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“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor��--Charles Willeford

I began reading Willeford only fairly recently, though as it turns out I actually read this book and maybe a couple others many many years ago. The recent Willeford reading was of his later, more comic novels, written in the eighties. Willeford preferred his early, hard-boiled books to the later ones, the Hoke Moseley series that made him way more money, as some of them were made into popular movies. (An anecdote related to one of those books, Sideswipe: Willeford got a package in the mail, a copy of Sideswipe that someone had shot six times, and a note, written in all-caps, saying “It’s a crime to charge $15.95 for shit like this.�� It was signed, “A Dissatisfied Customer.�� Funny, right?)

I picked up Pick Up (see what I did there?!) based on the salacious, pulpy cover, hoping to read a trashy hard-boiled mystery, expecting to see macho perspectives subverted as I encountered in all of his other books, but it was less fun and more somewhat nihilist noir, beautifully written, so no complaints. The book grabs you right away through the main character, Harry, who works the counter at a restaurant and drinks the rest of his day. Harry meets a woman, Helen, who also drinks all day, and says to her, as they fall into bed together:

“I’m pretty much of a failure in life, Helen. Does it matter to you?��

“No. Nothing matters to me.�� Her voice had a resigned quality and yet it was quietly confident. There was a tragic look in her brown eyes, but her mouth was smiling. It was the smile of a little girl who knows a secret and isn’t going to tell it. I held her hand in mine. It was a tiny, almost pudgy band, soft and warm and trusting. We finished our drinks.

Sound fun enough yet? Willeford writes a taut and compelling post-war damnation of the world available for the lost and alienated and broke such as are Harry and Helen. Harry is also a failed artist and former art teacher, now in a kind of Leaving Las Vegas despair:

“As far as I was concerned the world we existed on was an overly-large, stinking cinder, a spinning, useless clinker. My life meant nothing to me and I wanted to go to sleep forever and forget about it.��

But drink first; Harry is a big drinker, and Helen is an alcoholic.

At one point, Harry compares himself to a car without a driver, a machine, without feeling or desire. And this feeling of alienation in part comes from this post-war Capitalist drive to success:

“The Great American Tradition: You can do anything you think you can do! All Americans believe in it. What a joke that is!��

I love it how Harry increasingly sees things through the conventions and history of the art world that deserted him. Elsewhere, the former art scholar Willeford also writes about the art world in the more satirical Burnt Orange Heresy.

I think this is a terrific book, one of the best of a series of noir indictments of American society that I have read. I guess I was more interested in the Helen and Harry scenes than the hospital scenes with its fifties rejection of psychology, and you know, there is a murder in the book, though I’d hardly call it a mystery. But there are a couple of real surprises, twists, the greatest happening in the last two lines, maybe in the last five words where an aspect of Harry's identity is revealed which makes you rethink every single thing in the book. And because it is such a surprise, I of course can’t tell you what it is, though at this very moment that is the main thing I want to talk about.

Oh, and that sleazy cover that seduced me? I learned that Willeford, working with often low-end presses, had little control over the covers or marketing in general of his books, especially early on. Sometimes even the titles were changed. This book is not really focused on the "pick-up" tease in the title, though the girl featured on the cover is somewhat suggestive (ahem!) of Helen in a bar, on a few occasions, when drunk, which is always. But it's not as pulpy or outrageous or sexy as you'd expect, or maybe hoped for; false advertising! It's an actual serious novel, damn it!