Pick-up

About This Book

First published in 1955, Pick-Up is a noir novel by Charles Willeford (1919–1988) that ranks among the bleakest works of American hardboiled fiction. The story is narrated in alternating voices by Harry Jordan, a failed painter working as a short-order cook in San Francisco, and Helen Meredith, a desperate young woman he meets in a diner. Their relationship spirals into alcoholism, co-dependency, and mutual destruction with an inevitability that reviewers have compared to David Goodis and Jim Thompson.

Pick-Up was Willeford's second published novel and appeared as a paperback original from Beacon Books. Unlike the dark comedy of his later work, the novel is sustained nihilism — a portrait of two people drowning in plain sight. Willeford, a decorated World War II veteran and career Army man, drew on his own experience of poverty and marginal existence in postwar America. He would later achieve wider fame with the Hoke Moseley detective series, beginning with Miami Blues (1984).

Excerpt

I am pretty much of a failure. I have been a failure all of my life, and I suppose I will continue to be a failure until I die.— Opening of Pick-up

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