3 🌟 for the descriptive writing and the character development. If you live in or near San Francisco, you will love the writing about parts of the city, many of them now gone (Playland). A POS who sees women as objects for his use has zero qualms about developing a relationship with a woman and"bettering" her life, telling her he "loves" her and wants to marry her. ( )

I couldn't quite figure out the point of this pulp volume. It wasn't mystery or crime. It was sort of romance, I suppose, albeit noir romance, if there's such a thing. It wasn't half bad, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to this repressed, elderly Calvinist. Still, it was fun enough for a couple of hours.

So, we have Russell Haxby. He's a used-car salesman, which apparently according to Life magazine makes him a High Priest of California. He's a bit of a womanizer and operates with a rather relaxed set of ethical standards.

He hits on a woman in a bar, Alyce Vitale. She's a bit of a cold fish, but he figures persistence will pay off in the end. It seems that Alyce has a husband, Salvatore, who is somewhat brain damaged due to a long standing case of syphilis. So, then Russell tries to figure out how to get Salvatore out of the way so that he can have a bash at Alyce, and try to warm her up a bit.
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Williford populates his books with truly despicable characters. Russell Hixby, a used car salesman, spends his time cheating his customers, mistreating the lot's mechanic, taking advantage of people, randomly hitting people in bars, and rewriting Joyce. His way of spending his free time is to take paragraphs from Ulysses and using a thesaurus simplify the words and writing for the simple people. When he's not at work he's trying to seduce every woman he meets. He listens to Bartok and reads T.S. Eliot. (Let's hope there's no cause-and-effect.) And he likes Kafka because he has a sense of humor.

Alyce Vitale's husband suffers from advanced syphilis, has been to a rehab center where he is on the mend but his brain has been addled. She meets Russell at a dance, he takes her home, and begins his slow seduction, getting her to "fall in love" with him. Russell is intrigued by her "differentness," wondering if "she was mysterious or just plain stupid."

No a pretty story. If you like feel-good-happy-ending stories, I do not recommend Williford. Some good writing with an undercurrent of sophisticated sarcasm. ( )

I think I've read all of Willeford, now. They are uniformly interesting, especially as representative of fifties noir. Willeford was a master of language, and I doubt if there is a more unlikeable character than Russell Hixby, used car salesman, who meets a woman and schemes to get her into the sack. Willeford populates his books with truly despicable characters. Russell Hixby spends his time cheating his customers, mistreating the lot's mechanic, taking advantage of people, randomly hitting people in bars, and rewriting Joyce. His way of spending his free time is to take paragraphs from Ulysses and using a thesaurus simplify the words and rewrite for the "simple" people. When he's not at work he's trying to seduce every woman he meets. He listens to Bartok and reads T.S. Eliot. (Let's hope there's no cause-and-effect.) And he likes Kafka because he has a sense of humor.

Alyce Vitale's husband suffers from advanced syphilis, has been to a rehab center where he is on the mend but his brain has been addled. She meets Russell at a dance, he takes her home, and begins his slow seduction, getting her to "fall in love" with him. Russell is intrigued by her "differentness," wondering if "she was mysterious or just plain stupid."

Not a pretty story. If you like feel-good-happy-ending stories, I do not recommend Willeford. Some good writing with an undercurrent of sophisticated sarcasm.

Willeford writes superior pulp fiction and I'm glad they are returning in print. Available ridiculously cheap for your Kindle. ( )

I'm beginning to see a pattern as I read more Willeford. His male protagonists act with total disregard for what would be considered normal behavior, and they stop at nothing to get what they want. In this case, our used car dealer "hero" (though his name is different, I think he is really the same one who reappears in the even weirder "The Woman Chaser") has his eye on a girl - unfortunately she has a husband suffering from the latter stages of syphilis that he needs to get out of the way before he can bed her. And that's really the story. It's not a detective story or a murder mystery; just the story of a single amoral individual. No subplots to speak of. Willeford continued writing about this type of character almost to the end of his career, when he created one of his most memorable characters, Freddy Frenger, in Miami Blues.

Of course, along the way, we get all sorts of things thrown in. In his spare time at home, Haxby, the protagonist, is re-writing James Joyce's Ulysses page by page, substituting words in common use for Joyce's archaisms with the goal of turning it into something that anyone can read.

While not exactly scintillating, the story holds a strange fascination as we see a whole bunch of characters dealing in their own ways with the cards life has dealt them. All in all, probably more insight into real human nature than you would find in a dozen mainstream novels. ( )