It's looser than it's predecessor, which was so tightly written and paced, which feels a bit jarring. It opens up Hoke's world and we spend more time with him hopping around various cases. It's a very chill read.

I'm reading all the Hoke Mosley books, and I'm finding they differ wildly. Sometimes, this is good, sometimes bad. This book happens to be one of the good ones.

Unlike Miami Blues, this book is not as fast paced. This is largely attributed to the fact that it's just Mosley this go round, no Junior. n  Miami Bluesn was cut squarely in half between the two, and with one removed, I didn't know if it would play. I knew this going in, and was apprehensive about it. However, my worries were unfounded, and even though this book is much more slowly paced, I enjoyed it.

I was never bored, but I did wonder when the antagonist was going to show up. There was no clear adversary for most of the book, and that's unusual for noir. There are several homicide cases Holke is working on, with no real antagonist. Sometimes, the person he struggles against most, is himself. This book is much more of a character study, than a crime novel.

The majority of the book is Hoke learning to be a father. His ex wife has dropped his two teenage daughters on his doorstop, without a word. He hasn't seen them in ten years, when they were four and six. Now they're teenagers, and strangers. But Hoke loves them, so he's willing to try to make it work. He's also assisting his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who's found herself homeless and pregnant. The baby is not Hoke's, but he's amenable to helping her anyway. Having never lived on her own before, Ellita is clueless about many things, even though she's a homicide detective.

I think some women might be offended by Hoke's sexist attitudes, but I laughed. He's misogynistic, but doesn't realize it. His ideas are laughable, even by 1980's standards. But there's no malice in him. He's more baffled by women, and their reactions to him than anything else. You do worry for his daughters though. What crazy advice is he going to give them next? The characters are so well drawn, you worry for them. They feel like real people to you, and isn't that the standard of a well written novel?

Hoke is a consummate slacker, with little to no ambition. He thinks nothing of wearing the same sweat stained shirt three days in a row. He can't be bothered to take the lieutenant's exam, so he can get promoted. And he's only moving out of his dumpy hotel, because his Captain says it's not allowed. All that being said, he's a dedicated homicide detective. He thinks of his duty as a sacred trust, and it's the one thing in his life he does well. It's a fun ride watching him solve cases, and if this series did nothing but that, I'd be happy.

For fans of neo noir, I highly recommend, New Hope for the Dead, and Miami Blues. They're both interesting rides, albeit in very different vehicles.

Se vi piacciono i polizieschi ambientati a Miami, dovete assolutamente leggere le "disavventure" del detective Hoke Moseley scritte da Charles Willeford. E' la definizione del detective povero in canna, trasandato, ma determinato e giusto.

Gettate i telefonini, spegnete l'aria condizionata e fatevi prestare un vecchio condizionatore rumoroso o un ventilatore mezzo scassato e arrugginito dal vostro vicino sudamericano, chiudetevi in casa e assaporate il gusto dell'aria umida della vera Miami anni 80.

Un autore che ha ispirato, grazie ai suoi personaggi e situazioni realistiche ma allo stesso tempo assurde e surreali, tutto il filone di film polizieschi con le classica formazione a due detective più il capitano dove il caso fa da sfondo e i personaggi sono la parte principale della narrazione.
Inoltre è fonte di ispirazione per Tarantino e i fratelli Coen, sempre per la genuinità dei personaggi e le situazioni "da strada", da tessuto sociale; piccoli criminali, agenti di polizia, detective, famiglie disagiate, il tragico e il comico che si fondono perfettamente in una città multietnica in continuo cambiamento. E sullo sfondo le Everglades.

Tempi d'oro per i morti non è Blues come il primo libro "Miami Blues", e non ci sono haiku, lo stile è leggermente diverso ma Willeford ha scritto un monumento alla città di Miami che aspetta solo di essere letto e vissuto. Un romanzo poliziesco con una gran anima, e un grande spirito.

Le illustrazioni di Emiliano Ponzi per l'edizione italiana Feltrinelli sono stupende.

- "Una volta," cominciò Hoke alzandosi in piedi, e posando la lattina vuota sul piano di vetro del tavolo, "a Miami bastava comporre un numero telefonico e arrivava un tipo su un taxi. Gli davi cinque dollari, lui si prendeva il cadavere e lo faceva sparire. Ma non credo che lavori più."

The second of my great find; the Hoke Mosely novels by Charles Willeford. This one is less mystery novel and more "day in the life" of Mosely, a Miami PD detective. It's very hard to describe where it was going and where it went but boy was it good.

Burned through it in an afternoon. More hard as nails noir from Willeford, probably not as good as Miami Blues as it lacked the brutality of the first book in this series. Even without that extra edge it was never boring and hopefully it's setting up the later books in the series to return to the mayhem of book one

Sebbene Willeford sia stato incensato per i suoi romanzi fuori dai canoni della letteratura gialla/poliziesca, e sebbene sia stato amato da registi come Tarantino e i fratelli Coen, questo libro è davvero piatto. Non ha guizzi, né colpi di scena, non è così irresistibilmente ironico come si sbandiera che sia, né ha una trama particolarmente interessante. È la fotografia di una certa America in declino vista attraverso gli occhi di un protagonista allo sbando. La noia rischia di sovrastare il lettore e, a conti fatti, c'è sicuramente di meglio da leggere all'interno dello stesso genere.

My first Willeford novel. This is an easy read - quite enjoyable, but hardly great literature. The characters were well drawn, the action less so.

Recensione pubblicata originariamente sul mio blog Arte della Lettura
Tempi d'oro per i morti è il seguito di Miami Blues, dal quale però si distingue nettamente per via del cambio di protagonista. In questo libro torna infatti l'ispettore Moseley Hoke, che stavolta si trova al centro di tutta la storia.
n  Traman
La trama è semplice, più tendente verso il genere di narrativa che quello thriller. Non si tratta di nulla di eccezionale, ma rimane comunque coinvolgente e interessante.

I contenuti di questo libro, così come nel caso del precedente, sono a volte volgari e sconci.
n  Stile di scrittura
n
Lo stile di scrittura semplice e rapido di Charles Willeford si avvicina molto a quello di Charles Bukowski. Le descrizioni sono ridotte all'essenziale, ma sono comunque sufficienti a creare l'atmosfera adatta per il libro.
n  Conclusionin
Un ottimo libro se già si apprezza Charles Bukowski, per stile e contenuti.
Altre recensioni sul mio blog Arte della Lettura

One way to understand the history of detective fiction is to weigh out the changing balance between character-building and the central plot.

The Victorian ancestors of "detective fiction" proper were much richer in character than in plot. Consider The Moonstone, whose pleasure derives not so much from a stolen diamond as the round robin narrative eccentricity. The novel shows us not crime in a bare form, as golden age crime novels do (though always dressed with an inconsequential motive as though to better accentuate the ingeniousness of the act itself), but rather a relationship between character and crime. The early and mid 20th century saw a great many stripped down crime novels. Conan Doyle, the four Queens of Crime, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, most pulp writers, etc. - all of them reduced characters to a few distinct qualities. Sometimes this sketch captures the reader in a jovially Dickensian way (e.g., Doyle or Stout) and sometimes its obvious staginess had a curious distancing effect (e.g., Poirot or Perry Mason). In all cases, however, the emphasis was on static characters, whose personalities are understood to exist separately from the experiences they undergo in the course of the novel.

There were a lot of important character heavy books from the mid-century that foreshadowed a shift in balance in favor of character. Mystery is clearly a secondary element in Chandler's work (hence the famously indeterminate murder of the chauffeur). There are two central elements. The first is dialogue and the second is character. This is not to say that the mystery plot is in the margins. It remains front and center as a pretext for a paranoid grand tour of the interconnected corruption at different levels of society. Mass market writers in the sixties (Day Keene, Bruno Fischer, etc.) tend to offer a stripped-down version of the paranoid tour. If anything the view of society is even more anatomical, as stereotyped characters of all classes and professions are shown to be working for corrupt interests.

This societal anatomy is formalized and delimited in a couple places. The first is the Cold War novel, where the characters are still in disguise, in that they have a cover rather than openly working for corruption. However, rather than a society of anarchically grasping people as in classic roman noir, the source of the corruption has been elegantly pared down to bad ideology. Then there is the success of the Mafia novel, where crime is similarly centralized (and therefore segregated from standard everyday American society) but cover becomes less important. These are still social anatomies, but the social rot is heavily circumscribed, unlike Chandler, where one can walk into any house and find a murderer.

In all paranoid tour novels detection loses its centrality. The revelation is not the reconstruction of the true story of the crime by the detective, but that society itself is complicit. The crime is a symptom, not the illness itself.

The Hoke Moseley series is a take on the paranoid tour, but also a parody of that paranoid mode. Society is pretty much irredeemable, yes, but rather than an anatomy of the social structure, one finds that society is hopelessly fragmented. There are not conspiracies, not even destructive ideologies, just greed, bad luck, and stupidity. Moseley's haplessness is correlative. The mystery novel has always been about social structures. The detective has to look into the crowd and judge. In Miami, where crime is so anonymous and society is entirely incoherent, the task itself is absurd, and can therefore only be solved through dumb chance.

What most people find "weird" about New Hope for the Dead is that it has no center. There is little direction, little crime, little detection. We spend a lot of time just hanging out with Moseley. The central plot is about his difficulty finding an affordable new rental within Miami city limits. Willeford explodes the standard paranoid novel tactic of using a single crime to reveal a web of evil, showing instead disconnected institutional, cultural, and financial factors that are stumbling blocks. Crimes aren't united by collusion, but by life in Miami. It is not a novel of social criticism, to be sure. Willeford's reaction is bemusement, not concern. Miami is a human zoo where social controls are so broken that our native anarchy reigns.

To put this into historical perspective once more, the classic detective story is about the conquest over disorder by society, an effective use of social controls. The paranoid detective story is about the tragically (if excitingly) hopeless pervasiveness of corruption. From one perspective, this is a breakdown of social controls, but what is always revealed is that there is a parallel society of crime operating under the cover of regular society. Willeford, more existential, sees that the breakdown has really destroyed the concept of society. There are conditions, and there are people. Willeford sees this with a kind of comic libertarianism. This diminished sense of belonging is frustrating, tiresome, but above all funny. Your classic detective helps render society coherent. Moseley, more dizzy, registers the incoherence and absurdity of Miami, an incoherence that seems part and parcel with the city's particular human freedom.

New Hope for the Dead is the second novel in Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley series, following Miami Blues. Hoke is a middle-aged Miami P.D. homicide detective who’s been gutted financially by a divorce and has been reduced to living in a tiny room in a run-down residential hotel that is inconveniently located just outside the Miami city limits. Inconveniently, because Hoke’s boss has just laid down the law and announced that the department will begin rigorously enforcing the requirement that all city police officers must actually live in Miami. Hoke has only a couple of weeks to find a new place to live, a herculean task given his financial straits and the scarcity of affordable housing in the city.

To compound his difficulties, Hoke’s ex-wife has decided to move from Florida to California to live with a major league baseball player who’s just signed a huge new contract. The ball player is not enamored of Hoke’s fourteen and sixteen year-old daughters and so, with no forewarning, the ex-wife packs up the girls and ships them off to live with Hoke who hasn’t had any contact with his daughters in years.

Things are almost as bleak on the job front. Hoke’s ambitious boss is bucking for a promotion and as a part of his campaign, he details Hoke, Hoke’s former partner Bill Henderson, and Hoke’s new partner Ellita Sanchez to compromise a three-person cold case squad and assigns them fifty old cases. The Major figures that even if the team only solves a few of them it will make him look good and assure his promotion. But these cases are virtually all dogs with very little hope of solutions.

Meanwhile, Hoke and Ellita have caught a death call that appears to be a simple heroin O.D. The young male victim is found the house of his shapely stepmother with whom he has been rooming. The case itself seems a slam dunk, but it’s going to take time and effort to get the case processed and the paper work done. On the bright side, though, Hoke sees romantic possibilities with the stepmother who owns a flower shop and who readily agrees that she might enjoy lunching with Hoke someday soon.

Complications ensue as they usually do, on virtually every front of Hoke’s life. In and around working his cases and training his new partner, he’s got to find a new home and the days are dwindling down to a precious few on that front. All in all, it’s a very entertaining story with a lot of humor. Willeford was a master at this sort of thing and he develops both the plot and his characters with a sure hand. A very good sequel to the novel that introduced Hoke Moseley.

I loved the other two Charles Willeford books I've read, but I could not finish this one. I gave up with less than 80 pages to go.

There simply isn't a plot. That might be ok for a Murakami novel, but for the follow-up to Miami Blues? It's Hoke trying to find an apartment; Hoke thinking about minorities; Hoke awkwardly hanging out with his daughters; Hoke helping his partner move.

I continue to be fascinated by just how different society was during the time wherein I was newly born. The approach and discourse surrounding things such as smoking, sexual education, racial and cultural definitions, and gender equality are unbelievable. Not to mention the cost of living and political views...

The actual storylines are entertaining, certainly, but they come in second to the experience of perplexed disbelief I experience on every other page.