He enrolled in the Universitarias de Belles Artes in Lima, Peru, studying art and art history in the graduate program. In July of the same year, he left the army, leaving a mailing address of General Delivery, Dallas, Texas. In May 1949, he and his wife, Lara, divorced. His first book of poetry, Proletarian Laughter, was published in 1948. He ran the army radio station WLKH and was promoted to master sergeant. As a member of the 24th Infantry Division, he was stationed in Kyushu, Japan, from 1947 to 1949. Willeford enlisted again in 1945 for a term of three years. After V-E Day, he studied at Biarritz American University until he was shipped back to the United States. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for outstanding bravery, the Purple Heart with one oak leaf cluster, and the Luxembourg War Cross. He was assigned to Company C, 11th Tank Battalion, 10th Armored Division and sent to Europe as a tank commander.

In 1942, Willeford married Lara Bell Fridley before being stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for infantry school. He also served as a 'horseholder' in a machine gun troop and earned a marksman qualification. In the Cavalry, he learned to ride and care for horses and spent several months learning the art of horseshoeing. Cavalry stationed at the Presidio of Monterey, California. At the end of 1938, he was discharged from the Army, though he re-enlisted in March 1939, joining the U.S. He spent two years stationed in the Philippines serving as a fire truck driver, a gas truck driver, and briefly as a cook. In March 1935, he signed up with the California National Guard a few months later, he enlisted in the regular United States Army. At the age of thirteen, in the midst of the Great Depression, he boarded a freight train in Los Angeles, assumed a false identity, and-passing as a seventeen-year-old-traveled by rail along the Mexican border for a year.

After his mother's death in 1927, also from TB, he lived with his grandmother Mattie Lowey on Figueroa Street near Exposition Park until 1932. Following the death of his father from tuberculosis in 1922, Willeford and his mother moved to the Los Angeles area. Film adaptations have been made of four of Willeford's novels: Cockfighter, Miami Blues, The Woman Chaser, and The Burnt Orange Heresy.Ĭharles Ray Willeford III was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on January 2, 1919. Willeford published steadily from the 1940s, but vaulted to wider attention with the first Hoke Moseley book, Miami Blues (1984), which is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. Charles Ray Willeford III (Janu– March 27, 1988) was an American writer.

Gumshoe America by Sean McCann