Q: Charles Willeford's publisher asked Kurt Vonnegut to write a blurb for
Miami Blues.
He declined, but he wrote Willeford directly, praising
his book.
He wondered why Willeford chose to write thrillers. He used the
word ghetto.
Instead of serious books, describing America as it really
is.
He added a patronizing postscript.
Here's a trade secret maybe nobody ever told you. The more highly educated and powerful your characters the more popular your book will be.
A: I think Willeford described America the way it really is. He is
a magical surrealist. He wasn't interested in powerful, well-educated characters.
He was interested in low-lifes. Used car salesmen, people who fight roosters.
To me, his best book, The Shark-Infested Custard, had to be published posthumously.
Because it was about successful middle-class men--an airline captain, a drug salesman,
a director of security for a national private security firm, and a small business
owner who sold English silver settings to rich Cubans
.
They were also drunks,
thieves, tax-cheats, adulterers, and murderers.
It wasn't about their crimes,
it was about their normal lives, how they cut corners to make a living, their fucked-up
sex lives, their horrible marriages, where they were forced to live, in a tight housing
market like Miami, what they did for fun: drink, shoot pool, play cards, go to the
movies, pick up women they did not respect, and talk about them behind their back.
Hank Norton's boss trying to get him to accept a transfer to Buffalo is priceless.
It shows the business-major mentality in all its hideous splendor, the same mentality
people in book publishing have, or newspapers and magazines, or university writing
departments.
Willeford taught writing, at Miami-Dade. He knew college students,
faculty members, deans and college administrators. He also reviewed books for the
Miami Herald and knew journalists. He reviewed mysteries, so he knew a lot
about mysteries.
He wrote a critical study of modern fiction that shows he
knows exactly what the choices are, what the traditions are, what the conventions
are. He stood the police procedural on its head, when he wrote one.
Hoke
Moseley shoots a man he could have arrested because the man beat the shit out of
him and scared him to the depths of his soul. He let a murderer go, to get a house
to rent, to live in with his daughters and his pregnant partner. He had a retired
auto worker get sucked into a gang of armed robbers who killed all the witnesses.
They also killed a baby when a car they stole had a baby in it. He was a one-man
crime spree, a rogue cop, in The Way We Die Now. And I would have dearly
loved to see how he handled his promotion to Internal Affairs.
Kurt Vonnegut
was a science fiction writer. And professional commencement speaker.
The
only thing lower on the evolutionary scale is horror writer.