Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.5mb
Overview: Charles Ray Willeford (1919 – 1988) aka Will Charles, W Franklin Sanders was orphaned before he knew the difference, and spent the remainder of his childhood between boarding schools and his Grandmother’s house. By the time he was fifteen, he was living as a hobo and riding the freight trains that crossed the Southern states. He joined the army and went to war, he was alarmed at the psychopaths and criminals that also joined and pointlessness of war. He remained in the army and started to write poetry. He wrote 18 novels, some under his pseudonym Will Charles, before he died in 1988.
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
NOVELS:
High Priest of California (1953)
"She was leaning against the door. Her smile was a sickly twisted grimace; the sort a prisoner gives a judge when he’s asked if he has anything to say before he’s sentenced." Russell Haxby is a ruthless used car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic of hard-boiled fiction, Charles Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue and lust set in San Francisco in the early fifties. In High Priest of California every sentence masks innuendo, every detail hides a clue, and every used car sale is as outrageous as every seduction.
Cockfighter (1962)
The sport is cockfighting, and Frank Mansfield is the Cockfighter-a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. In this haunting, ribald, and percussively violent work, the author of the Hoke Mosely detective novels yields a floodlit vision of the cockpits and criminal underbelly of the rural South.
The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971)
The classic neo-noir novel acclaimed as Willeford’s best, soon to be a major film
Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing, and fiercely ambitious art critic James Figueras will do anything—blackmail, burglary, and beyond—to make a name for himself. When an unscrupulous collector offers Figueras a career-making chance to interview Jacques Debierue, the greatest living—and most reclusive—artist, the critic must decide how far he will go to become the art-world celebrity he hungers to be. Will Figueras stop at the opportunity to skim some cream for himself or push beyond morality’s limits to a bigger payoff?
Crossing the art world with the underworld, Willeford creates a novel of dark hue and high aesthetic polish. The Burnt Orange Heresy—the 1970s crime classic now back in print—has lost none of its savage delights as it re-creates the making of a murderer, calmly and with exquisite tension, while satirizing…
Short Fiction:
The Old Man at the Bridge
This short story is a slyly humorous meditation on fishing, relationships and machismo by the Florida author of MIAMI BLUES and THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY.
Strange
The question wasn’t what is the best place to pick up women in Miami. It wasn’t what was the easiest place either. The big question the three friends discussed was what was the most difficult place to pick up women in 1970’s Miami. When the expert of the group, Hank, takes on the challenge his friends propose, things quickly go from bad to worse in this classic novella by Charles Willeford, dubbed "the Pope of Psychopulp" by The Village Voice.
"Quirky is the word that always comes to mind. Willeford wrote quirky books about quirky characters, and seems to have done so with a magnificent disregard for what anyone else thought." –Lawrence Block
Sentences
A wry little story by the author of Miami Blues, originally published in Florida Magazine in 1987.
Play:
The Ordainment of Brother Springer: A Play (2009)
This darkly humorous one act play is a riff on Charles Willeford’s "masterpiece" (as it was called by The Washington Post), THE BLACK MASS OF BROTHER SPRINGER. It re-imagines the ordainment of Sam Springer — a drifter novelist — as a pastor of the Church of God’s Flock in Jacksonville, FL.
Download Instructions:
https://ouo.io/kM6WLmr
Mirror:
https://ouo.io/skqnElV
https://ouo.io/wygPJQ
https://ouo.io/TIQsOs
Trouble downloading? Read This.
