

"["]The easiest place to pick up a fast lay in Miami is at the V.D. clinic."" - p 17

Ok, that's funny - but having been in V.D. clinics before it's hard to imagine making the moves. The hardest place?

""I don't get it," Don said. "What's so hard about picking up a woman at a drive-in, for Christ's sake? Guys takes women to drive-ins all the time—"

""That's right," Hank said. "They take them there, and they pay their way in. So what are you going to do? Start talking to some woman while she's in her boyfriend's car, while he's got one arm around her neck and his left hand on her snatch?"" - p 19

Good point there, Hank. This guy really knows what he's talking about. I go to the drive-in all the time & I cdn't pick up a tire iron there. So they decide to go to the drive-in.

""Jesus," Don said, rattling the paper. "At the Tropical Drive-In they're showingfive John Wayne movies! Who in hell could sit through five John Waynes for Christ sake?"

""I could," I said.

""Me, too," Eddie said, "but only one at a time."" - p 23

Hank makes a bet that he can pick up someone to fuck at the drive-in. He succeeds.

"She was about thirteen or fourteen, barefooted, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, and tight raggedly-cuffed blue jeans with a dozen or more different patches sewn onto them. On her crotch, right over the pudenda, there was a patch with a comic rooster flexing muscled wings. The embroidered letters, in white, below the chicken read: I'M A MEAN FIGHTING COCK." - p 27

The tragedy starts here. Hank moves on.

"If I had known she was married, I would have made my plans accordingly. She was the most desirable woman I had ever met, and because I wanted her so badly, I had apparently overlooked the telltale signs of her marriage. She had fooled me from the beginning, and for no discernible reason.

"The entire pattern was senseless and illogical, beginning with the electronic dating service, "Electro-Date." - p 54

There're plenty of twists in this novel & there's a pattern to them. That was one of the most fun things about it for me. Here's where one of them started:

"There were more than twenty cars parked on Don's lawn and along the curb and on neighboring lawns by the time I got to his house for his birthday party. The quiet of the suburban neighborhood was bothered by gibbering drums which pulsed above the shattering rise and fallof voices from the poolside patio. I learned later that some maniac had given Don a birthday present of three LPs of the authentic tribal drums of Africa." - p 74

"The musk smell on Jannaire was faint, because her own smell, or reek, to be more exact, of primeval swamp, dark guanoed caves, sea water in movement, armpit sweat, mangroves at low tide, Mayan sacrifical blood, Bartolin glands, Dial soap, mulberry leaves, jungle vegetation, saffron, kittens in a cardboard box, Y.W.C.A. volleyball courts, conch shells, Underground Atlanta, the Isle of Lesbos, and sheer joy—Patou's Joy—overpowered the musk oil. I was overwhelmed by the nasal assault, overcome by her female aroma, and although I could not, at the time, define the mixture—nor can I know, exactly—there wasn't the faintest trace of milk. Here was a woman." - p 78

Did I saw the writing was generic? I beg to differ w/ myself. That description of a woman that Hank's attracted to is EXCEPTIONAL.

""Mary Jane isn't a drug," she protested.

""I know the arguments. And I can counter every one you bring up too. But in my job, with drugs of every kind available to me, I leave them strictly alone. They scared us badly during training. I'm even nervous about taking an aspirin. And aspirin can be dangerous too. In some people, it burns holes through the stomach lining."

"I lit her a cigarette. She inhaled deeply, held it in, and said through closed teeth, "What's a detail man?"

""Drug pusher. I'm a pharmaceutical salesman for Lee Laboratories, and my territory includes Key West, Palm Beach, and all of Dade County. I'm supposed to see forty doctors a week and tell them about our products. I brief them, or detail one or more of our products, so they'll know how to use them."" - p 82

I find Hank refreshing as a character. I detest the pharmaceutical industry & think it's one of the biggest threats to health. To have Hank refer to himself as a "drug pusher" is, therefore, pleasing to me. Furthermore, to have him be someone who warns against drug use is also pleasing. This type of characterization is a sign of the subtlety of Willeford's perception.

"My adjustment year in Miami, after getting out of the army, had been a grim and confusing period. I had hated Pittsburgh, a cold and miserable city, and I had made no sfriends among its residents. I drank and ran around with some of the other officers from the Recruiting Station, and our conversations were usually centered on what we were going to do and where we were going to go after we got out of the service. It had never entered my mind to go home to Michigan. Dearborn, if anything, was a colder and more miserable city than Pittsburgh, and with fewer opportunities." - p 117

It's always interesting to read about the city that I've lived in or am currently living in, as the case is. At age 70, it's quite likely that I'd move from PGH to somewhere warm on an ocean if I cd afford to do so, wch I can't. I can barely afford to live here. Oh, well. If there're any women out there who want to invite me to join them in their tropical paradise feel free to propose something lacivious to me.

"The features were A Hard Man's Good to Find and Coming Attractions, and they were both one-hour films." - p 151

'Urban development' as typical racist shit:

"When Don had first moved into the warehouse office there had been seventy of these clapboard houses along Fair Alley, as it was called by the black residents (although there was no such street or alley listed on the city map), but fifty of them had been torn down, ten houses at a time, as new "Little HUD" housing had been constructed. The black residents had been "relocated," as the officials put it, in Liberty City, Brownsville, and Coconut Grove." - p 194

I was installing an exhibit about the presidents of the US at a museum when a newspaper photographer took my picture & asked me what my name was. I was quick-witted enuf to reply "Leon Czolgosz" but I stumbled slightly over the spelling. That might've given me away - at any rate my picture & the hoped-for caption didn't appear in the article.

"But who remembered Leon Czolgosz, or if they did, how many people could spell his name? Don could, and he had won a few bucks in bars by betting he could spell it. How many people, in fact, remembered or knew that Czolgosz had assassinated McKinley? Or knew that McKinley, because he had been assassinated, now had his picture on the $500-bill?" - p 196

There, I've managed to review this bk w/o telling you very much about it at all. No appreciable spoilers in this review, no sireebob! I liked this & I'm going to read The Burnt Orange Heresy if it's the last thing I ever do!

Charles Willeford felt that The Shark-Infested Custard was his masterpiece. The novel centers around four men who become friends because they all live in a Miami apartment building that caters to singles. Beyond this, the main things they have in common are a creepy crassness and an interest in the finer points of getting laid. Willeford described The Shark-Infested Custard as "a fairly nasty picture of so-called ordinary young men who are making it down here." Thus, the challenge facing Willeford as a writer was to give his readers sufficient reason to want to spend 263 pages' worth of time with such an unpleasant group of protagonists. For a noirish novel, the obvious strategy would have been to hook readers with a strong narrative drive, but Willeford's episodic storytelling pointedly refuses to do this. (Perhaps it was this vaguely arty storytelling decision, in combination with the vaguely arty decision to use multiple first-person narrators, that deluded Willeford into his high opinion of this book.) Failing this, the author might try to give the book some sort of substance as sociological document, exploring the nature of a society that produces "ordinary young men" like these. But the novel does not seem especially interested in this, either. In the end, the problem with The Shark-Infested Custard is that it does not seem interested in much of anything other than itself.

This is the first Willeford I really haven't liked. The Burnt Orange Heresy was a little iffy, but this one--no. It’s about four ordinary guys living in Miami Beach. One day, they find themselves (relatively innocently enough) with a dead fourteen-year-old girl on their hands. Inexplicably, the former cop of the bunch (Larry) decides that rather than report the incident to the police, they should get rid of the body, binding them in this terrible secret.

There are four parts to the book, told from four different points of view. They are pretty well self-contained stories. The dead girl is just in the first one. Incredibly, there are more extraordinary killings and other crimes in the lives of these regular working men. Larry is something of a sociopath, no conscience, no empathy, and Hank runs a close second. They are loyal to their pals, that’s all.

These guys have a hateful attitude towards women. There is nothing but sex behind any of their relationships, and the search for sex or getting away from entanglements drives every plotline. Of course, this is deliberate on Willeford’s part, but hard to take. The ending is bleak and ironic.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as many of his others and I have read many. However it is a Willeford, candid sometimes harsh and on point for some and the time. Much if this would not be socially acceptable by today’s standards.

I fucking adore Willeford (avatar = hint) it's his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of life in the US (under capitalism?) coupled with such a keen eye for human detail and always this otherness, an openness in his books that makes all his characters no matter how unbelievable and unpredictable their actions appear entirely convincing.

He can for example spend three pages discussing how a tax-deductible PR report altered the sales plan of a trans-atlantic silverware company before seamlessly going into how this is now affecting the robbery choices of one of the protagonists...he is fucking great. (um, I liked the book)

Okay, so I loved this, but I can't decide whether to give it three or four stars. It lost some steam towards the end, and also I felt like a book that's told from the perspective of four different people needs to make a stronger and more successful effort to differentiate their voices.... BUT, this ruled and I really did enjoy reading it. For some reason it reminded me of Jacqueline Susann, but for/about men instead of women, and set in the seventies.

I recently got into a really embarrassing fight with a stranger on facebook when I overreacted to moralizing about my refined sugar consumption and other vices; I count books like this among the things I love that are shameful and likely giving me cancer. Recently I've stalled out on books with any nutritional value or moral virtue, and The Shark Infested Custard was the perfect antidote to that, basically a KFC Double Down topped with whipped cream and washed down with scotch. If you've recently quit smoking, drinking, sex, pills, or pretty much anything else fun, this might be a good read because a) it feels deliciously bad for you and b) it makes all those things I just listed seem totally gross.

In case you did not, as I didn't, "get" the title, The Shark Infested Custard takes its title from what Willeford calls an "old Miami riddle": "What is sweet, bright yellow, and extremely dangerous?" Apparently there is also a British kiddie TV show called this, after the same joke, which seems odd considering how well the title worked to convey the lethal sleaze of 1970s Miami.

Aw, hell, I'm giving this thing another star because I really did enjoy it. The best thing about the book is that it's from the point of view of these completely screwed up, horrible, unsympathetic guys, but it never breaks character or winks or gets meta for even a moment, and so you really do see things from their perspective. I would guess that most of the people whom I like and respect would really hate this book and, by extension, would hate me for liking it, so I don't recommend it unless you're a bad person or have at least got a wide unsavory streak.

-----------------------------------

I'm only on page thirty, but this is one of the most fucked-up books I've started in kind of a long time.

In other words, so far it's pretty awesome. I've already learned a new (to me) term, "strange," my new favorite-ever slang for pussy, and one of the main characters' outfits was described like this:

Hank came into the living room, looking and smelling like a jai-alai player on his night off. He wore white shoes with leather tassels, and a magenta slack suit with a silk blue-and-red paisley scarf tucked in around the collar. Hank had three other tailored suits like the magenta -- wheat, blue, and chocolate -- but I hadn't seen the magenta before. The high-waisted pants, with an uncuffed flare, were double-knits, and so tight in front his equipment looked like a money bag. The short-sleeved jacket was a beltless, modified version of a bush jacket, with huge bellows side pockets.

Don was the only one of us with long hair, that is, long enough, the way we all wanted to wear it. Because of our jobs, we couldn't get away with hair as long as Don's. Hank had fluffed his hair with an air-comb, and it looked much fuller than it did when he slicked it down with spray to call on doctors.

"Isn't that a new outfit?" Eddie said.

"I've had it awhile," Hank said, going to the table to build a drink. "It's the first time I've worn it, is all. I ordered the suit from a small swatch of material. Then when it was made into a suit, I saw that it was a little too much." He shrugged. "But it'll do for a drive-in, I think."

"There's nothing wrong with that color, Hank," Don said. "I like it."

Hank added two more ice cubes to his Scotch and soda. "It makes my face look red, is all."

"Your face is red," I said.

"But not as red as this magenta makes it look."

"When you pay us off tonight," Eddie said, "it'll match perfectly."

Unfortunately, I can't tell you the really fucked-up stuff, because that would be spoiling. But hopefully you've gotten a taste of its obvious awesome.

This is sick and, twisted, nihilistic psycho noir and I loved it.

To dated for current contexts.

Willeford’s books have been analyzed exhaustively by knowledgeable reviewers who have written masses of astute text about Shark Infested Custard—there isn’t much I can add.

The story’s narrative, though grounded, exhibits tinges of dark-comedy and theater-of-the-absurd. Its dramatis personae inhabit a milieu fraught with anomie, not unlike citizens in Jim Thompson’s small towns. The bad guys are pretty ordinary until something catalyses their inner killers: then they rationalize and compartmentalize their behaviors with alacrity, and their crooked psyches become their destinies.

If you’re a Willeford buff, enjoy—there aren’t many other novels by him to pick from, anyway. You will laugh at the characters’ bizarre outlooks, and dread the havoc that their vexing actions will wreak.

If you’re new to the author, don’t start with this volume: it’s a good read, but flawed, and suffers from chronological palsy. You won’t have as much fun with Shark Infested Custard as you would with, say, Miami Blues.

What a bunch of freaks.

Some people mistake first person narratives as the voice of the writer. Those people also usually think that the characters represent ideas the author actually believes and wants to express as his own. Then, there are people who actually know how to read. These people know that characters, even the POV character are not the author and that with good authors, sometimes the discomfort the author is giving you through a POV character is the point. If you don’t get that or don’t believe that, don’t read Willeford, and especially do not read this book.

Willeford puts you right inside the head of true sociopaths with zero schlock. These are not redeemable characters and you are not supposed to like them. This is probably how these behave in reality. We all know someone like them.

The prose is dry and funny, with some laugh out loud passages and other sections that become more chilling every time you think about them. Willeford knows people and knows characters and assumes you’re already in on the joke.

His descriptions of food and people are often equally hilarious and disgusting (this goes for all of his novels). He seems to have a deep knowledge of strange and very human character traits that normally one wouldn’t think would appear (false teeth, body odor that makes a guy horny, strange jobs). His characters love to order hamburgers. They also like to speak in medium size monologues telling people what to do. He’s not for everyone, but man I like to read it. I would almost call it satire but it isn’t really that, and it’s definitely not crime/detective fiction but it isn’t NOT that. Definitely mischaracterized and under appreciated.

But anyway, Miami is the custard and men like our four protagonists are the sharks. Good stuff.

Four guys who are drawn together because they live in a singles apartment complex in 1970's Miami, and the activities they share. These range from picking up broads, to covering up murder. A dark and twisted story told by and expert of the genre.