High Priest of California was published by Royal Books as a paperback original in 1953, Willeford’s first published novel. Russell Haxby is a used-car dealer in San Francisco — a man who sells cars the way other men breathe, automatically and without conscience. He spots a married woman, decides he wants her, and applies the same techniques he uses to sell Chevrolets: assess the customer’s desires, create a sense of urgency, overcome objections, close the deal.
The novella (it is barely 150 pages) is stripped to its essentials — no subplots, no digression, no moral commentary. Willeford presents Haxby’s seduction with the same flat, procedural tone in which he might describe a car sale, and the effect is chilling: the woman is not a person to Haxby but a prospect, and the seduction is not romance but a transaction. The title — High Priest of California — is ironic: the “priesthood” is salesmanship, the “religion” is consumption, and the “sacrament” is the manipulation of desire.
The novel established the template for everything Willeford would write afterward: protagonists who are intelligent, competent, and morally vacant; narratives that refuse to provide the moral framework that the characters lack; prose that is clean, hard, and utterly without decoration. The tradition is Hammett and Cain, but Willeford is colder than either — he does not even provide the existential romance that redeems noir’s anti-heroes.
Collecting High Priest of California
First edition (Royal Books, New York, 1953): Paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition paperback, fine: $300–$800
- Very good: $100–$300