Willeford

by Don Herron

Book by Herron, Don

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

469 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1997

Reviews

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant biography of pulp/pro/neo-beat author Charles Willeford.
The book is divided into three sections: IN LIFE; IN CONVERSATION; IN PRINT.
The 1st section describes how Herron, the author, first came to meet Charles Willeford and discover his pre-"Hoke Moseley"/Miami Blues books.
The second section is a freewheeling Playboy Magazine style conversation between Herron, Willeford, Willeford's wife Betsy, Betsy's adult son David Poller, and Herron's then-girlfriend.
The final section is the first entertaining and highly readable bibliography of an author I have ever read. It is as complete as could be possible for an author who was almost incredibly prolific.

Along the way, Willeford gleefully pranks Don Herron (and the reader) mercilessly:

"One of the things I have never understood," I told Willeford, "is how Ross MacDonald got on the list with Hammett and Chandler as one of the top three hard-boiled writers. You know how all these mystery critics are always call Hammett the Father, Chandler the Son, and Ross MacDonald the Holy Ghost? How do they get that? MacDonald is okay, but he's not that great."

"Oh," Willeford replied, "that was a conspiracy. These people conspired to get MacDonald on the best-seller lists, and his reputation just took off from there."

I sat there in the booth...and stared at him. At that point I wasn't positive about Willeford being a prankster but I damn sure had suspicions. Obviously he was a humorist, funny as hell, and while I was willing to wait on the issue of James Joyce being the writer to contend with, see what I could uncover about it, I had filed the no colons or semicolons bit as a gag, although I didn't think he had used any in The Burnt Orange Heresy -But maybe I was missing something, and a delicate aspect of that Willeford novel had slipped past me unnoticed.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No. No, I'm not kidding. That's what happened."

I didn't believe him, and he could tell I didn't believe him- but he was telling the truth!

...After realizing that we had an impasse -I didn't believe him and he couldn't remember the source, so couldn't convince me- we went on to other things and the conversation resumed its loopy course. I asked him about it later on in letters, and on March 14, 1986 [Willeford would die in 1988] he wrote to reassure me that Ross MacDonald becoming a best seller "was not a coincidence" - and at that time he remembered that John Leonard was the guy who wrote the article about the conspiracy.

Still skeptical, but having nothing to lose ...I made an expedition to the library and looked for everything I could find written by John Leonard, finally locating the essay "I Care Who Killed Roger Ackroyd" in Esquire, August 1975.

"Let me tell you about a literary conspiracy," Leonard wrote. "It's the only one I know of that actually worked. One blue February noon in 1969, in a seedy tavern on Eighth Avenue..., two young men drank gin and tonics at sixty cents a throw and discussed a favorite book. The book was The Chill by Ross MacDonald. Now these were serious young men..."

Leonard was soon to become a regular staffer, and eventually the editor, for the New York Times Book Review. The other fellow, Raymond Sokolov, was writing criticism for Newsweek.
"We should have been discussing Nixon or Catullus or synergetics or, as Antonioni put it, 'the superannuated casuistry of positives and negatives.' Instead, we dilated on the thesis that Ross MacDonald had, quite consciously, married Freud to the detective story; that this was a worthy union; that not enough people were aware of it -his books sold modestly in hardcover and were only sporadically available in paperback -and attention should be paid. As a new Lew Archer novel, The Goodbye Look, was to be published in May, it was up to us to seize the moment."

They talked Walter Clemons, the Times editor, into giving the novel a good reviewer in the person of William Goldman "instead of sending it to the ghetto of the Criminals at Large column." Leonard flew to California to interview MacDonald. The first two pages of the book section of the Times featured the review and interview and "two weeks later MacDonald hit the best-seller lists for the first time and he's been there ever since." When Leonard became the editor about two years later he lined up Eudora Welty as reviewer on Ross MacDonald's next novel, while Clemons did the review for the daily paper and Sokolov came through with a cover story for Newsweek.

Willeford had the correct information. It was a conspiracy. I would never have believed it.

At another point, Willeford maintains that Ernest Hemingway stole the lead character's name in his final novel Islands in the Stream from one of Charles Willeford's earlier novels (possibly The Burnt Orange Heresy). It turns out to be another of Willeford's pranks on Herron.

Later, Willeford regales listeners with a story about how he upset a scholar who'd written a very serious piece on the mysterious B. Traven, a writer most famous for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, how so little is known of the author. Willeford wrote the author back, saying in essence, what's all this shit about the "mysterious B. Traven? Everybody knows he was really Ambrose Bierce..." . The scholar replied, taking Willeford to task explaining that if Bierce had written Traven's various novels he would have been 97 years old.

This book is great fun. Willeford discusses with Herron the fun of filming COCKFIGHTER (directed by Monte Hellman; produced by Roger Corman) with Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. Charles Willeford seems to have gotten along famously with Elmore Leonard, the only writer he felt was his equal.

There is an extended bit on the pulp digest of the late 1950s-early 1960s, MANHUNT which Willeford seems to recall published really "tough" stories about murderous psychotics:
(DH = Don Herron/ CW = Charles Willeford)

DH: That would be ..."Michael St. John"?

CW: Well, he's the publisher.

DH: "Editorial Director ... George Wiswell."

CW: Yeah, that was the guy. He's the one who told us about Kinsey. He's the guy who told us about the guy who came along and collected the suitcase full of stories for Manhunt each week. Of course, they were no longer - Manhunt was out of print by that time. It had already failed, I guess, but it was popular when it first came out. People were really buying that Manhunt. It was tough.
I wish I had a complete collection of Manhunt. You could really get a hell of an anthology from Manhunt, if you could find those Manhunts, and went through them. The toughest stories you ever saw..., and they had a lot of first person psychotics in there, murderers telling about killing people, in Manhunt. Remember those?

DH: I never did read it.

CW: Well, if you ever come across any, pick 'em up. Especially the first year or two that they came out.

DH: And that's where the guy came in and picked up the bag...

CW: They didn't even know who the hell he was. They had editors, I guess they would edit this stuff but they let him pick the stories.
Nobody likes to read slush. And they were getting most of the stuff out of the slush pile where [Starts Laughing] every psychotic writer in America was sending stuff in there to Manhunt. [Cracks Up]
You know, that story, I remember that one story, it was sickening. About these two girls fighting with these beer openers, cutting each other's faces. She didn't die, she just had her face all slashed up, and she was bleeding, and this middle class family picked her up and dumped her on the porch...

I had the best time reading this massive tome I've had in a while.
Don Herron is an engaging writer and this book is surprisingly exciting as Herron excavates stacks and stacks of boxes in Willeford's garage discovering massive amounts of rarities (columns, news articles, plays, short stories, drafts of early novels), with Willeford offering commentary on every find.

[Looking over his college essays, Willeford tells [Herron] about sending out one of his term papers to a magazine and selling it...]
CW: English 101, I think. So I got the letter, the guy sent me a check for thirty-five dollars and a letter of acceptance, I brought it in, said, see, I sold my term paper. "Jesus Christ, you already had an 'A', you didn't have to do that." He was hopeless, anyway, you know?

DH: Freshman English. At Miami?

CW: No, Palm Beach Junior College.

DH: "Notes On Beat Writing," that was that essay.

CW: This is all these guys who were pre-Beats.

DH: Now regarded as pre-Beats. They were Beats then.

CW: These were pre-Beats. I mention these other guys, like Jim Tully, and Henry Miller, and, uh, who else was it? Nelson Algren.

DH: Are you using Beat in the same sense that they were using it then?

CW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause this was sixty-one, the Beats came in fifty-six, and they were saying that they were all originals, and I was saying they weren't.

DH: You might want to write some notes, explaining what some of these things were. That story would be great with that: "What would you want to sell it for? You got an 'A'." That's classic... I'm going to turn up some more stuff in here.

CW: [Reading from "Notes On Beat Writing"] "The overall definition of 'beat' is now wide enough to include such diverse personalities as Albert Schweitzer, who rejected the world and retired to the African jungle..." [Laughs] They kept getting wider and wider when they tried to define Beats, you know.

DH: Albert Schweitzer [Laughs] Jack Kerouac and Albert Schweitzer. Dharma Drums!!! That would be great. What a satire. Philip Jose Farmer would write that. He's good on that sort of thing, pop ideas.

This book is charming, funny, and unforgettable.

At one point, Willeford was a story consultant for the tv series with Don Johnson, "Miami Vice". Willeford submitted a script for the series in which Johnson's character "Sonny Crockett" has a flamboyantly gay man fall in love with him. It was rejected outright by producers fearing the overly sensitive Don Johnson would blow his top if he read it.

Highest Possible Recommendation.
For Charles Willeford fans only.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Willeford died in relative obscurity at the age of 69 in 1988.

This is a must read book by any fan of Mr. Willeford.

Purchased this book from Mr. Dennis McMillan himself.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the only real bio of Willeford available, but considering it's the gold standard, it isn't necessary for someone to write another bio of the brilliant writer. Don Herron (in addition to running the Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco) was a personal friend of Charles Willeford, which gives this book the intimate, "inside baseball" feel you're not going to get from any other source (except, perhaps Willeford's widow, Betsy Willeford). Everything one could want to know about Willeford is here, from his stint in the army, to his poetry, to his slaving in the pulp trenches during the "Black Mask" years, and his eventual "rock star" treatment (in the words of Stephen King). Herron has a spare, unpretentious style reminiscent of Howard Sounes (another skilled biographer), and he leaves no stone unturned, no facet of the author's oeuvre unplumbed. Highest Recommendation.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great biography of the pulp fiction author Charles Willeford by the man who helped him be rediscovered. Fantastic firsthand anecdotes and experiences between Herron and Willeford, mainly in the five years preceding Willeford's death.

Best to read if you are familiar with Willeford's other works.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who woulda thunk that there'd be a bio of one of my favorite authors? There is, and I enjoyed it. The list of publications is particularly useful. Willeford's own bios of his Korea war experience are required reading.

[Paul Dionne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Willeford shows up at Don Herron's noir walking tours in San Francisco in the early 1980's. Both bond over Dashiel Hammett and James Joyce. Herron writes this memoir of the great novelist after Willeford dies.
It's a great biography of the man that feels true as Herron becomes Willeford's confidante, and assistant until he dies.
Of special note is the access Don Herron had to Willeford's stored unopened boxes of "stuff" that Willeford had not opened. They are moldy and had gotten wet from the bottom on the garage floor in Willeford's Miami home.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prolific writer, Charles Willeford. A biography of his life, an interview over a period of days, his bibliographic output including books, poems, articles, reviews and plays. Comprehensive. Author of "Miami Blues" and the Hoke Mosley series. Comparable to Elmore Leonard. Sadly, little read anymore.

[Chris Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great little bits of insight into Willeford,
but I can't get the picture of boxes rotting and wet,
full of manuscripts and etc. tragic.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breezy bio of a one-of-a-kind crime writer, with a long interview at the end conducted while cleaning out Willeford’s garage. A labor of love that reads like one. Not the place to start, maybe, but a great place to end after you’ve made your way through the backlist. If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d recommend The Pick-Up, a pokerfaced San Francisco noir that doesn’t reveal its hand until the mind-altering final sentence.

[Steve]

I won't try to rate this. I did like it but I suspect that if I had read more of Willeford's work and more of the books and authors to which he refers, I would be more enthusiastic.