Since I couldn't locate locally a copy of Willeford's _Burnt
Orange
Heresy_, I decided to read some of his other works I picked
up at the
used paperback shack.
I started with _The Shark-Infested Custard_, which, as
Willeford wrote,
is the answer to the old Miami Riddle: What is very sweet,
bright
yellow, and extremely dangerous? This is an entertaining but
absurd
book, about several bachelors who wind up on an unintentional
kill spree
-- the first death leading almost ineluctably to the next and
so on. I
found Part 2, "Hank Norton," the most engaging. In fact, it
scared me,
which books rarely do. "Hank Norton" as a sub-story, however,
wimped out
in the end. I won't give it away; you can decide for
yourself.
I also read _Sideswipe_ and _New Hope for the Dead_, and I'm
halfway
through _The Way We Die Now_. These are all "Hoke Moseley"
novels and
are marked with a succession of weird, unbelievably weird,
bad guys.
Hoke has an appropriate name -- he's battling all the hokey
nutcases
infesting Willeford's Miami. The bad guys may be
unbelievable, but
Willeford's writing, especially the dialog, is good enough to
move
things forward and somehow make interesting the hash he
creates.
I've also seen the movie "Miami Blues" -- before I ever knew
who
Willeford was -- and I it found gruesomely humorous and of
the same
absurd caste as the rest of Willeford's books.
They're all worth reading as minor entertainments.
-- Ned Fleming # # To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.