>
> I'd also say it's not entirely typical of
> Willeford's work.
The earlier pulp novels, and _The Burnt Orange Heresy_, often
featured a person with no sense of obligations to people, a
kind of "psycho" completely devoted to his own self-interest.
He was also an artist who had total contempt for publishers,
editors, producers, and critics who wanted to revise or
suppress the subversive energy in the protagonists' work.
These protagonists are to some extent innately vicious, but
they have also learned to embrace that sociopathy by what
they see other adults practicing, without even thinking acts
of real integrity are possible in the "real world." _The
Shark Infested Custard_ (a combination of 2 earlier stories
and one new one), like the Hoke Moseley novels, I think show
the people we could and do meet every day. These people live
insulated from danger and moments of self-defining choices.
They don't have the ambitions that the protagonist of _Woman
Chaser_,
"The Machine in Ward 11," or _Burnt Orange Heresy_.
When these average guys confront such moments, they behave as
viciously. Wouldn't the reader? Hoke Moseley, in _New Hope
for the Dead_, actually gives a murderess the choice of being
prosecuted for manslaughter or allowing Hoke and his
daughters to live in her house for four years. Wouldn't we,
under the circumstances? All Sergeant Hoke is, is a competent
police investigator who knows that if the woman stands trial,
she will spend maybe a year or two in jail, partly because
the guy she killed, although her step-son, was a drug
dealer.
What I don't like is critics who prate about "the humid
decadence of south Florida." That applies to the corpsuits
who own the Marlins or the Dolphins. CW writes about
Everyman. He just happened to like Miami.
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