PICK-UP (1955) was the first Charles Willeford novel I ever
read, around 1990 or 1991. I got it because it was reprinted
by Black Lizard, and I was buying anything they put out. (I
bet a lot of us did that, and that's why we're here today.) I
remember being confused because the setting of the book
didn't match the original publication date they mentioned
(1967), but they were referring to an earlier reprint.
I thought it was great when I read it back then. I just
reread it for the first time since, and to my surprise I
didn't like it as much. The first half, where Harry and Helen
drink, actually seemed dull. Perhaps I'm just not as
interested in reading about the depressing lives of
relentless alcoholics. I'd forgotten Harry was an artist,
though, and was interested to see Willeford had used painting
there (and in WILD WIVES, where there's a Klee
collector--Klee is mentioned in PICK-UP). When Helen died and
Harry went to jail, that's where things seemed to click into
place and I was back in Willeford territory--the
matter-of-factness of it all, the desire for peace and quiet
in a cell, the police and lawyers he meets, the irony of his
art finally becoming valuable.
We've talked about the famous last two lines of the book. I
won't quote them, but when you read the book for the first
time, they cast everything that happened in a new light. This
time I looked for clues along the way and found one or two,
but mostly I was interested at how Willeford described people
such as Harry's bosses and Big Mike. The last two lines seem
to me a bit like the Continuum Hypothesis, if you'll allow me
a mathematical analogy [1]. The Continuum Hypothesis is an
important thing in set theory and basic math, but it can't be
proven true and it can't be proven false. Everything works if
you assume it's true, and everything works if you assume it's
false. You could analyze PICK-UP with and without the last
two lines, and it'd work perfectly both ways. Neither version
is better than the other.
WILD WIVES (1956) was Willeford's next book, his third,
written the year he left the army and turned 37. It's a fair
bit shorter than PICK-UP, and a bizarre hardboiled PI story.
Jake Blake gets mixed up with a teenaged girl who wants to be
a detective, a gay man who wants to be free of his young
boyfriend, and a crazy woman. It's a strange story, with the
traditional elements of a hardboiled story (especially
getting hit on the head or knocked out) mixed up with
Willeford's humour, violence, surrealism, and matter-of-fact
violence. At one point Blake brutally attacks a man and
leaves him a bloody mess on the floor, then goes back to his
room and comments, "My blue gabardine was a ruined. I felt
more than a little unhappy about it."
Bill
[1] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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