A former professional boxer, actor, horse trainer and radio announcer,
Charles Willeford (1919-1988) is best known for his Miami-based crime
novels featuring hard-boiled detective Hoke Moseley, including Miami
Blues and Sideswipe. His career as a writer began in the late 1940s,
but it was his 1972 novel Cockfighter that announced his name to a
wider audience.
Of that book, Harry Crews said, "Charles Willeford renders the sport
with such knowledge and attention to detail that...had the almost
inexpressible impression of being on my knees again beside the great
fighting pits of the southern circuit.
Frank Mansfield is the titular cockfighter: a silent and fiercely
contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost
everything. Mansfield haunts the cockpits, bars and roads of the rural
South in the early 1960s, adrift but always capable of nearly anything.
First published in complete form in 1972, and adapted by Willeford for a
Monte Hellman film in 1974 (which became infamous for its use of real
animals in the fight scenes), the novel Cockfighter has been out of
print for nearly 20 years.
