Pick-Up

By: Charles Willeford

Narrated by: Benjamin Charles

Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

First published as an unheralded paperback original, Pick-Up is an authentic underground classic, an explosive bulletin from the urban underbelly of mid-1950s America. It was Charles Willeford’s second novel, after a rough and wandering earlier life that had taken him from Depression-era hobo camps and soup kitchens to wartime battlefields. The unblinking story of two lost and self-destructive drifters - a failed painter working as a counterman in a cheap diner and a woman in flight from domestic violence - trying to find a place for themselves in the back streets of San Francisco, Pick-Up is hardboiled writing at its nihilistic best: Willeford’s preferred title for the book was Until I Am Dead. Its bleak vision of life beyond the edge is haunted by rape, racism, alcoholism, suicide, and inescapable poverty, yet shot through with a tenderness and compassion sustained against all odds in a society offering few breaks to its outcasts and misfits. Pick-Up’s many twists and violent turns culminate in an ending that continues to surprise, confirming it as what critic Woody Haut has called “a razor-sharp narrative that rips open the genre”.

©1967 Softcover Library, Inc. (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

one of CWs best

Earlier Willeford thay is one of his strongest. didnt love the narrator at first but he settled in and ended up being very good i thought. the novel is fantastic with an explosive ending that made me want to pick up the book and do it all over again

Gritty Fun That Revels in Genre

The narrator really delivers. His voice is grave and demands your attention.

The plot is a little thin, and there's a pretty clear delineation between the first act and the rest of the book that feels like the author wanted to end it there but then decided against it.

If you like adverbs you'll get as many as you want.

I was immersed beginning to end.

I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about the big reveal.

Maybe not for me

This one was maybe not for me. It starts very interesting, like a hard-boiled noir novel set in San Francisco, but then quickly moves into relentless suicidal drinking and despair. I passed on this (fine narration though) did not finish.