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First published in 1956, Wild Wives is a short but very entertaining novel from Charles Willeford, the author of Miami Blues and a number of other crime novels.Jake Blake is a struggling San Francisco P.I. who lives in the same cheap hotel where he has his office. One slow afternoon, Florence Weintraub, the inevitable Hot Babe essential to the beginning of practically any classic P.I. story, waltzes into his office insisting that she's desperately in need of his help. Even though she's twenty-si...
Wild Wives begins with a beautiful, young femme fatale walking into a private detective's office. Sound familiar? Yep, it's a well-used, ordinary convention in hard-boiled detective fiction. But writer Charles Willeford is anything but ordinary. As he did in the last Willeford book I read, Pick-up, he turns the genre on it's head. In the first two pages of Wild Wives, we realize that the femme fatale is a 16-year-old girl, who shoots the detective with a water pistol, bends over his desk, and pr...
2020:From 1953Gritty and graphic, violent Pulp Novella. Great action suspense, especially as it goes on. I love all this, but there are such interesting character details, such strange entertaining sequences. This made it stand out. The scenes in Vegas, the wedding chapel, are funny and fun. And the almost appropriate encounters with the fifteen year old girl are unusual, not exactly genre cliche.Back in like 2010 I found a cache of his older books at a used booksale. Like someone had collected
This fast-paced novella is an unconventional private eye tale populated with seedy, greedy characters. Willeford, having written it under a pseudonym in 1956, rehashes the usual private-eye-falls-for-a-femme-fatale formula. But he throws in enough curveballs to keep the reader off-balance, starting with the first scene where a beautiful young lady struts into the private eye's office. Our lovers eventually make their way to no-holds-bar Las Vegas where the action grows even weirder. I'd say WILD...
Willeford takes what seemingly starts out to be a typical hard-boiled private eye story and turns it on it's head with with this fast paced and insanely plotted noir.
This was a slim but satisfying noir novelette that delivers exactly what you want from a slim but satisfying noir novelette. (MOST CONCISE. REVIEW. EVER.)
Cockfighter keeps popping up on one shelf or another of my recommendations here on Goodreads so when I found this classic hard-boiled novel in an op-shop for $1 I knew I HAD to try Charles Willeford for myself.And I wasn't disappointed. It's a tiny novella filled with seedy and conflicted characters and a simple yet convoluted plot. Perfect pulp material.Three seperate parts are vivid in my mind for different reasons; the first being the description and behaviour of Barbara Ann Allen is graphic
This early book by Charles Willeford has depth beyond it's deceptively simple plot. At first glance, it's just another detective story, but beneath the surface is an examination of post-war America, with a noir protagonist who has been changed by the war he fought in, and even may be suffering from PTSD beneath his always cool, sarcastic exterior. Not Willeford's best work, but definitely worth reading if you like noir with a little more depth.
Damn, so good. Got this for less than a buck from PlanetMonk Books. This is the kind of book that you won't find in Barnes & Noble anymore--100 pages with zero filler. Protagonist Jake Blake is a sexist, racist, homophobe sleazebag of a PI. But he's entertaining and the action in the book is nearly non-stop without ever feeling forced or repetitive.
Enjoyable, quick little read. Great cover!
