Charles Willeford was a child of the Depression era, one of thousands who drifted across the Dust Bowl of America riding the freight trains. That experience, combined with twenty years spent in and out of the armed forces, and the most colourful of lives afterwards, fuelled his deeply authentic hard-boiled prose. High Priest of California is his first novel, and, like Pick-Up and Wild Wives, it is not pulp fiction, but almost satirises that genre. The humour is raunchy and bad-tempered, but the writing is never pretentious. The stories are not lurid; rather, skilfully crafted tales of men and women responding to their individual circumstances, at times purely for their own gain, at others driven by sheer force of hardship.