Wild Wives

About This Book

First published in 1956, Wild Wives is a short, razor-sharp noir novel by Charles Willeford (1919–1988). The story follows Jacob C. Blake, a San Francisco private detective, whose routine is upended when a beautiful, unstable young woman — the wife of a socially prominent architect — walks into his office with a water pistol and a talent for chaos. What begins as a bizarre prank escalates into a tangle of manipulation, violence, and moral collapse.

Wild Wives was published as a paperback original and is one of three novels Willeford set in San Francisco during the 1950s. At barely over a hundred pages, it packs the cynicism and sharp dialogue of classic hardboiled fiction into a compressed, hallucinatory narrative. Willeford would later be recognized as one of the most distinctive voices in American crime fiction, particularly for his Hoke Moseley series.

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