The four-part The Shark-Infested Custard is reputedly Willeford’s longest novel and dates from the mid-Seventies, the first part originally seeing print in a strictly limited short story collection in 1988, and the second, longer one as the splendid novella Kiss Your Ass Goodbye from Gollancz in 1990. In its complete form, these are components in the interconnected tales of four men living in the singles-only Dade Towers apartments in Miami. With typical Willefordian provocation the first opens on a bet between the four, on the possibilities of picking up women at the local drive-in. It’s only when the young date turns up dead that the joking stops and asses are covered with an astonishingly amoral ease.

This is the Willeford of the wonderful Miami Blues and Sideswipe, the novelist more than willing to bathe in waters with the worst asocial, conscience-free, misogynist trash America has to offer. That these are not the forerunners of the pure, amiable psychopathy of Junior Frenger or Troy Louden but the supposed cream of young, happening Miami society (a pilot, a drug salesman) makes this all the more grim and absurdly funny. The second section finds Hank Norton haunted by a jealous husband when he steps a little too far out of line, with more than a few twists and surprises, and is a hard-boiled delight. (It also now has a slightly less heated climax than when previously published). In the third and most sedate, Don Luchessi determines to run away from his cloying, stifling family life with his ten-year-old daughter, but as one of life’s eternal losers, things do not go according to plan. The final part returns to the narrator of the first story, and offers a birthday party that ends with a bizarre twist on that initial tale and an enormously blunt fade-out. "I suppose it is a fairly nasty picture of the so-called ordinary young men who are making it down here," said Willeford of the book. "But such is my intention. (It) says a good deal about the brutalization of urban life."

Like most Willeford, Custard is distinctive, superior noir. A university English professor, he clearly understood his field, more than able to make the seamless transition between the art-crit of The Burnt Orange Heresy and the high-life arrogance on offer here, scarcely missing a beat. This isn’t as loosely plotted as the bizarrely constructed Sideswipe, but again it offers great ideas and elegantly vicious prose over tight narrative. A weird, baiting novel that identifies so frighteningly with its protagonists that to read it without a sense of irony is to miss the point entirely. In that spirit, this is quintessential Willeford, and a fine-grade primer for those brave enough to hop aboard.