I first read Willeford's Hoke Moseley series, and found them quite comic and quirky. This book about four Miami buddies who casually kill a man and cover it up is heavy on the dialogue. Willeford also uses long passages for tangents on things like male circumcision, and resulting court cases, and of course there's always drinking involved.

Oh but the clothes!!!

What a nasty group of people – bad company indeed in the hands of a lesser writer. I do love Willeford's prose: the specificity of time and place, the consistency of tone and characterization. The seamy, misogynistic underside of seventies dating culture is a perfect setting for his selfish and amoral characters. I also have a weakness for any novel set in Miami. However, this seems less like a novel than a series of interconnected short stories. It lacks an overall narrative arc; the segments don't quite cohere into a whole. If this had found a publisher during Willeford's lifetime, I suspect it would have undergone considerable revision.

The true highlight of this book is the multiple descriptions of seventies-era male fashion! From yellow zip-front jumpsuits to white ties to magenta double-knit leisure suits – truly wonderful and literally laugh-out-loud funny. I found myself taking photos of certain paragraphs to send to friends. Read this and rejoice that you neither know these people nor have to dress like them!

The title of this book is better than the book itself. The title is the punchline of the riddle "What is sweet, yellow, and dangerous?"

A novel should have a central question presented to the reader: will Ahab kill the whale, will Raskalnikov get away with murder? Alternatively, a novel should present a central character who faces a challenge, and must exert his character traits, or have those traits changed, as a result. This novel does neither. It presents four somewhat unlikable adult male characters who have no relationships with women beyond the transactional. The stumble into homicide, fraud, kidnapping, and thievery with no insight as to their antisocial behavior. It's just not a very good novel, and I don't recommend it.

Caper Stories with the Willeford Existential Slant

This is a set of novelettes linked together about 4 friends who, at the start of the book, live in the same Miami apartment building. Each of the characters goes through a bizarre life changing experience that involves the others. It's hard to do a plot summary that doesn't involve spoilers because plot twists figure prominently. Each story, in one way or another, involves the consequences of an inability to relate to others. dThere are deaths and crimes.

While not the equal of the Hoke Moseley series, the characters are interesting if not sympathetic. Willeford's knack for mundane sounding dialogue and detailed descriptions from an odd point of view can just about sustain the reader's interest. As in all Willeford's work the action has a banal tone that slowly reveals the core of sickness. I finished it because I couldn't quite stop reading. I think this is more for Willeford completists. I don't recommend it as an introduction to Willeford.

There is a difference between being "of a time" and being stuck in time. *The Pick Up* is a great novel because it is "of a time", but addresses timeless themes, and is still relevant. This one, however, is stuck in the 70s, and really doesn't have much to recommend it beyond Willeford's elegant, economic prose. While he often can be amoral, bleak, and even nihilistic, he has never been this shallow and mean-spirited.

Willeford is a fantastic writer and storyteller, but this is nowhere close to his usual standards. Please do not let this be the only Willeford novel you read.

05/2020

From 1972
When this is good it is very good. Unfortunately, it happens in only a quarter of the novel. Brilliant, boring, strange.

The Shark Infested-Custard (1996) by Charles Willeford is supposedly one of his own personal favorites. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't rank it among my favorites though. There's plenty to like with his divergences into subjects like psychology, singles apartments, luxury flatware, pharmaceuticals among other subjects. it si a set of four interlocking stories involving four men who have become friends living in a singles' apartment complex in Miami in the 70s. Each story is told in a distinctive voice from each character's point of view: Hank, a pharmaceutical salesman, Larry ,a private security operative, Eddie, an airline pilot and Don, the unhappily married middleman for a luxury silverware firm. This isn't a crime story per se, but there are criminal events that take place in the four narratives as Willeford goes on about sumptuous meals and pantsuits all the while these events take place. It ends abruptly with a sudden unforeseen plot twist. This is not his best, but it is entertaining as always.

The darkest of the dark, the meanest of the mean. Willeford's nastiest work (and if you haven't read him yet, believe me, that's saying something) offers up four searing indictments of good old boys so breezily entitled they drift into lanes traveled only by psychotic monsters--then wander out again, untroubled and unfazed. It's a testimony to Willeford's thoroughness as an artist (or his commitment to pulp mechanics; six of one in this field) that he doesn't abandon his typical humor. This is as fun a ride as it is horrific, right down to a final punchline that makes you chuckle even as it churns your stomach.

A slice of sin city life that has great style, but goes four separate directions and the point where they’d meet up seems never to arrive. But on the very last page it does, and Willeford’s vision is a grim one - a hell’s labyrinth of palms, heat, condos and swimming pools.

This was - most definitely not my favorite read of this year. This crime novel is set in the 1970's and follows the lives of 4 single men in Miami. They are really some of the crassest men ever and I think I was kind of grossed out by them in general.
Williford is a good writer, but this probably isn't his best, even if he thought it was. There is just very little cohesion. I kept expecting the story to kind of come together, the initial deaths to relate to the other deaths, but, no, no they did not, it was sort of a bit of a mish mash of experiences. also- i kept waiting for a shark-custard, but no, that was not included in the novel either.
So meh, I think there are better books out there for certain.

Second Time Through

This book really sucks. Rag-tag band of Horny-fits.

If I wanted to read about horny guys and the various ways they humiliate themselves, I'd read Harvey Weinstein's biography or I'd turn on the subtitles on PornHub.

It's so easy to tell when a guy is trying to get "Hollywooders" to buy his book.

I Take Titles Literally -- I'm a Titular Fundamentalist

I don't like titles like this. Reminds me of The Strawberry Alarm Clock, A Clockwork Orange, Lead Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane. Stupid names.

Charles Willeford wrote “The Shark-Infested Custard” in 1975 but couldn’t get it published because it was considered too depressing; in fact, it’s pretty close to perfect.

Willeford is best known for his Hoke Moseley novels which were published in the 1980s. The Moseley novels are more police procedural than noir (but, nevertheless very good), but “The Shark-Infested Custard” is pure noir.

There are four protagonists. The novel is divided into four interlocking stories, each with one of the four as the protagonist. Each is reasonably successful. Don Lucchesi is the Florida representative for a silverware company. Eddie Miller is a pilot for an airline, Hank Norton is a salesman for a drug company, and Larry Dolman is a low-level executive for a private security company. All make pretty good money and they all receive promotions during the course of the book. They are also typical noir protagonists. Each is flawed and because of his flaw he makes a mistake, which leads to more mistakes, confusion ensues, and the consequences are horrendous.

When we first meet them they are all single (Don is separated) and living at a singles apartment complex in Miami. All fancy themselves to be lady’s men, with Hank being the lead dog. He makes a bet that he can even pick up a woman at a drive-in. He does so and before you know it, two people are dead. By the end of the novel, two more will be dead.

How are these men flawed? They’re all casual racists and not so casual misogynists. Women are strictly pieces of meat to these guys. A woman’s appeal is strictly physical. How long are her legs? How large are her breasts? How does she smell? And they’ll think nothing of cheating on a wife or girlfriend or simply walking out on them if they think something better has come along.

Some critics have called the four protagonists sociopaths, but they’re not. They’re relatively successful. They’re conscientious when it comes to their jobs and their friends (and for Don, his daughter). They’re just typical male specimens of that period that came after the sexual revolution and before AIDS. They’re part of the “Me Generation.” They’re into self-fulfillment and self-actualization and self-realization. They’re strictly into doing their own thing. They’ve got their own bag. Dig it?

In other words, they’re extreme narcissists.

Williford said, “The Shark-Infested Custard” "says a good deal about the brutalization of urban life—at least in Miami. It’s written in the hard-boiled tradition of James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and I suppose, it is a fairly nasty picture of so-called ordinary young men who are making it down here. But such was my intention . . .”

Calling the protagonists sociopaths misses the point. A sociopath is exceptional, a clinical case, somebody out of the ordinary. These four aren’t out of the ordinary; they’re representative.

They’re not sociopaths, just pretty horrible people.