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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

UNDERSTUDY FOR DEATH

Charles Willeford

Why would a happily married Florida housewife pick up her husband's .22 caliber Colt Woodsman semi-automatic pistol and use it to kill her two young children and herself? Cynical newspaper reporter Richard Hudson is assigned to find out—and the assignment will send him down a road of self-discovery in this incisive, no-holds-barred portrait of American marriage in the Mad Men era.

On the 30th anniversary of the death of the masterful novelist the Atlantic Monthly called the "father of Miami crime fiction," Hard Case Crime presents Charles Willeford's legendary lost novel, unavailable since its original publication by a disreputable paperback house in 1961. One of Willeford's rarest titles (copies of the original edition sell for hundreds of dollars), Understudy for Death still has the power to disturb, half a century after its debut.

Charles Willeford (1919-1988) was an American writer of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism. He is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. Willeford published steadily from the 1940s, but vaulted to wider attention with first Hoke Moseley book, Miami Blues (1984), which is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: Cockfighter, Miami Blues, and The Woman Chaser.
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Published 2018-07-01 by Hard Case Crime

Comments

Acclaim for CHARLES WILLEFORD: "No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford." -- Elmore Leonard "Extraordinarily winning...Pure pleasure...Mr. Willeford never puts a foot wrong." -- The New Yorker "Spare, laconic, unflinching." -- Jonathan Lethem "If you are looking for a master's insight into the humid decadence of South Florida and its polyglot tribes, nobody does that as well as Mr. Willeford." -- New York Times