Charles Willeford's novels were marketed as crime fiction, though many of them weren't mysteries and some treated their crimes almost as afterthoughts. Like a slapstick existential drama, they read as though someone set out to answer the question, "What if Dostoevsky had been funny?"
Willeford started his career in California, and several of his stories are set there. (One of my favorite Willeford books, 1960's The Woman Chaser, bears the unmistakable imprint of the used-car lots and low-budget studios of Los Angeles.) But once he settled into the Sunshine State, the Sunshine State settled into his work. When a person with Willeford's darkly comic sensibility finds himself in the land of Florida Man, he'll find it hard not to write about the place.
