Safe Return Doubtful

American Literature – Unpublished – Written circa 1984

Here is a book that was too dark to be published, something that immediately took my interest. Fortunately, it survives as a manuscript.
I write this review of a rare and unpublished book with a spoiler as I guess that anyone who reads it is unlikely to read the book. Though I would encourage anyone who enjoys Willeford to get a hold of it, and stop reading now…

Contains Spoilers

This would have been a follow up to Miami Blues which Willeford wrote early in his career, and was turned down by many publishers, before eventually being published in 1984. Willeford had now found fame, and was asked to write a sequel, which was this.

The writing style is similar but though compelling, this is disturbing and darkly funny. In many ways, it is Willeford at his best.

Hoke has left the force, moved into a drab and basic apartment and works at his father’s hardware store. It is clear he wants to be as anonymous as he can, quite happy to live on the little he earns, eating basic meals and with only two sets of clothes in his wardrobe. Into this constructed, simple life, arrive his two teenage daughters, abandoned by his ex-wife, who has taken off to Los Angeles to live with a baseball player. Life now becomes complicated and he is told by those around him he needs more money, and offered a prestigious job back in the police.
Coming into this book having read no summary, or forgotten it, as I had, one would then assume he takes the job and the second half of the book to relate his last case. But no, Willeford springs a midway through dark jolt.. he strangles his daughters, ices their bodies in the shower until he is ready to dispose of them, in California. He knows perfectly well he won’t get away, but has worked out that he will get at least 12 years in solitary on death row before his eventual execution, and he is quite happy to settle for that.

As to the questions of why Willeford wrote a book that he knew would displease his publisher, I am sure it is ‘two fingers’ to the publisher and the system, readers included, who gave him his fame so late in his life, he died in 1988.
A review I read, of which there are very few, mentions to compare it Adrian Monk, the books written by the reviewer Lee Goldberg, and a scenario where Monk rapes and murders his secretary Sharona, then melts her body in acid.
Willeford’s publisher eventually got him to relent, and from existing bits and pieces, with very little extra work, he produced the three novels that would follow Miami Blues. Legally, the book is only available to be read at the Willeford Archive at the Broward County Library, but there do exist bootleg copies, which can be found on the internet without too much of a problem.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5