High priest of California Book

CREEP ALERT!
"A roaring saga of the male animal on the prowl"
"The world was his oyster'and women his pearls!"

Never trust a used cars salesman, whether they are on the job, selling you a piece of junk for three times what it's worth, or in his spare time, where he is out checking the night scene for more easy marks.

I didn't do any research about the book beforehand. It was chosen for a group read by my friends in the "Pulp Fiction" group. Colour me slightly deflated at finding out the story is not about one of those kinky religious cults that seem to proliferate in California (Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Jonathan Latimer have all explored the theme). What's the connection then between a priest and a used car salesman that justifies the title? They both have the gift of gab, selling their customers a fake image of either salvation or luxury. They both dress carefully for their role. One of the first things that you notice about Russell Haxby is that he is a fussy dresser. He gives himself airs of a sophisticated, man-about-town, smooth operator, but there are cracks in his carefully projected image. He may listen to great classical concerts and read the modern writers (Kafka, Joyce, T. S. Eliot), eat in good restaurants, but he's really a slob, a brawler and an egomaniac.

Russell Haxby is the third bad boy in a row from my pulp reading list this year, after last month's "The Name of the Game is Death" and "Hell on Church Street" . Russell may take the raspberry prize because the two other guys had at least some integrity, principles or scruples in their criminal careers. Mr. Haxby may not rob banks, shoot it out with the cops or steal from the church offering box, but he still fits the definition of a criminal psychopat to a "T".

sidenote The devil is in the details sometimes, and a funny reason I disliked Russell is his atitude to Scotch. I myself enjoy a dram in the evening, single malts preferably, after work is done: but Russel tries to convince me that Anybody who knows something else will never drink Scotch anyway. It tastes like woodsmoke and weeds. ... Well, I'm not buying anything from this guy!


His victim in this debut novel by Charles Willeford (if we're not counting the clients at the used cars business that employs Haxby) is a beautiful, but vulnerable woman. when we first meet Alyce Vitale, in a dingy dancing parlor in San Francisco, she seems like the quintessential femme fatale of pulp fiction : a blonde with alluring curves in an eye-catching red dress. Readers might expect her to trick the first person narrator (Haxby) into a dangerous plot to murder an inconvenient husband or to participate in a high stakes heist. The impression is reinforced by the shifty, secretive manner Alyce displays as she starts to go out with Russell. Soon enough though, we find out that she is a true innocent girl, trapped in a dreary accounting job and in a loveless marriage with an older and ill man. I was still hoping for something along the lines of "The Postman always Rings Twice Here", and Charles Willeford played along with my expectations for awhile, as Russell Haxby plots to remove the inconvenient husband from the scene.

... if you want to find out more about the endgame, I guess you should actually read the story. Willeford is a solid writer, with a straightforward prose and convincing shady characters. After two books, I am still not 100 % sold out on his style. As other reviewers noticed, it is very hard to find a character to identify with or to cheer for in one of his novels, and the action rarely goes into top gear. Willeford prefers character studies with a side dish of social commentaries (there's a chilling scene here mentioning the Red Scare tactics of McCarthysm). But at least, he keeps the pagecount down, and knows how to make the reader keep turning those pages. I finished "High Priest" in two sittings, without straining myself, and some leeway should be given to Willeford considering this is his first published novel. I might try "Pick-Up" (next year), since I still want to discover why so many top writers consider him a master of the trade.