Some authors have the filthy luck of becoming famous after they die. As in any other creative field, this usually happens because you are too ahead of your time. Because it is certainly only now that we are more receptive to the avant-garde, even though we do not understand a damn thing about what is represented to us artistically or told to us in literary terms.
I have brought here the case of Charles willeford as an absolute rarity. Because it is not that he bet on a disruptive bibliography. He only wrote his crime novels with more or less success and time and its strange twists and turns is what has been in charge of bringing him here today with unexpected reissues.
Strange attracts me with that point of mystery. What got you back, Charles? Surely it is that of the myth, of the heightened legend of the loser that seems to give a new shine to his artistic manifestations.
Possibly Charles could pass for the stereotype of the one hit writer with his novel Miami Blues. Or maybe not, maybe it's because his style that is born in the hardboiled also masterfully exudes humor. It may also be that the genders yearn for better times and the black undoubtedly misses here in Spain Vazquez Montalban y Gonzalez Ledesma while in the USA they long for Hammett or the peculiar Charles Willeford.
Who knows? The reader's desires or editorial intentions are inscrutable, like the ways of the lord. The point is that Willeford is back and it is always a special pleasure to delve into dark underworlds that are also already trapped in the mists of time...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Charles Willeford
Miami blues
Willeford's most valued novel. A kind of translation of the old duels of the American West between sheriff and villain. In the adaptation, Willeford uses humor, violence and the maximum tension of the chases already done. case beli between the two protagonists as emblematic representatives of good and evil. Only sometimes the black and white of the profiles intermingle to general confusion and total hook.
Freddy Frenger, Jr., a charming psycho from California, just landed in Miami with his pockets full of stolen credit cards and wanting to make her fat. After a conviction in San Quentin, he wants to start over in another state without being considered a repeat offender.
On his way he crosses Sergeant Hoke Moseley, a policeman with a disastrous life, a battered car and a scruffy appearance, but ruthless in his work. Criminal and police sense that the city is not big enough for both of them, but Freddy is the one who strikes first: he steals the sergeant's badge, his gun and his false teeth. The duel is served.
A masterpiece
The peculiar worlds of art, with its quirks and rarities, with its proximity to vices that slide between social strata as wealthy as they are happy for bohemia, are the meeting places for this novel full of humor, blood, passions, manias and love to art, strange as it may be.
A millionaire collector makes an irresistible proposal to the young critic James Figueras: to exclusively interview Jacques Debierue, the most legendary and inaccessible artist in the world of painting. In exchange, the collector asks Figueras to steal a work by Debierue, who lives hidden in a remote part of Florida.
Two possibilities open up for the critic: to do the right thing, or to become a criminal to meet the greatest living artistic genius and write an essay about him that will give him international prestige. The ambitious Figueras is clear about the path to take.
Game-cock
Deep America offers a varied scenery through which to move the most grotesque characters of a Willeford who enjoys his most atrocious display, with his open veins, with his ability to laugh at the ominous in order to finally extract criticism and analysis from the human condition.
At thirty-two years old, Frank Mansfield is one of the best galleros in America. In the squares of the South his name capsizes the bets. Frank is boastful, impulsive, and quarrelsome; but to be number one you have to have a head.
With the Gallero of the Year Award between the brow and the eyebrow, the highest distinction of American gallistics, Frank vows not to open his mouth again until his consecration. Only he knows the reason for his muteness, although in the primitive world of cockfighting, a world of men governed by ancestral rules in which "a handshake is as binding as a sworn statement before a notary", no one will bother to find out.
On the other hand, Mary Elizabeth, after many years waiting selflessly for her fiancé to leave the roosters, return to town and settle down, has little patience left, and that strange muteness is about to exhaust her. Frank knows that there are many hunters in town who want to bring Mary Elizabeth down the aisle; If he is to return to her, it may be his last attempt to achieve what he has wanted most in his life.
Charles Willeford, one of the great names of American hardboiled and a cult author, was inspired by "The Odyssey" to conceive what he himself considered his best novel. Absorbing, hilarious, expertly written, "Fighting Rooster" is an adventure through the southern squabbles of the sixties, a journey through a little-known and extinct North America, in the company of an unforgettable character.
