wit's end publishing

“The unlikely father of Miami crime fiction.” Atlantic Monthly

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 darkly humorous novella by Charles Willeford, dubbed “the Pope of Psychopulp” by The Village Voice.

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Discussing Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has said that the film “is not noir. I don’t do neo-noir. I see Pulp Fiction as closer to modern-day crime fiction, a little closer to Charles Willeford.”

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. 

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“I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and normal condition for Americans living in the second half of the century” Charles Willeford

“Willeford’s experience of his life led him to a certain attitude toward the world and his place in it, and this attitude, ironic without meanness, comic but deeply caring, informed every book he ever wrote, from his two volumes of autobiography through all the unnoticed novels.” Donald Westlake

Here is Charles Willeford’s slyly humorous meditation on fishing, relationships and machismo. 

Available for 99 cents at the Kindle Store

“Nobody writes a better crime novel,” Elmore Leonard said of Willeford.

Discussing Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino has said that the film “is not noir. I don’t do neo-noir. I see Pulp Fiction as closer to modern-day crime fiction, a little closer to Charles Willeford.”

Fellow writer James Lee Burke has acknowledged a “great debt” to Willeford: “If someone wanted advice about writing, about how to pull it off, make it work, punch it up…Charles could tell you how to do it.”

Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called him “one of our most skilled, interesting, accomplished and productive writers of what the literary establishment insists on pigeonholing as ‘genre’ fiction.”