Dostoevsky meets Jim Thompson. Willeford was a true original in crime writing. This one shows the author's depth. He could pair noir with high brow and do it so well. But what do you expect from a man who was a many-medaled WWII hero as well as an acclaimed art scholar.

”The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached. He wasn’t well-to-do, but the sale of his Montmartre shop would take care of his expenses for several months. The Paris Soir reporter then asked the obvious question. ‘If you refuse to exhibit or to sell your paintings, how will you live?

‘That,’ Debierue replied, ‘isn’t my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.’ With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.”

Jacques Debierue is, without a doubt, the most famous painter in the world who has never sold a painting. No one has seen even a scrap of one of his paintings for decades, and yet the endless speculation about what he is creating has kept the art world atwitter. When James Figueras, ambitious art critic, gets a chance to meet him, he is not only determined to take his picture and get an interview, but to also, at all cost, lay eyes on the man’s work.

James decides to take his “girlfriend” with him, a teacher from Duluth who climbed into his bed while on vacation in Florida and...won’t leave. ”Despite her size, and she was a large woman, Berenice, curled and cramped up in sleep, looked vulnerable to the point of fragility. Her unreasonably long blond lashes swept round flushed cheeks, and her childish face, in repose and without makeup, took several years from her age. Her heavy breasts and big round ass, however, exposed now, as the short flimsy nightgown road high above her hips, were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face and tangled Alice-in-Wonderland hair.”

Berenice, for all her annoying aspects, is the artist’s bait. Debierue might be less likely to boot the art critic down the road if the art critic brings something lovely for the artist to admire. James is a serious man, and even though he tries to control every aspect of this historic meeting between a famous painter without a known painting to talk about and the desperate-to-be famous art critic, things get seriously out of hand.

There is a revelation.

There is a fire.

There is an art critic, sitting in a hotel room, painting a picture called The Burnt Orange Heresy.

There is an unexpected murder.

Everything that could possibly go wrong in a James Figueras nightmare does so, including things that he couldn’t even conceive of going wrong in his wildest, most sinister dreams.

In other words, this is a Charles Willeford novel.

I first read Willeford’s novels thirty years ago, but I think I actually have a much greater appreciation reading and rereading his books now than I did then. He’ll make your teeth squeak as you grind your molars together to masticate the hardboiled egg of a plot he has dropped on your plate. And what you are spitting out? That ain’t eggshell; that’s grit, road grit. And that pain in your neck is from the hard left turn plot twists that left you half hanging out of the car and two wheels dangling in the air. And that red sauce on your tie? That ain’t sauce...you just got a little too close to the action.

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4.5 stars loved all of this. Just read kirk’s review; it explains all in a perfect way. I think it helps if you’re an artist or an art lover which is the only reason I knocked off a half a star, I am both of those but even so he got a little crazy detailed..but still, it just takes you away into another time, place and mind.

A neo-noir novel with as odd a cast of genre characters as has ever been assembled. The lead isn't a cop but an art critic, his main squeeze isn't your typical gun moll type but a pretty young (though somewhat vacuous) English teacher, and the potential victim is, of all things, an aging and reclusive artist hiding somewhere in the backwoods of Florida. Only the critic's benefactor, if he can be called that, fits the bill: he's a lawyer and art collector with little on his mind but acquiring another showpiece for his wall. There's way too much "art-speak", long conversations about Surrealism and Dadaism and the like, and the story is altogether too talky, so if (like me) you're not terribly interested in what the characters (particularly Figueras, the critic) have to say, you may feel, now and then, a trifle bored. On the other hand, Willeford--a former student of art himself--deserves kudos for pulling off the near-impossible: crafting a short, tight, small-cast suspenser featuring no guns, no fisticuffs, no car chases, and (almost) no murders. As the story of a driven man who craves fame and success no matter what the cost, "The Burnt Orange Heresy" isn't a great novel, but it's certainly an interesting one. Read it.

I read Charles Willeford’s four Hoke Mosely novels many years ago and thought they were among the best crime novels I’d ever read and, in the case of ‘Sideswipe ‘ simply one of the best novels. So, I decided to catch up with some of his other books. This one was interesting but somewhat disappointing after his detective novels. It’s about a young art critic and his obsession with a mysterious French avant-garde painter. Most of the book consists of conversations about art and artistic movements. The explosive, dramatic ending seems to belong to a different novel.

Well-written, with a fairly simple plot, but I was left feeling that it was more of an examination of the world of art than the thriller I thought it would be. I thought it got bogged down toward the middle, although I did rather enjoy the ending.

A rising art critic accepts a deal to meet a famous, reclusive artist and steal one of his paintings. I liked the exposition of art criticism. The famous artist’s signature work reminded me a great deal of the “painting” by Banksy that shred itself after being auctioned off.

I have been reading early Charles Willeford novels and trying to do it chronologically. I had just finished "Whip Hand" and it was a terrific story about kidnapping and a whole lot more. A dark twisting piece of crime fcton. Chronologically the next novel was this one. What a change. I almost put it down in the beginning because of the long and deep discussions about what it meant intellectually and emotionally to be an art critic and art itself. I'm not that interested in art but I eventually began to get interested in Figueras as a person. It didn't start to become a noirish crime story until almost 75% of the way through. It was a little bit of a surprise how things worked out but it did complete the in depth analysis of Figueras.

James Figueras is to modern art criticism as Frank Mansfield is to cockfighting.

But this is not just a story of a shrewd selfish fanatic. This is a suspenseful spoof. Somewhere in Part 1, readers will begin to get the joke modern art is a swindle. But Willeford remains deadpan throughout. I think Willeford might have been in favor of the Entartete Kunst exhibition.

deep within the text there is a paragraph that describes the French artist's delusion about frozen vegetables reigning supreme over fresh. that graph is priceless. also the recurring descriptions of our hero's wisconsin girlfriend is downright salacious and seductive. true, the leadin to the action is somewhat longwinded, but given that the novella takes roughly 2 hours to read negates that silly objection. ultimately, i'd recommend this pile of words for the fact that our dear writer selects valdosta, GA as a key location in the narrative. it ain't often one uses that locale, and for that i must pass this read along to friends.

An art collector hires an art critic to steal a painting from a reclusive artist. It sounds like an allegory about the role of art and commerce in society. It's actually a swift, brutal dissection of a man driven by pride and ambition. A masterpiece of a crime novel.

A weird little book that should be read in one sitting if possible. Willeford is a fantastic writer whose tight sentences and vivid imagery made me miss the days when books could be fantastic without being over 200 pages long. The story itself isn’t really my cup of tea but the ending was a sour little surprise.