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school teacher from Duluth who had come down to Palm Beach after having a cyst removed from the base of her spine. “The coccyx scar had changed from an angry red to gray and finally to slightly puckered grisaille. Our romance had passed through slightly similar shades and tints.” His favorite writers were Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller—and it’s not hard to imagine Willeford sharing their table in some heavenly bistro.
    Willeford’s early biography reads like most of the other bleak, disjointed, virtually hopeless writers’ lifestarts chronicled by editor Robert Polito in his recent “American Noir” set for the Library of America (Willeford’s “Pick-up” is in Volume 2). Charles Ray Willeford III was born in Little Rock in 1919. His father died of tuberculosis when the son was 2 and his mother of the same disease when he was 8. “When you’re an orphan at the age of eight, you realize that you’re the next one to die,” he once told an interviewer. “Your vision of life is colored by reality rather than pipe dreams.”
    His poverty-crippled years with his grandmother in Los Angeles, his adventures as a 14-year-old hobo and—most important—his discovery of a permanent home and family in the U.S. Cavalry in the Phillipines were covered in two attempts at autobiography—”Something About a Soldier” and “I Was Looking for a Street”—both of which Willeford kicked around in several forms (all detailed in Herron’s exhaustive bibliography). A lively correspondence in his last years between Willeford and an old Army buddy helps Herron fill out that period, showing how many of Willeford’s fictional characters and incidents came from his military days. Moving from horses to tanks, Willeford spent the last years of World War II serving under Gen. George Patton. Then he continued his Army career by writing English-language radio soap operas in Japan, and speeches, press releases and training manuals at bases from Newfoundland to San Francisco.
    From Willeford’s early poems, novels published badly or never published at all, paperback Westerns and lurid sex novels with titles like “Wild Wives” and “Lust Is a Woman,” Herron traces Willeford’s writing career as it mostly ebbs but occasionally flows through the 1960s, when marriages and the other needs of life made him take on all sorts of literary hackwork. When Crown brought out “The Burnt Orange Heresy” in hardcover in 1971, the world probably wasn’t ready for this dazzling slice of prickly American noir pie. There followed a 10-year lull, as the author sustained himself with teaching and journalism. Herron makes a good point of comparing Willeford’s career to that of Chester Himes, the black mystery writer whose books produced occasional thunder and lightning, but no real rain of money during his lifetime.
    Ironically, the financial success that began to trickle and then swell after “Miami Blues” came too late. “(The money means nothing to me now,” he wrote his old Army buddy in 1987. “20—even 10—years ago it would have, but not now. I have my three small pensions [from the Army, teaching jobs and Social Security], and savings, and like you, I don’t have to worry about living a petty bourgeoisie [life] for the few years we have remaining.”
    In fact, he had just about a year left. Willeford died March 27, 1988, after a series of strokes and other illnesses. A few months before came what Herron labels “the definitive moment in Willeford’s long career.” Reluctantly agreeing to continue the Hoke Moseley books (after first trying to end them by writing “Grimhaven”—the one in which Hoke murders his teenage daughters—then being talked out of it by his publishers), Willeford had turned in an excellent draft of “The Way We Die Now.” But the publisher wanted more—a new first chapter. “Sick, only months away from his death, with a masterly new novel just completed, and asked to go that extra step,”