Orphan, hobo, painter, poet, boxer, book critic, decorated tank commander, actor, truck driver, teacher, author and inveterate prankster—Charles Willeford led a life that could provide him with a zillion stories, each one touched with his distinctive view of the world. He spent three decades cranking out pulp fiction classics like Pick-Up and Cockfighter that earned him very little money and hardly any notice from the critics.
Then, in 1984, he wrote a poker-faced comic thriller called Miami Blues that suddenly made him a hot commodity. He followed it up with three more off-kilter books about his unlikely hero, the leisure-suit-wearing Sergeant Hoke Moseley of the Miami Police. On the strength of those four books, the Atlantic magazine dubbed him “the unlikely father of Miami crime fiction.”
One of the Hoke Moseley sequels was called Sideswipe. His widow Betsy says that not long after that book came out, Willeford got a package in the mail. When he opened it, he found a hardbound copy of Sideswipe that someone had shot. Accompanying the book was a note, written in all-caps, saying “It’s a crime to charge $15.95 for shit like this.” It was signed, “A Dissatisfied Customer.”
When Willeford mentioned this to some friends they became concerned for his safety. One asked, “Have you alerted the FBI?” He replied, “No, it’s always good to get feedback.”
There are plethora of Willeford anecdotes, but I think that one might be my favorite. (Incidentally, Mrs. Willeford recalled that the book had been shot once, but a 1988 news story said five times. Fortunately the Broward County Public Library has Willeford’s papers, so I checked with them. Librarian Erin Purdy sent me photos showing that that copy of Sideswipe had SIX bullet holes.)
“The Charles Willeford Archive, Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, Broward County Library.”
These days few readers care quite so passionately about Willeford’s writing. He is a cult figure to some, and otherwise just occasionally mentioned among the roll call of hard-boiled writers. But Willeford’s work is due for a revival now that his 1971 novel The Burnt Orange Heresy has been made into a film starring Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Debicki, Claes Bang and, in a small but crucial role, Sir Mick Jagger. The film had its world premiere in September at the 76th Venice International Film Festival. A Variety review calls it “a marble-cool art-fraud thriller.”
“Cool” is not an adjective often associated with Willeford, born 100 years ago this year. “Quirky” is the one that Lawrence Block used. A couple more might be “droll” or “tongue in cheek.” James Crumley called him “an original—funny, weird and wonderful.” Carl Hiaasen, whose first wacky Florida crime thriller, Tourist Season, was published two years after Miami Blues, told me that Willeford was “a wonderful, crusty guy” who was “among the first to figure out that this is a pretty phenomenal setting for a novel.”
Willeford himself once commented about his books, “Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.”
* * *
Charles Ray Willeford III was born in 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father died of tuberculosis in 1922, so he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. She died of TB in 1927, leaving him in the care of his grandmother. After the Great Depression hit, Willeford became concerned that his grandmother couldn’t afford to feed him as well as herself, so at 13 he dropped out of school and hit the road as a hobo.
After riding the rails for a year, he lied about his age and enlisted in the military, beginning what would become a lengthy career in two different branches of the service. Initially he was an Army grunt, working with horses in a cavalry unit and later serving as a truck driver and a cook. When World War II came along, he was shipped out to Europe as a tank commander. He was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for heroism.
What did he do to earn those medals? He never wanted to talk about his war experiences, Betsy Willeford told me.
“I think he had what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said. “He had some bad dreams even 40 years later.”
His first book, Proletarian Laughter, came out in 1948. It’s a collection of poems, but in between were short pieces that he called “Schematics.” They recounted, in a matter-of-fact way, some bits of what he’d witnessed, including one horrific story about a fellow tank commander who committed a rape and a double-murder. Betsy one asked him if the “Schematics” were non-fiction. He said yes, but in a way that indicated he didn’t want any more questions, she said.
A year after his book came out, he left the Army and moved to Peru. He convinced the teachers at the Universidad de Belles Artes to admit him as an art student by telling them he had studied at “Woodrow Wilson” in California. When they finally figured out that “Woodrow Wilson” was the name of the middle school he’d dropped out of and not a college, they kicked him out.
Willeford returned to the military, this time enlisting in the U.S. Air Force. While still in uniform he wrote his first pulp novel, The High Priest of California, featuring a ruthless and fairly despicable San Francisco used-car salesman named Russell Haxby. He’s obsessed with manipulating and bedding married women, especially one in particular. The writing is crisp, the dialogue crackles, but Haxby’s such a nasty customer that it turned off some readers.
He soon followed that up with more short, sharp stories of detestable people, including Pick-Up (1955), which concerns a pair of down-and-out alcoholics in San Francisco who can’t even commit suicide properly, and The Black Mass of Brother Springer (1958), about a phony white preacher who takes charge of an African-American church in Florida and later runs off with a deacon’s wife. (Pick-Up was later included in the Library of America series on ‘50s American noir, where it’s described as “hardboiled writing at its nihilistic best.”) More followed, with titles like Wild Wives and Whip Hand.
His publishers tended to be third-rate sleaze merchants who paid him poorly and would change his titles to make them sound even pulpier. Black Mass, for instance, became Honey Gal, and Made in Miami became Lust Is a Woman. One publisher misspelled Willeford’s name on the cover as “Williford.” His lone Western, which he called The Difference, hit bookshelves as The Hombre from Sonora. Still, he kept plugging away. In addition to his fiction he wrote memoirs (I Was Looking for a Street) and even a raucous remembrance of a painful operation, which he called A Guide for the Unhemorrhoided.
He once told a fan that the key to cranking out all those books was quite simple: “Never allow yourself to take a leak in the morning until you’ve written a page. That way you’re guaranteed a page a day, and at the end of a year you have a novel.”
The Air Force stationed him in Palm Beach for a while, his first taste of Florida living. After retiring from the military, he studied painting in France, worked as a boxer, horse trainer and radio announcer, then returned to Florida to stay. He wanted to get the college education he’d missed. He earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Miami. This led to him teaching, first at the University of Miami, and later at Miami-Dade Community College.
At Miami-Dade he taught at the southern campus, while the same classes were being taught at the northern campus by another would-be writer named James Lee Burke, still years away from launching his Dave Robicheaux mystery series. The pair became friends and often got together to discuss their work and how to make it better. When Willeford read the first chapters of the first Robicheaux novel, The Neon Rain, he encouraged Burke to keep going.
“He was always lighting these little fires and then walking away,” she said.As a teacher, Willeford was determined to get a reaction out of his students, if only to make sure they were listening. He once told a class that scientists had developed a way of determining someone’s personality by examining the person’s armpit hair. The gasps he heard in response told him he’d succeeded.
Willeford was willing to say just about anything, to pull any prank. He once asked Lawrence Block if he’d ever eaten cat, and assured him that he’d read of a worldwide association of men devoted to that practice. Another time, his wife Betsy recalled, they were sitting in a Miami restaurant surrounded by prosperous young men smoking big cigars, so when a well-dressed couple walked in, Willeford shouted, “NARCS!” just to see everyone else scramble.
“He was always lighting these little fires and then walking away,” she said.
* * *
Although he was writing fiction, Willeford believed in doing his homework to make the story believable. He spent two years learning everything he could about the sport of cockfighting before he wrote his 1962 novel Cockfighter. Hard-boiled fiction is known for its terse heroes, but the hero of Cockfighter, Frank Mansfield, tops them all. He vows not to speak to anyone until he wins the big championship.
Cockfighter was going to be Willeford’s big breakthrough novel. But shortly after it was published, his publisher died and the publishing house went bankrupt. As a result, most of the print run, more than 20,000 copies, never reached bookstores.
Later, in 1974, Roger Corman produced a movie version directed by Monte Hellman and starring a masterful Warren Oates as Mansfield and Harry Dean Stanton as his nemesis. Willeford wrote the screenplay and had a cameo as a ring official. Corman said that it was his only film that lost money, despite the movie’s legendary tagline: “He came to town with his cock in his hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.”
The reason Corman found Cockfighter at all was because it had been republished. That happened thanks to the success of Willeford’s next novel, The Burnt Orange Heresy, which leans more toward satire than noir. The narrator is an egotistical art critic named James Figueras who hopes to become the greatest art critic in the world. In Palm Beach he meets an art collector who gives him the chance to interview a reclusive but widely acclaimed artist named Jacques Debierue, which Figueras is sure will cement his reputation. In exchange, though, he has to steal one of the artist’s paintings for the collector. The reader soon learns that the only art on display here is the art of the con. Violence follows, of course.
Although some critics consider Heresy his masterpiece, Willeford followed it with a fallow period. He tried a novel about a game show, and another about life on a military base, but they didn’t work. He wrote a sort of non-fiction novel about the Son of Sam case but it didn’t sell. He wrote one of his bleakest novels, The Shark-Infested Custard, but it wasn’t published until after his death.
Then came Miami Blues.
* * *
When Betsy Willeford met her future husband, he was twice divorced and headed for a heart attack. They were both working for a magazine based in the artsy Miami enclave known as Coconut Grove. They soon discovered they shared a twisted sense of humor. For instance, back then Florida law required people to list an occupation on their driver’s licenses. Willeford’s said, “Typewriter Repairman.”
They moved in together, and later wed in the backyard. The groom’s side consisted of his poker buddies. Soon he started on a new book, a most unusual police procedural that would change both his fortunes and the shape of crime literature, and he dedicated it to his new bride.
Willeford had reviewed mysteries for the Miami Herald and had served for a time as an editor for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, so he knew how to write a proper mystery. Of course, what he wrote wasn’t like any other mystery in print.
Take the opening line: “Frederick J. Frenger, Jr., a blithe psychopath from California, asked the flight attendant in first class for another glass of champagne and some writing materials.” Freddy has recently been released from San Quentin and plans to start fresh in Florida—with help from the credit cards in some wallets he stole. While practicing forging the signatures on the credit cards, he pauses to examine what else is in the wallets. Upon spotting photos of some kids, he wonders, “Why would any man want to carry around pictures of such ugly children in his wallet?”
Then there’s the murder. When Freddy steps off the plane at the Miami airport, he encounters a Hare Krishna who pins something to Freddy’s brand leather jacket, then asks him for money. Outraged that there’s now a pinprick in his new jacket, Freddy promptly breaks the Hare Krishna’s middle finger and goes on his merry way. The Krishna, meanwhile, goes into shock and dies—which is what brings Hoke Moseley into the plot, as he’s assigned to find out who killed the Krishna. And Hoke is just as unusual as the murder he’s investigating.
“I wanted to show that Hoke is not a cop 24 hours a day,” Willeford told a Florida newspaper reporter in 1988. “Most cops are fairly normal people. I wanted to write a novel with police procedural elements, but concentrating on character and on reflecting the times.”
Moseley is an amazing creation: A cheapskate who gets his dentures made for free by the medical examiner, a divorced dad who wants little to do with his daughters, a loner who lives in one of the rundown hotels on Miami Beach. He has opinions about a lot of things, many of them wrong. Physically he’s no match for the younger, more muscular Freddy, who ambushes him and steals his identity. Nevertheless Hoke stumbles along and eventually comes out on top—thanks, in part, to Miami itself, which proves much tougher for Freddy to deal with than anything he’s encountered before.
“Willeford flipped the script on the rugged, tough-talking cop/private eye, instead showing readers a sloppy, messed-up, clunky, but still very relatable hero in Hoke,” explained Alex Segura, a Willeford fan and the author of Miami Midnight and four other novels about private eye Pete Fernandez.
The third player in this novel is a young prostitute named Susan who begins hanging out with Freddy in what becomes a spoof of wedded bliss. Neither Freddy nor Hoke thinks she’s very smart but by the end of the book she’s outfoxed them both.
The book concludes after fewer than 200 pages. Even the ending is unusual—the last page has a recipe on it.
Mitchell Kaplan, who befriended Willeford not long after opening his Books and Books store in Coral Gables, well remembers how a lot of people didn’t get what Willeford was up to with Miami Blues—including the publisher, which failed to promote it properly.
“My impression was that the publisher did not really completely understand that they had just published a classic American author,” said Kaplan, who would go on to found the Miami Book Fair International. Even worse, he said, “the Miami Herald critic panned it.”
But the New Yorker raved that the book was “extraordinarily winning,” and the New York Times Book Review said, “If you are looking for a master’s insight into the humid decadence of South Florida and its polyglot tribes, nobody does it better than Mr. Willeford.” Suddenly, Willeford had a bestseller on his hands.
The setting, and his sharp-eyed observations about it, were the key to the book’s success. Willeford had written it as a way to talk about an extraordinary time in South Florida’s history. In the 1980s violent crime soared. Drug dealers had a shoot-out on Interstate 95, the medical examiner brought in refrigerator trucks to handle the overflow of bodies, and the FBI declared the entire Key West police department to be so corrupt that it was a criminal enterprise. Meanwhile the Mariel boatlift had brought in thousands of refugees from Castro’s jails. Some were political prisoners, but plenty were not, and they didn’t mix well with the elderly Jewish retirees eking out their last days in the old South Beach hotels.
“It was a hell of a time to be a writer, a spectacular time,” Hiaasen told me. In the Hoke Mosely novels, Willeford perfectly captured that, he said. “There was no other place you could set those books—the stories wouldn’t work.”
All of the elements of ‘80s Miami—the random violence, the refrigerator truck morgue, the drug gang overkill, the police corruption, the Marielitos and the Jewish retirees—show up in Miami Blues.All of the elements of ‘80s Miami—the random violence, the refrigerator truck morgue, the drug gang overkill, the police corruption, the Marielitos and the Jewish retirees—show up in Miami Blues. The novel serves as a wicked funhouse mirror of the TV show Miami Vice, which premiered that same year.
“He’d clearly staked out his own unique territory with the absurd, prickly, anti-heroic Hoke,” his friend James W. Hall, whose first novel about Key West private eye Thorn, Under Cover of Daylight, was published three years after Miami Blues. “There was something almost pornographic about the novel, lurid, extreme. And for me it was liberating to see someone taking material that I was very familiar with and find a unique and engaging voice.”
For the first time in his life, Willeford was a success. His old out-of-print books became collectibles. Kaplan said one man moved to Miami just to meet Willeford and cut a deal to print special signed and numbered editions of his work, including New Forms of Ugly, which was drawn from Willeford’s 1964 master’s thesis.
But Willeford soon learned there was a downside to success. His agent and publisher were clamoring for a sequel. The one thing Willeford had never done as a writer was repeat himself. He viewed writing a series of books about one character the equivalent of paint-by-numbers art, Betsy Willeford told me.
Finally he gave in to their demands—sort of. Willeford sat down and wrote the nastiest, foulest novel of his career. He called it “Grimhaven,” with the emphasis on that first syllable. In it, Hoke murders his daughters so he won’t have to deal with them anymore, and gladly goes off to prison to pay for his crime.
His agent read it and immediately rejected it, telling him to stop screwing around and write a real sequel. His spleen vented, Willeford did just that, producing New Hope for the Dead, in which Hoke takes on a pile of cold-case files while trying to find a new place to live. That was followed by Sideswipe and The Way We Die Now. While each one had Hoke in it, each one took a very different tack from the one before it.
“Willeford knew how to strike the perfect balance between the noir ingredients of Miami—weird, deadly, funny,” Segura said. “The Hoke novels are sublime, and I find myself reading them over and over again as time passes, just to learn more.”
The fourth book in the series brought him the biggest payday of his career, a $225,000 advance. He told the Fort Lauderdale newspaper, “I’ve made more money writing since 1981 than I did in 16 years of teaching.”
Meanwhile Miami Blues had been optioned by Hollywood. It would eventually become a zippy 1990 comedy starring a grizzled Fred Ward as Hoke, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Susan and a young and dangerous Alec Baldwin as Freddy.
By the time The Way We Die Now hit stores, Willeford was already at work on the fifth book in the series, Betsy told me. In this one, the inveterate rule-bender Hoke finds himself assigned to work in Internal Affairs, a set-up that offered plenty of comic possibilities.
One day, the couple strolled by the front window at Kaplan’s bookstore and Willeford took great pleasure in seeing The Way We Die Now prominently displayed, Betsy said.
A week later—before he could spend much of the advance, or see the movie, or write that fifth book—he was dead of a heart attack. It was just the kind of punchline that Willeford himself might have written, one touched with cosmic irony. He left behind a mourning widow, lots of friends, a score of bizarre and impressive books of nearly every possible kind, and plenty of readers who wished he’d written more.
While it’s possible the movie version of The Burnt Orange Heresy will bring Willeford a wave of new fans, Betsy isn’t counting on it. That pitch-black tone in everything he wrote is just as likely to repel new readers as it did back when he was alive.
“He’s for certain people,” she told me. “They’ve already found him.”
