This is a noir novel, I should say. Actually, I'd qualify that: it starts out a fairly straightforward, well-framed story of life on the bottom rung, wanders into noir as stories that like often do - particularly in mid-century, when there was a huge market for such - but then veers again, in the late chapters, to what I can only call anti-noir.
In a noir novel, everything conspires against the hero. The entire world seems to bend to hurt him, to break his will, to force him to do the unforgivable thing, to destroy him utterly in the end. There is no way out, no matter how much he struggles - whether he gleefully engages in crimes, or tries to stay honest and keep his head above water, it will come out the same way in the end: he will either die at the end of the book or be on his way to death.
Charles Willeford follows that model closely in the middle chapters here, but then - and I really can't put this any other way - turns it absolutely inside out at the end. That's the anti-noir bit, as if the universe is conspiring to clear this protagonist, to move obstacles from his way in much the same unexpected, doom-laden way as traditional noir. And that sting ending makes the anti-noir turn that much more puzzling: I don't want to overexplain or hint, but the sting is the kind of thing that would have fit much more comfortably in a traditional noir, the way the book was going already.
Pick-Up is the story of two alcoholics, who meet in the first chapter. Harry Jordan is the first-person narrator, a former painter and currently working at random odd low-level restaurant jobs in San Francisco. He would say he's not an alcoholic, and maybe he's right, technically. But he spends most of his time drinking or waiting to get to the next drink. Helen Meredith is an heiress, who spent her whole life under the thumb of a domineering mother and had a brief, horrible marriage. She's much worse than Harry, needing to drink vast quantities every day.
They meet, they fall in with each other, and Helen moves into Harry's flat in a roominghouse. They're happy, more or less. Harry paints a full-length nude portrait of Helen; we think this could potentially be the spark that puts him back on a good path, doing something more productive with his life.
But they're alcoholics. Helen much much worse than Harry: the kind of mid-century woman drunk who wanders off with any man (or three Marines, in one scene) willing to buy her drinks. Harry can't leave her alone, even to go to work for the day, and they're dirt-poor.
They're both also mildly suicidal: they have one shared attempt early in the book, which leads to a stay in a local mental hospital that doesn't help either of them. And this is noir, so things keep getting worse, more constricting. Until there only seems to be one way out.
It doesn't go the way they hope: things get worse for Harry. And then there's the turn at the end.
I suspect Willeford wrote Pick-Up to deliberately tweak the standards of its genre. I don't know how consistent he was in that. And I'm not a major scholar of his work: I read his late PI novels, and a bunch of his early noir, in the 90s when he had a revival soon after his death, but nothing since then, and I didn't make a particular study of him at the time.
This is a quirky, gnarly noir novel that does interesting things with the form. It has a weird ending, which readers sometimes react strongly to, one way or the other. And it's short, told quickly in the first person, in that traditional noir style. So it's a book that you might as well just read, if any of the above sounds intriguing. I knocked it off in two or three hours: it's worth at least that much time.
(I read this in the Library of America omnibus Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. As far as I know, the text is the text, no matter what edition. The cover above is what it looked like the last time I read it, in the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime edition in the '90s. I suspect it doesn't look like that these days; books don't keep covers that long.)
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