WILD WIVES by Charles Willeford

GRADE: B-

Wild Wives begins with a beautiful, young femme fatale walking into a private detective's office. Sound familiar? Yep, it's a well-used, ordinary convention in noir detective fiction. But writer Charles Willeford is anything but ordinary. As he did in the last Willeford book I read, Pick-up, he turns the genre on it's head. In the first two pages, we realize that the femme fatale is a 16-year-old girl, who shoots the detective with a water pistol, bends over his desk, and proceeds to ask him for a spanking.

Thus begins this bizarre, sleazy little  hard-boiled novella that has a hefty dose of sex and violence, not to mention a fitting title!