The book is different from what I'd expected. I'd thought it
would be
a real biography of Willeford, but it's more of an excited
friend and
fan's analysis of the stories and what he knows of the man's
life.
(Dennis McMillan, the publisher, mentioned to me in some
e-mail that
he's taken some flack from "academic types" for the tone of
the book.)
Herron is no observer at a distance, he's got himself all
over the
book. There are lots of anecdotes from him and McMillan, both
of whom
knew Willeford closely in his last few years. Aside from
Betsy
Willeford (Willeford's third wife and widow), letters (mostly
to and
from an old army buddy) and other stuff found in the garage,
there's
no other research: no army records, no other friends, no
lengthy
searches through old municipal records for family
information. I
don't think the first wife's name is given at all, the second
one
passes by in a paragraph, and WW II passes in a few
pages.
What Herron does do is cover a lot of what Willeford wrote,
including
his unpublished and/or unfinished novels, some of which
he
cannabilized for later stories. Willeford's class notes for
his
college mystery courses are there. Herron points out a number
of
things I'd never noticed, such as how much Willeford re-used
certain
names. Willeford told a lot of stories in conversation; some
of these
went into his books and some of them came out of them. In the
end, it
seems, it's hard to separate his fiction from his life. Maybe
that's
why Herron did the book the way he did.
It could have used a final check by the editor: I've seen a
couple of
phrases or lines that get used within pages of each other,
and Andy
William's didn't really dub Lauren Bacall's singing voice in
"To Have
and Have Not."
I know there are a lot of Willeford fans here, and you'll
probably
want to get the book. It has some good stories, a few
pictures (the
cover has a wonderful photo), and you get a good feel for
what
Willeford was like. There are also interesting facts, like
Ross
Macdonald's high reputation being created by a conspiracy
between two
writer-critics. They both liked his books, they thought he
deserved
more attention, so they got reviews of his new book into the
NYT Book
Review and Time. Next thing you know, he's third on the list
of the
best hardboiled writers behind Hammett and Chandler. I'd
wondered why
this was so, and now I know. However, we'll still have to
wait for a
real biography.
Bill
--
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
"It is better to incur a mild rebuke than to perform an onerous task."
-- "Uncle" Oswald Hendryks Cornelius
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