Showing results for "Writing Mysteries" in World Literature

Charles Willeford was a man of letters in all senses of the word. Poet, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and raconteur, his early paperback novels with their existential/immobilized heroes were the creations (to paraphrase Chandler) of a man not himself immobilized - a man who, instead, with his trademark black-humored prose, doggedly examined the mind-thrumming banalities of our materially sated but intellectually befuddled postwar world, crafting a body of work that is only now, 50-some years after his first appearance in print, beginning to be widely appreciated.

Pete's dead and Gwennie's life will never be the same. How could Pete, a young, fit man, leave her now? Their lives together were only just beginning. And pneumonia? It was insane, unthinkable, unbearable. Somehow she struggles through the funeral in a daze, and the mysterious mourner in the tight-fitting red dress barely registers in her consciousness. It's only later, when spotting a discrepancy in Pete's tax records, that she begins to wonder. Who was that woman?