COCKFIGHTER (1972)

chicago paperback house B-120, 1962 crown hb 1972 - expanded and rewritten avon pb 1974 vintage crime/black lizard reprint editions 1987, 1990 filmed by Monte Hellman in 1975, as COCKFIGHTER winner of the Mark Twain Award, 1974 "The sport is cockfighting and Frank Mansfield is the cockfighter - a silent and fiercely contrary man whose obsession with winning will cost him almost everything. In this haunting, ribald, and percussively violent work, the author of Hoke Moseley detective novels yields a floodlit vision of the cockpits and criminal underbelly of the rural south."

"Charles Willeford renders the sport with such knowledge and attention to detail that...I had the almost inexpressible impression of being on my knees again beside the great fighting pits of the southern circuit."
- Harry Crews

This was Willeford's attempt at a retelling of THE ODYSSEY in the hard-boiled world of cockfighting.