Wild Wives

by Charles Willeford

Book Overview

A classic of hard-boiled fiction, Wild Wives is amoral, sexy and brutal. Written in a sleazy San Francisco hotel in the early '50s, Willeford details a drama of deception featuring the crooked... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400032474
• ISBN13: 9781400032471
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

His characters dance like diamonds in a coal mine

My favorite writers every now and again create an interesting character. Williford has the ability to create pages of interesting characters in a sentence. All of Williford's characters are gritty and real and appear effortlessly in cheap dime novels. His characters spring fully drawn, alive and ready for action reflecting humanity in different periods of American history richly visited by Williford. There's no sense of political correctness in any of his characters--including his protagonist. Somehow, Williford ducks the conservative hypocrisy of the McCarthy Era during which he creates some of his best works yet at the same time seems to scorn any liberal humanity. Jacob C. Blake is no Hoke Moseley, but instead a reasonably honest private eye who deals with everyone from a naughty 15-year old who asks him to spank her to a vengeful police lieutenant who wants his license revoked. In this wonderfully short novel Jacob C. Blake deals with a post-war mix drawn from a time that was far more complex than imagined in Leave it to Beaver or I Love Lucy.

a Willeford novella deserving of more attention

Charles Willeford certainly wrote an interesting mix of novels during his long career. His early works, such as 'Wild Wives', written in the 1950s is very much like the works of James Cain, David Goodis and Jim Thompson. Greed, desperation, and violence of the poor and forgotten (, alcoholics, druggies, psychotics) provide the backdrop of psychological dramas/crime stories.In 'Wild Wives' we have a San Francisco rarely employed private eye who is hired by a rich socialite. Of course he finds this woman irresistable who, unsurprisingly, puts him on a course of "misadventure". The woman we discover possesses many secrets (..no spoilers here), and Willeford treats us with a terrific ending. The book is very enjoyable and wonderfully lean (packs a punch in only 100 pages).Bottom line: an unjustly forgetten classic.

Willeford was one of the best at Noir

Originally entitled Until I Am Dead and published in 1956, Wild Wives' only blemish is its ending. I'm not saying that the ending is terrible, or even bad, but it did strike me as lazy. That being said, I can't find anything else wrong with this book and everything right. Willeford brings to the table a sophistication and class that most noir books are lacking. His knowledge of art, clothing and style strongly tempers his unforgiving toughness. I think Willeford was only rivaled in noir by Jim Thompson, but I must confess that Willeford's stories are tighter, more concise. This edition of Wild Wives weighs in at a light 102 pages. It's a fast, exciting read and Willeford packs a full, well-rounded story into what few pages he has given us here. This isn't as good as Pick Up, which was published in 1954, but not many crime books are. This book, as with most of Willeford's work, is very plausible. It's a quality that allows you to fall right into his stories. Jake Blake & Florence Weintraub are great characters. Despite their many quirks and abnormalities, Willeford manages to keep them consistant through the whole yarn. I highly recommend this one, Pick Up and Willeford's memoir- I Was Looking For A Street.

Another Willeford Classic

Ok, you've got this guy Blake, a detective and a real piece of work. Blake gets involved with a real kook of a broad. He mixes business with pleasure and starts thinking with the wrong head. At the end Willeford delivers the kind of twist only he can. Blake is kind of a prototype for Hoke Mosely but he's not as nice. Great Book!