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High Priest of California/Wild Wives
hard-boiled pulp fiction author of MIAMI BLUES
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 11, 1987
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46 people want to read
About the author
Charles Willeford
85 books426 followersCharles Willeford was a remarkably fine, talented and prolific writer who wrote everything from poetry to crime fiction to literary criticism throughout the course of his impressively long and diverse career. His crime novels are distinguished by a mean'n'lean sense of narrative economy and an admirable dearth of sentimentality. He was born as Charles Ray Willeford III on January 2, 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Willeford's parents both died of tuberculosis when he was a little boy and he subsequently lived either with his grandmother or at boarding schools. Charles became a hobo in his early teens. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps at age sixteen and was stationed in the Philippines. Willeford served as a tank commander with the 10th Armored Division in Europe during World War II. He won several medals for his military service: the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and the Luxembourg Croix de Guerre. Charles retired from the army as a Master Sergeant. Willeford's first novel "High Priest of California" was published in 1953. This solid debut was followed by such equally excellent novels as "Pick-Up" (this book won a Beacon Fiction Award), "Wild Wives," "The Woman Chaser," "Cockfighter" (this particular book won the Mark Twain Award), and "The Burnt Orange Heresy." Charles achieved his greatest commercial and critical success with four outstanding novels about hapless Florida homicide detective Hoke Moseley: "Miami Blues," "New Hope for the Dead," "Sideswipe," and "The Way We Die Now." Outside of his novels, he also wrote the short story anthology "The Machine in Ward Eleven," the poetry collections "The Outcast Poets" and "Proletarian Laughter," and the nonfiction book "Something About A Soldier." Willeford attended both Palm Beach Junior College and the University of Miami. He taught a course in humanities at the University of Miami and was an associate professor who taught classes in both philosophy and English at Miami Dade Junior College. Charles was married three times and was an associate editor for "Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine." Three of Willeford's novels have been adapted into movies: Monte Hellman delivered a bleakly fascinating character study with "Cockfighter" (Charles wrote the script and has a sizable supporting role as the referee of a cockfighting tournament which climaxes the picture), George Armitage hit one out of the ballpark with the wonderfully quirky "Miami Blues," and Robinson Devor scored a bull's eye with the offbeat "The Woman Chaser." Charles popped up in a small part as a bartender in the fun redneck car chase romp "Thunder and Lightning." Charles Willeford died of a heart attack at age 69 on March 27, 1988.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 31, 2019
HIGH PRIEST OF CALIFORNIA:
Willeford was quite fond of this short little novel and rightfully so.
It’s the story of a self-centered thirty-three year old used-car salesman who considers himself a natural born ladies’ man and the tragic young woman who falls for him.
Tawdry and excellent!
WILD WIVES:
A potential buyer unfamiliar with Charles Willeford might have spotted this one on a spinner-rack and assumed it was a typical private dick novel of the early 1950s.
It certainly isn't.
This is as twisted as a Jim Thompson penned noir Lion paperback original.
This one opens with private investigator Jacob Blake sitting in his office on the mezzanine floor of the King Edward Hotel smoking a cigarette while admiring a photo on a wall calendar of a nude Marilyn Monroe.
Suddenly, a young girl holding a pistol in one hand opens the door to his office and shouts "Stick 'em up!" He tells her that his hands are already up when he feels warm water splashing on his forehead and dribbling down his face.
This is followed by childish laughter - the young girl is holding a water pistol.
Some silly business follows.
Blake threatens to bend the girl over his knee and spank her. She's only too willing and assumes the position. Blake recognizes jailbait when he sees it. More nonsense and then she begins to beg him to hire her as a co-investigator. Her name is Barbara Ann Allen.
To get rid of her, Blake makes up a job for her – to help him investigate shoplifting at a nearby department store.
This will lead to serious complications later.
After a few more pages he finally gets a real case. A beautiful woman named Florence Weintraub enters his office and hires him to help her get rid of two bodyguards hired by her father to keep her out of trouble. It seems that her father is a big-shot architect in San Francisco and the family is loaded.
Blake takes the case ("Twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses") and we're off.
After a couple of beatings delivered by the bodyguards, Blake has just about had it. But then Florence Weintraub introduces Blake to her own unique carnal pleasures and he likes what she has to offer in that particular vein.
This is so unremarkable, such a stereotypical private eye tale that I was tempted to move on. But there are all of these Willefordisms ...social commentary, popular and classical music critques, and a sub-plot involving a gay art collector and his particular problems with a bothersome paramour. He tries to hire Blake to work for him, getting rid of the former boyfriend, but after he makes romantic overtures to Blake, Blake declines the job.
This short, less than 25-pages, segment with the gay art collector ends as quickly as it begins.
It seems on first read like an afterthought or filler Willeford inserted in order to pad the book out enough to fill 124 pages.
Sort of like the business with Barbara Ann Allen.
The novel quickly returns to the Weintraub case where things turn increasingly more violent and the twists in the narrative are impossible to anticipate.
There isn’t a thing I can add to this review. I’ve revealed enough as it is.
I’d recommend this to die-hard Charles Willeford enthusiasts as well as newcomers to his fiction.
Willeford was quite fond of this short little novel and rightfully so.
It’s the story of a self-centered thirty-three year old used-car salesman who considers himself a natural born ladies’ man and the tragic young woman who falls for him.
Tawdry and excellent!
WILD WIVES:
A potential buyer unfamiliar with Charles Willeford might have spotted this one on a spinner-rack and assumed it was a typical private dick novel of the early 1950s.
It certainly isn't.
This is as twisted as a Jim Thompson penned noir Lion paperback original.
This one opens with private investigator Jacob Blake sitting in his office on the mezzanine floor of the King Edward Hotel smoking a cigarette while admiring a photo on a wall calendar of a nude Marilyn Monroe.
Suddenly, a young girl holding a pistol in one hand opens the door to his office and shouts "Stick 'em up!" He tells her that his hands are already up when he feels warm water splashing on his forehead and dribbling down his face.
This is followed by childish laughter - the young girl is holding a water pistol.
Some silly business follows.
Blake threatens to bend the girl over his knee and spank her. She's only too willing and assumes the position. Blake recognizes jailbait when he sees it. More nonsense and then she begins to beg him to hire her as a co-investigator. Her name is Barbara Ann Allen.
To get rid of her, Blake makes up a job for her – to help him investigate shoplifting at a nearby department store.
This will lead to serious complications later.
After a few more pages he finally gets a real case. A beautiful woman named Florence Weintraub enters his office and hires him to help her get rid of two bodyguards hired by her father to keep her out of trouble. It seems that her father is a big-shot architect in San Francisco and the family is loaded.
Blake takes the case ("Twenty-five bucks a day plus expenses") and we're off.
After a couple of beatings delivered by the bodyguards, Blake has just about had it. But then Florence Weintraub introduces Blake to her own unique carnal pleasures and he likes what she has to offer in that particular vein.
This is so unremarkable, such a stereotypical private eye tale that I was tempted to move on. But there are all of these Willefordisms ...social commentary, popular and classical music critques, and a sub-plot involving a gay art collector and his particular problems with a bothersome paramour. He tries to hire Blake to work for him, getting rid of the former boyfriend, but after he makes romantic overtures to Blake, Blake declines the job.
Now, I don't really object to homosexuals. It's a big world and there is room for everybody. The way some men prefer to make love is their business, not mine, but it seemed to me that I was being used as a short blunt apex for a crazy triangle.
This short, less than 25-pages, segment with the gay art collector ends as quickly as it begins.
It seems on first read like an afterthought or filler Willeford inserted in order to pad the book out enough to fill 124 pages.
Sort of like the business with Barbara Ann Allen.
The novel quickly returns to the Weintraub case where things turn increasingly more violent and the twists in the narrative are impossible to anticipate.
There isn’t a thing I can add to this review. I’ve revealed enough as it is.
I’d recommend this to die-hard Charles Willeford enthusiasts as well as newcomers to his fiction.
December 30, 2015
The kind of poisoned shit Charles Willeford writes so well, about an oily used car salesman in post-war Frisco working on a gorgeous but square dame to dump her vegetable husband. Bonus in the book is an actual stage adaptation by Willeford of the novel for all you aspiring actors out there. Hey, go for it!
Best line in the book: "I re-read 'In The Penal Colony'. This is the best short story ever written. Kafka was one writer who had a sense of humor".
Best line in the book: "I re-read 'In The Penal Colony'. This is the best short story ever written. Kafka was one writer who had a sense of humor".
June 16, 2023
Crime stories served up with cynicism and style as only Charles Willeford can.
June 14, 2024
Better than I expected. A hardboiled classic. I actually loved Wild Wives a bit more. Just a fun trash story. I really got a sense of the dialogue in my head and that made it really fun.
December 27, 2020
In the mid-1980s, RE/Search Publications put together this nice-looking edition of Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California and Wild Wives that also includes a short play version of the former title. The two novels are both centered around a tough, independent male who, despite all his actions, well-intended or not, end up confronting the traditional institution of marriage. While working within the idiom of pulp, noir, and hard boiled detective fiction, these short novels offer a more nuanced portrayal of this subject than you might expect. As nuanced as the stories may be, both are pessimistic in the end.
High Priest of California tells the story of Russell Haxby, a used car salesman in San Francisco who meets a naive woman named Alyce in a dance hall. She takes him back to her apartment and they start circling around each other in a game of seduction. Haxby is the obvious chaser and Alyce is the obvious catch but there is something different about the way she eludes his advances. Haxby is an experienced womanizer and he has never met a woman who resists him in such unusual ways.
Alyce is a strange woman, hopelessly naive, living a dull and sheltered life. She collects stray cats and keeps them in her apartment, never allowing them to go out. Haxby is turned off by this and the way he reacts to the symbolism says a lot about how he treats her later in the story. Knowing that Alyce’s goal is to capture a man and keep him under her control, Haxby nonetheless tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. The cats also symbolize a secret about Alyce that gets revealed later in the story.
The pair of Haxby and Alyce play off another couple in the narrative. Ruthie is Alyce’s roommate and she is involved with a middle-aged man named Sinkiewicz. Ruthie met Sinkiewicz when she worked as a nurse for his bedridden wife. Sinkiewicz is waiting for his terminally ill spouse to die so he can inherit her money and marry Ruthie. Compared to Haxby, Sinkiewicz is dull and sheepish; like Alyce’s cats, he is contained and kept under control by Ruthie. His life amounts to little more than running back and forth between Ruthie, the stronger woman, and his wife, the weakened, catatonic wife who can never get out of bed. Ruthie and Sinkiewicz are one representation of marriage that identifies why Haxby hates the idea of commitment.
The unattached and domineering Haxby contrasts sharply with the married, subservient Sinkiewicz who has more in common with with Alyce than appears at first. Later in the story we learn that Alyce is also married. Her husband Salvatore is an elderly man whose brain is rotting from untreated syphilis. Alyce runs his life because he can’t take care of himself. He has been infantilized, emasculated, symbolically castrated by his illness. Alyce dominated his life; she contains and controls him the same way she imprisons her cats in the apartment. But Alyce is not happy in her marriage. Stanley is a burden and for Haxby he is both an obstacle and yet another symbol of the weakened state of a man imprisoned in a marriage. Stanley is like Sinkiewicz, a man enslaved by his relationship but Stanley is also like Sinkiewicz’s wife, sick and dependent like an unwanted appendage that can not be removed. The trio of Haxby, Alyce, and Stanley mirror and shadow the trio of Sinkiewicz, his wife, and Ruthie. The way these characters play off each other while they interact creates a complex web that gives this easy-to-read novel a great deal of depth and dimension. This structure of characters who dance around one another is slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Russell Haxby is a sociopath. He wants to sleep with Alyce and his plan is to get Stanley permanently out of the way so he can do so. Simultaneously he acts as savior, liberator, and malevolent predator. He will do anything he can, be it bribery, flattery, honesty, dishonesty, or violence to get what he wants. But this behavior is not limited to how he treats Stanley; he treats everyone in the book with the same lack of discretion. Haxby controls every character in the whole story. He moves the people around like checkers on a checkerboard, as if he is playing a game with himself as his own opponent. Haxby manipulates everybody, always knowing the right thing to say but Stanley, being stubborn and stupid, proves to be his strongest opponent.
Sinkiewicz and Haxby contrast with one another because Haxby is in almost complete control of his life. A lot about his true nature is revealed during the time he spends alone in his apartment, a room that contrasts sharply with the living quarters of Alyce and Ruthie. Haxby lives in his bachelor pad, complete with classy furniture, a mini-bar, records, lamps, and a desk. He thinks of it as a palace but this grandeur is deflated by the fact that it is a former servants’ chamber, located over a garage, and its windows give him a view of nothing but the backs of other houses. It is physically comfortable but psychologically dark and lonely. The only people who visit him are a cleaning lady and delivery boys. He spend his time reading complicated books and translating Ulysses into language that is easy enough for ordinary people to understand. This shows that Haxby is not only sociopathic but also possessed of a need to prove that he is more clever than everybody else. This is related to the reader in his comments about James Joyce, the way he treats the other characters, the way he tricks customers into buying cars while cheating his boss, and his strange habit of physically assaulting random strangers on a number of occasions. But Haxby’s life is empty and unfulfilling. His power over other people is saturated with an underlying melancholy. He also isn’t quite as smart as he likes to think he is; he throws his copy of Ulysses across the room when he gets frustrated with Joyce’s dense prose. Towards the end of the book, he stays in bed for two weeks, stuck in a rut of depression.
Willeford portrays the married life as being a droll and mediocre prison but he also portrays the life of an aging bachelor as being dismal as well. In the end, we are left with no satisfactory options.
In Wild Wives, Jake Blake is another type of man altogether. As a private eye his business is failing. As this short novel starts, a high school girl named Barbara Allen is teasing and hitting on Blake in his office while her brother Freddy is off someplace else. She begs Blake for him to give her a job as his assistant. He wants to get rid of her so as a prank he sends her off to look for thieves in a department store. This harmless joke proves to be fatal to him later in the story.
Her older brother Freddy is involved in a gay love affair with an art dealer who lives in the same building as Jake Blake. When the detective pays the dealer a visit, Freddy gets jealous and assaults him outside this lover’s room. Jake Blake, being the tougher of the two, beats Freddy up and leaves. Freddy, along with his sister Barbara, will be a part of Blake’s downfall in the end.
These two sordid subplots get resolved later but along the way the main story revolves around Jake Blake’s affair with Florence Weintraub. She claims to be the daughter of Milton Weintraub, a famous architect who has hired two bodyguards to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. Florence is a nymphomaniac and a whole heap of trouble for every man she sleeps with. She hires Blake to help her lose the bodyguards so she can be alone with him for some hot sex which ends up happening on a the balcony of a restaurant.
Even though Jake Blake is a private detective, the story really has no mystery. The biggest secret of the book is about who Florence Weintraub really is and why she is being tailed by the two hired goons. This secret gets explained halfway through the story when Jake Blake goes home with Florence and encounters Milton Weintraub. After Blake learns that the architect is truly not her father, the older man winds up dead on the living room floor. Florence and Blake take off in her car in hopes of getting some money she has stashed in Las Vegas and then flying to Mexico. From that point on, Jake Blake gets himself out of many bad situations only to find himself in worse situations as the story goes on. Jake Blake is the type of macho character who is smart enough and tough enough to get himself out of any trouble but every time he does that, he winds up in a bigger hole than he was in before. He was figuratively born with a noose around his neck and the noose gets tighter and tighter as the events of the novel unfold.
Like High Priest of California, Wild Wives is structured around the theme of marriage and family. Jake Blake and Florence Weintraub get married in Las Vegas under assumed names. Their marriage is based on a reversal of gender stereotypes; Florence is after Blake because she wants to have sex with him and he is only interested in her money. He certainly doesn’t complain about the sex though. They invert the roles of her previous marriage where she married a man for money and he wanted nothing else from her but sex. They hated each other and were incapable of staying together. Likewise, soon after they marry, it is obvious that Blake will never be able to stay with her either, especially after he sees a newspaper story about the crime that happened the night before. Marriage is dangerous for either of them and Jake Blake can only think about getting rid of her in the most honest and expedient way possible.
As mentioned before, the other family nightmare for Blake involves Barbara and Freddy Allen who come back to haunt him in the end. When they show up with their father and a police chief named Pulaski, they prove to be his doom. Family life for the Allens is depicted as being full of dirty secrets, dishonesty, and plots against innocent people.
Jake Blake is actually a somewhat sincere man. Even though he has an affair with a married woman and, in the end, does a cowardly policeman���s job for him, he really is a moral person. His intentions may not be entirely honorable but compared to every other character in the story, he is a paragon of virtue. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he sticks to a code of ethics no matter what but this code of ethics is not powerful enough to save him from his fate. Wild Wives is a darkly humorous tale of a tough guy pursuing his own destruction. The reader may not even realize how comedic this story is until after they finish the last page. You could imagine the Coen Brothers making a great movie out of this. It would probably be a surprise if they were not already familiar with it.
Both Wild Wives and High Priest of California use marriage and family as structural themes for their noir idiom. Wild Wives is a satire of pulp detective fiction and High Priest of California is a pessimistic character study of a postwar American man. It might be wrong to overstate the family motif by calling either of them social commentary but the social commentary is there, giving these easy-to-follow-stories more emotional and psychological depth than you would ordinarily find in literature from this genre. Genre styles of fiction always have their handful of authors that turn the style into art; for pulp noir fiction, Charles Willeford is one of them.
High Priest of California tells the story of Russell Haxby, a used car salesman in San Francisco who meets a naive woman named Alyce in a dance hall. She takes him back to her apartment and they start circling around each other in a game of seduction. Haxby is the obvious chaser and Alyce is the obvious catch but there is something different about the way she eludes his advances. Haxby is an experienced womanizer and he has never met a woman who resists him in such unusual ways.
Alyce is a strange woman, hopelessly naive, living a dull and sheltered life. She collects stray cats and keeps them in her apartment, never allowing them to go out. Haxby is turned off by this and the way he reacts to the symbolism says a lot about how he treats her later in the story. Knowing that Alyce’s goal is to capture a man and keep him under her control, Haxby nonetheless tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. The cats also symbolize a secret about Alyce that gets revealed later in the story.
The pair of Haxby and Alyce play off another couple in the narrative. Ruthie is Alyce’s roommate and she is involved with a middle-aged man named Sinkiewicz. Ruthie met Sinkiewicz when she worked as a nurse for his bedridden wife. Sinkiewicz is waiting for his terminally ill spouse to die so he can inherit her money and marry Ruthie. Compared to Haxby, Sinkiewicz is dull and sheepish; like Alyce’s cats, he is contained and kept under control by Ruthie. His life amounts to little more than running back and forth between Ruthie, the stronger woman, and his wife, the weakened, catatonic wife who can never get out of bed. Ruthie and Sinkiewicz are one representation of marriage that identifies why Haxby hates the idea of commitment.
The unattached and domineering Haxby contrasts sharply with the married, subservient Sinkiewicz who has more in common with with Alyce than appears at first. Later in the story we learn that Alyce is also married. Her husband Salvatore is an elderly man whose brain is rotting from untreated syphilis. Alyce runs his life because he can’t take care of himself. He has been infantilized, emasculated, symbolically castrated by his illness. Alyce dominated his life; she contains and controls him the same way she imprisons her cats in the apartment. But Alyce is not happy in her marriage. Stanley is a burden and for Haxby he is both an obstacle and yet another symbol of the weakened state of a man imprisoned in a marriage. Stanley is like Sinkiewicz, a man enslaved by his relationship but Stanley is also like Sinkiewicz’s wife, sick and dependent like an unwanted appendage that can not be removed. The trio of Haxby, Alyce, and Stanley mirror and shadow the trio of Sinkiewicz, his wife, and Ruthie. The way these characters play off each other while they interact creates a complex web that gives this easy-to-read novel a great deal of depth and dimension. This structure of characters who dance around one another is slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Russell Haxby is a sociopath. He wants to sleep with Alyce and his plan is to get Stanley permanently out of the way so he can do so. Simultaneously he acts as savior, liberator, and malevolent predator. He will do anything he can, be it bribery, flattery, honesty, dishonesty, or violence to get what he wants. But this behavior is not limited to how he treats Stanley; he treats everyone in the book with the same lack of discretion. Haxby controls every character in the whole story. He moves the people around like checkers on a checkerboard, as if he is playing a game with himself as his own opponent. Haxby manipulates everybody, always knowing the right thing to say but Stanley, being stubborn and stupid, proves to be his strongest opponent.
Sinkiewicz and Haxby contrast with one another because Haxby is in almost complete control of his life. A lot about his true nature is revealed during the time he spends alone in his apartment, a room that contrasts sharply with the living quarters of Alyce and Ruthie. Haxby lives in his bachelor pad, complete with classy furniture, a mini-bar, records, lamps, and a desk. He thinks of it as a palace but this grandeur is deflated by the fact that it is a former servants’ chamber, located over a garage, and its windows give him a view of nothing but the backs of other houses. It is physically comfortable but psychologically dark and lonely. The only people who visit him are a cleaning lady and delivery boys. He spend his time reading complicated books and translating Ulysses into language that is easy enough for ordinary people to understand. This shows that Haxby is not only sociopathic but also possessed of a need to prove that he is more clever than everybody else. This is related to the reader in his comments about James Joyce, the way he treats the other characters, the way he tricks customers into buying cars while cheating his boss, and his strange habit of physically assaulting random strangers on a number of occasions. But Haxby’s life is empty and unfulfilling. His power over other people is saturated with an underlying melancholy. He also isn’t quite as smart as he likes to think he is; he throws his copy of Ulysses across the room when he gets frustrated with Joyce’s dense prose. Towards the end of the book, he stays in bed for two weeks, stuck in a rut of depression.
Willeford portrays the married life as being a droll and mediocre prison but he also portrays the life of an aging bachelor as being dismal as well. In the end, we are left with no satisfactory options.
In Wild Wives, Jake Blake is another type of man altogether. As a private eye his business is failing. As this short novel starts, a high school girl named Barbara Allen is teasing and hitting on Blake in his office while her brother Freddy is off someplace else. She begs Blake for him to give her a job as his assistant. He wants to get rid of her so as a prank he sends her off to look for thieves in a department store. This harmless joke proves to be fatal to him later in the story.
Her older brother Freddy is involved in a gay love affair with an art dealer who lives in the same building as Jake Blake. When the detective pays the dealer a visit, Freddy gets jealous and assaults him outside this lover’s room. Jake Blake, being the tougher of the two, beats Freddy up and leaves. Freddy, along with his sister Barbara, will be a part of Blake’s downfall in the end.
These two sordid subplots get resolved later but along the way the main story revolves around Jake Blake’s affair with Florence Weintraub. She claims to be the daughter of Milton Weintraub, a famous architect who has hired two bodyguards to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. Florence is a nymphomaniac and a whole heap of trouble for every man she sleeps with. She hires Blake to help her lose the bodyguards so she can be alone with him for some hot sex which ends up happening on a the balcony of a restaurant.
Even though Jake Blake is a private detective, the story really has no mystery. The biggest secret of the book is about who Florence Weintraub really is and why she is being tailed by the two hired goons. This secret gets explained halfway through the story when Jake Blake goes home with Florence and encounters Milton Weintraub. After Blake learns that the architect is truly not her father, the older man winds up dead on the living room floor. Florence and Blake take off in her car in hopes of getting some money she has stashed in Las Vegas and then flying to Mexico. From that point on, Jake Blake gets himself out of many bad situations only to find himself in worse situations as the story goes on. Jake Blake is the type of macho character who is smart enough and tough enough to get himself out of any trouble but every time he does that, he winds up in a bigger hole than he was in before. He was figuratively born with a noose around his neck and the noose gets tighter and tighter as the events of the novel unfold.
Like High Priest of California, Wild Wives is structured around the theme of marriage and family. Jake Blake and Florence Weintraub get married in Las Vegas under assumed names. Their marriage is based on a reversal of gender stereotypes; Florence is after Blake because she wants to have sex with him and he is only interested in her money. He certainly doesn’t complain about the sex though. They invert the roles of her previous marriage where she married a man for money and he wanted nothing else from her but sex. They hated each other and were incapable of staying together. Likewise, soon after they marry, it is obvious that Blake will never be able to stay with her either, especially after he sees a newspaper story about the crime that happened the night before. Marriage is dangerous for either of them and Jake Blake can only think about getting rid of her in the most honest and expedient way possible.
As mentioned before, the other family nightmare for Blake involves Barbara and Freddy Allen who come back to haunt him in the end. When they show up with their father and a police chief named Pulaski, they prove to be his doom. Family life for the Allens is depicted as being full of dirty secrets, dishonesty, and plots against innocent people.
Jake Blake is actually a somewhat sincere man. Even though he has an affair with a married woman and, in the end, does a cowardly policeman���s job for him, he really is a moral person. His intentions may not be entirely honorable but compared to every other character in the story, he is a paragon of virtue. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he sticks to a code of ethics no matter what but this code of ethics is not powerful enough to save him from his fate. Wild Wives is a darkly humorous tale of a tough guy pursuing his own destruction. The reader may not even realize how comedic this story is until after they finish the last page. You could imagine the Coen Brothers making a great movie out of this. It would probably be a surprise if they were not already familiar with it.
Both Wild Wives and High Priest of California use marriage and family as structural themes for their noir idiom. Wild Wives is a satire of pulp detective fiction and High Priest of California is a pessimistic character study of a postwar American man. It might be wrong to overstate the family motif by calling either of them social commentary but the social commentary is there, giving these easy-to-follow-stories more emotional and psychological depth than you would ordinarily find in literature from this genre. Genre styles of fiction always have their handful of authors that turn the style into art; for pulp noir fiction, Charles Willeford is one of them.
March 17, 2020
Buy one novel, get one free, all for 35 cents (at least, that's the cover price on the dogeared and yellowing copy I have). The main course is "The High Priest of California," a story about the kind of über-caddish sociopath that author Charles Willeford really relished realizing in his fiction. Russell Haxby is a used car salesman and World War II veteran who takes an interest in a woman (to use "love" would be wide of the mark) and decides to bring her into his orbit, showing her all the compassion an entomologist displays toward a june bug when his collection doesn't need any more samples.
The second half of this double feature is "Wild Wives," a slightly more standard (but still off-kilter) tale about a PI who works out of a dingy San Francisco hotel and gets his wires crossed by...what else? A woman. There's deceit, there's murder, and then there is more deceit and more murder. And some sex (though mostly hinted at and treated briefly, since there was a limit on what the men's fiction market would tolerate, even among the more lurid paperback lines back in the day).
Both of the books would be cliche-ridden curiosities in the hands of a lesser talent, but the way that Willeford (even this early in his career) mined the genre until it revealed new depths (and lows) in the human soul makes these darkly comic forays good enough to reread more than half a century after they were written.
Much as Vietnam loomed in the background of the meaner and more fascinating movies produced by "New Hollywood" in the 1970s, these tales from the 50s are suffused with an ugliness that is undoubtedly a residue of the horror that was the Second World War. Tom Brokaw and the guys with the funny hats in the parades might have you believe that these men were the Greatest Generation and that's all there was to it, but Willeford (who served himself as a tanker) knew better, and more importantly, was brave enough to come out and say it (while being sly enough to not foreground it in his tales).
There's a boatload of darkness lurking in these two books, and a lot of that is pitch-black humor. Buy, read, laugh, cry, in that order. Then repeat. Highest recommendation.
The second half of this double feature is "Wild Wives," a slightly more standard (but still off-kilter) tale about a PI who works out of a dingy San Francisco hotel and gets his wires crossed by...what else? A woman. There's deceit, there's murder, and then there is more deceit and more murder. And some sex (though mostly hinted at and treated briefly, since there was a limit on what the men's fiction market would tolerate, even among the more lurid paperback lines back in the day).
Both of the books would be cliche-ridden curiosities in the hands of a lesser talent, but the way that Willeford (even this early in his career) mined the genre until it revealed new depths (and lows) in the human soul makes these darkly comic forays good enough to reread more than half a century after they were written.
Much as Vietnam loomed in the background of the meaner and more fascinating movies produced by "New Hollywood" in the 1970s, these tales from the 50s are suffused with an ugliness that is undoubtedly a residue of the horror that was the Second World War. Tom Brokaw and the guys with the funny hats in the parades might have you believe that these men were the Greatest Generation and that's all there was to it, but Willeford (who served himself as a tanker) knew better, and more importantly, was brave enough to come out and say it (while being sly enough to not foreground it in his tales).
There's a boatload of darkness lurking in these two books, and a lot of that is pitch-black humor. Buy, read, laugh, cry, in that order. Then repeat. Highest recommendation.
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October 23, 2013Russell Haxby. Here is the buzzard who sells the jalopies to the emerging Beat Generation; a predator of romance, a real shit-bucket. The High Priest of California cleverly defies the easy categorization of noir or hardboiled fiction. Overwhelming will to power or early childhood trauma are not the antagonisms at work here. No, Haxby lacks any enthusiasm whatsoever! Utter boredom seems to be his only motivation. I'd say the novel likens more to A Sentimental Education than Willeford's contemporaries; that is, if you wipe your ass with it before reading.
Wild Wives is a deadpan satire of hardboiled conventions with more or less the same monobrow protagonist as the first novel. Jacob C. Blake, a private detective, is a kind of egalitarian. Surprisingly for the 1950s, he openly acknowledges homosexuals with impartiality; nonetheless, he kicks the brains out of one. To be fair, Blake would kick the brains out of his mother. This exemplary indifference toward humanity is a gas to read and I'd say it ultimately won me over between the two. Also, with the femme fatale named "Florence Weintraub" (read: Vine Throb) you can't miss this one!
Wild Wives is a deadpan satire of hardboiled conventions with more or less the same monobrow protagonist as the first novel. Jacob C. Blake, a private detective, is a kind of egalitarian. Surprisingly for the 1950s, he openly acknowledges homosexuals with impartiality; nonetheless, he kicks the brains out of one. To be fair, Blake would kick the brains out of his mother. This exemplary indifference toward humanity is a gas to read and I'd say it ultimately won me over between the two. Also, with the femme fatale named "Florence Weintraub" (read: Vine Throb) you can't miss this one!
October 6, 2015
I read Wild Wives a couple years ago, but this was my first time reading High Priest.
It's not really a crime novel so much as it is a little book about a son of a bitch.
To paraphrase my wife from our discussion about the book last night: I was very intrigued with the fact that the main character was so intrigued with the woman he wanted to get with, because he didn't ever seem to present a reason to be interested in her, though at the end of the book, it seems clear that he was into her primarily because
One note on the edition I read. God bless Re/Search for putting it out, but the photographic illustrations actually detracted from the reading experience. I won't specifically critique the photos because I'm just trying to review the text here, but I do recommend getting a copy without the photos.
It's not really a crime novel so much as it is a little book about a son of a bitch.
To paraphrase my wife from our discussion about the book last night: I was very intrigued with the fact that the main character was so intrigued with the woman he wanted to get with, because he didn't ever seem to present a reason to be interested in her, though at the end of the book, it seems clear that he was into her primarily because
One note on the edition I read. God bless Re/Search for putting it out, but the photographic illustrations actually detracted from the reading experience. I won't specifically critique the photos because I'm just trying to review the text here, but I do recommend getting a copy without the photos.
September 15, 2009
I've read these before, some time ago. Fairly typical pulp novels of the early 50s, they only show in some places how great Willeford can be. High Priest of California is the story of a used car salesman in San Francisco, and the woman he seduces then dumps. It's pretty gritty stuff, and the main character isn't given a lot of motivation. It's a quick read, and a good one. Wild Wives is the story of a private detective in San Francisco and the young woman who comes to him complaining about her over-protecive fathers. She's lying, and continues to lie, with disastrous consequences. Fun Willeford, but not his best.
February 7, 2011
For Willeford fans only.
"High Priest" reads like a warm-up for "The Woman Chaser", and "Wild Wives" is a pretty standard detective + femme fatale on the run story.
"High Priest" reads like a warm-up for "The Woman Chaser", and "Wild Wives" is a pretty standard detective + femme fatale on the run story.
December 6, 2025
In some ways this is a strange book but I can see why they have a cult following. The stories take us to a gritty world of syphilitic husbands kept at home in secret, used car lots and desperate couplings of dissolute men and women. The style is very deadpan with occasional flashes of wit or insight. At the same time, odd views bubble through (as when one otherwise quite feisty female character says "You're the man. It's up to you to decide what to do" or when the low life detective is completely unphased by a gay man possibly hitting on him but wants to see his collection of Paul Klee!) Having a play script of one of the two novellas doesn't really work - too much deja vu - but the abstracted bibliography is useful. For me, this isn't a keeper but I'm glad I read it and would keep an eye out for more.
June 16, 2020
Two short, early pulps by Willeford. High Priest is more of a character study of a sleazeball as he pursues a troubled woman, and it's pretty good. Wild Wives is more out there and hilarious for it, about a low-rent private dick and an exceptionally nutty woman he gets mixed up with.
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