Charles Willeford

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....

Homicide detective Hoke Moseley is called to a posh Miami neighborhood to investigate a lethal overdose...

After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious Eldorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy....

Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter: a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars and roads of the rural South in the early 1960s, adrift but always capable of nearly anything....

She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he's asked if he has anything to say before he's sentenced. Russell Haxby is a ruthless used-car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women....

When Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley receives an unexplained order to let his beard grow, he doesn't think much about it....

Perfect in its description of an often brutish way of life - and the colorful mingling of unfettered boys, bitter old men, and even intellectuals - Something About a Solider is a rare portrait of a vanished army....

A masterly tale of midlife crisis and murder, Sideswipe is a page-turning thriller packed with laughs, loaded with suspense, and featuring one of the most truly original detectives of all time....

From the master of Miami noir comes this tale of four regular guys living in a singles apartment building who experience firsthand that there's more than one type of heat in Miami....

In this new collection of short stories, vignettes, and autobiographical sketches - many previously unpublished - Charles Willeford, author of Miami Blues and The Burnt Orange Heresy creates a mosaic of the absurdities of life in the 20th century....

Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing, and fiercely ambitious art critic James Figueras will do anything - blackmail, burglary, and beyond - to make a name for himself....

In this classic Miami crime story and thriller, from the writer acclaimed for his Hoke Moseley novels, a man's life is threatened when he discovers his new lover is married....

The Black Mass of Brother Springer tells the story of Sam Springer, a drifter novelist who meets Jack Dover, the retiring Abbot of the Church of God's Flock. Dover's final official act is to ordain Springer and send him off to serve as pastor of an all-Black church in Florida....

Charles Willeford was a man of letters in all senses of the word. Poet, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and raconteur, his early paperback novels with their existential/immobilized heroes were the creations (to paraphrase Chandler) of a man not himself immobilized....

Jake Blake is a private detective short on cash when he meets a rich and beautiful young woman looking to escape her father’s smothering influence. Unfortunately for Jake, the smothering influence includes two thugs hired to protect her....

Richard Hudson, woman chaser and used-car salesman, has a pimp's awareness of the ways women (and men) are most vulnerable. One day Richard decides to make an ambitious film, which turns into a fiasco. Enraged, he exacts revenge on all who have crossed him....

Why would a happily married Florida housewife pick up her husband's .22 caliber Colt Woodsman semi-automatic pistol and use it to kill her two young children and herself? Cynical newspaper reporter Richard Hudson is assigned to find out....

Set against the sweeping panorama of Arizona circa 1880, this work has many of the surface trappings of a standard western. However, from the first shocking realization that the line between good and evil is being overstepped, the author then begins to dismantle the American cowboy myth....

Lash by bloody lash, the she-devil from Dallas would get her revenge....

This reissue of Willeford's 1963 pulp classic is a timely reminder that madness is truly the dark heart of politics. Written at a time when people still had faith in their elected leaders, Willeford's book laid bare the American dream....