Sideswipe

The third in Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely series, and by far the best of the three, the best written, where Hoke’s character is well-fleshed out (and he’s out of shape, too). I’m not saying that there aren’t pleasures to be had in the reading of the first two, Miami Blues and New Hope for the Dead, for sure. I much prefer my mysteries with angst and anguish and existential dread, but this one clearly highlights the funny stuff and I laughed quite a bit, actually. (Laughter needed in conjunction with US inauguration, and related issues). I couldn’t help see Hoke as Paul Giamatti, who was also in a popular movie, Sideways, and Hoke’s life is going sideways here, too, for most of the book.

In this one two main separate plotlines converge; in the first, Hoke, overworked, has a kind of breakdown and “retires” (takes an unpaid leave) from the Miami police force to manage an apartment building for his father Frank on Singer Island; one daughter drops out of high school to work in a car wash, the other may have an eating disorder. He’s broke, disillusioned. He still has a house he is renting with his eight-month-pregnant (police) partner, Ellita Sanchez.

The other plotline involves a retired auto worker, Stanley, who ends up in jail, wrongfully accused of molesting a minor, and there meets a psychopathic lifetime criminal, Tracy.

“What’s a psychopath, Tracy?” the old, trusting Stanley asks.
“A psychopath makes no distinction between right and wrong.”
“You mean you don’t know the difference?”
“No, no! I know the difference, I just don’t give a shit.”

The old guy wants a more interesting life so agrees to the more edgy life of crime. He listens for hours to Tracy, a pretty funny smooth-talkin’ philosopher psycho who befriends and takes him in on one of his robbery schemes (gone wrong), also undertaken by a disfigured stripper who can’t dance and a terrible artist, which then involves Hoke’s partner getting shot, the crime roping Hoke back into policework.

The conclusion is suddenly more serious and violent than I expected, given the humor of the book, but well done and satisfying. What I noticed is that both Hoke and Stanley are both lost sideways American guys, and so finally there’s really a kind of existential undercurrent Willeford accomplishes, and we like both these schleppy guys.

4.5 stars. The plot of this third Hoke Mosely novel goes nowhere in a hurry, but that was fine with me. It's more of a character study, as Hoke suffers a midlife crisis and returns to his boyhood home on leave, aiming to simplify his life by cutting out everyone and everything he can. Alternating chapters follow a lonely elderly gentleman who seems harmless enough as he becomes entangled with, and bizarrely attached to, a psychotic criminal. Of course their paths eventually cross, though very late in the game, with a denouement that quickly comes full circle on a number of loose plot threads and is bittersweet and deeply poignant. I read these Hoke Moseley books a bit out of order, and this was the last one I had left unread. I finish it with a bittersweet feeling myself, wishing that Willeford had written more than just the four.

At the tail end of a long writing career, Willeford catapaulted to newfound fame with his four Hoke Moseley novels beginning with Miami Blues. What was it about this series that found new audiences for Willeford’s work? Lawrence Block in the introduction says that “Willeford wrote quirky books about quirky characters, and seems to have done so with a magnificent disregard for what anyone else thought.” Moseley is an odd hero for a police detective series. He is a prematurely-balding denture-wearing 43-year-old, divorced, and just has an odd lookout in life.

That odd lookout stands out quite clearly in “Sideswipe” which begins with Hoke having a nervous breakdown from dealing with too many cold cases, caring for his two teenage daughters who his ex-wife had shipped to him on the greyhound bus when she married a professional ballplayer who was not interested in having her kids around, and watching over his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is on maternity leave and living with him and his daughters in a suburban house he managed to borrow from a possible murderess since he needed a stable homestead. This fine day Hoke wakes up, gets the paper, sits in his chair on the back patio, and does not get up or say a word for hours. When he is shipped off to Singer Island where his father, Frank Moseley lives with second wife Helen, Hoke decides maybe he has had enough of everything and wants to simplify his life. He decides he is never leaving the little barrier island, that he will buy two sets of coveralls, and not get a telephone. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Willeford though offers us a parallel narrative with one Stanley Sinkiewicz in Riviera Beach, Florida, who had retired from the Ford Motor Plant’s assembly line where he hand-painted with a steady hand a stripe on the side of each car because a machine-ruled line lacked the raciness a hand-drawn line gives to a finished automobile. Maya, his wife, missed the cold slushy Detroit winters and her friends and family. Stanley just wanted to live his simple life on his pension and social security. But, unlike Hoke who rode the night train to simple life, Stanley’s life is about to turn upside down as he is unjustly accused of child molestation, makes pals with his cell mate until the complaint is withdrawn, and when his former cellmate who just happens to be a psychopathic killer, shows up at his now-bachelor pad in Florida, Stanley decides he will join in whatever his buddy Troy Louden is doing. That includes sending a threatening note to the guy Troy held up when he was hitchiking and joining Troy’s little quirky crime family which consists of Troy, a Barbadan painter, and a woman with a body that drew favorable looks from every man but a face destroyed so bad plastic surgery could never fix. It is an odd story about how Stanley, having no one else who seemed to care about him now that Maya had left him, throws in with this odd assortment of losers and psychopaths and plays his part in a violent affair that in retrospect seems a bit ill-planned and off-kilter.

But perhaps that is the magic that Willeford captured in the Hoke Moseley series in the 1980’s – the fact that, once you get to know people, you find out they are all a bit quirky and a bit off-kilter if given half a chance with nothing left to lose. Scratch the surface of the ticky-tacky suburban sprawl and you find that not all is peachy and that everyone you meet might just be treading water above a nervous breakdown.

I'm not sure what's going on, but I think I've started to develop a little crush on Hoke Moseley. I know, right? I mean, he pees his pants within the first ten pages of this book. But I feel such a strong affection toward him for some reason.

The structure of this book is more similar to Miami Blues in that every other chapter is about Hoke, and the odd ones deal with another storyline about a criminal sociopath (Troy) who isn't Junior, but might as well be. I completely loved the way it all came together at the end. It's shitballs crazy awesome. And I love how even though throughout the plots of these books Hoke's life is fairly shitty, at the end he gets a nice little pick me up and you're ready to move on thinking the old guy is going to be okay.

My favorite thing about Willeford is the little details. The fact that Hoke tries to cheat at Monopoly. His recipe for beef stew. I love it all.

Both parallel threads of this novel seem to meander, never seeming to move the story forward. But don't be deceived—the two unrelated narratives come together in a crashing climax. Halfway through the book the action starts building momentum so slowly the reader is not fully aware that the story is moving forward at breakneck speed by the last two chapters.

Interestingly enough, the book is a rewrite of an earlier Willeford novel No Experience necessary, or at least the Pop Sinkiewicz half.

Sideswipe , the third book in the Hoke Moseley series, finds Hoke at a crossroads in his life and unsure of what he would do if he quit the police department. While this one continues Hoke’s character study, it rolls into the criminal’s character study while setting up the crime mystery. It reminded me of book one in the sense that is a fifty-fifty split between the good and the bad guys.

My rating is less than average for this one and it boils down to the fact that I didn’t find that much appealing about the criminal in this book, unlike Junior who featured in book one. And the focus solely on Hoke with his daughter’s and partner being mostly sidelined didn’t help maintain my interests. It wasn’t a bad book by any means; I just didn’t enjoy it as much as the first two books (which is kind of funny since some reviewers felt this one was the best in the series thus far).

Tightly written, it’s another tribute to Willeford’s worth as an author.

11/2015

The character of Stanley Sinciewicz, and what happens to him, is the best part.

This is the third book in Charles Willeford's excellent series featuring Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. As the book opens, Hoke, although still only in his forties, wakes up to a full-blown mid-life crisis. He's completely unable to function irrespective of his responsibilities to his two teenage daughters who live with him, to his department, and to his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is eight months pregnant (not by Hoke) and who also lives in Hoke's home.

Unable to cope, Hoke takes a leave of absence from his job and retreats to Singer Island, where his wealthy father lives. He takes a job running a small apartment building for his father and swears that he will never leave the island again.

In the meantime, Stanley Sinkiewicz, an elderly retiree who has moved to Florida from Detroit has a brush with the law and, although he is completely innocent, he is briefly forced to share a jail cell with a man claiming to be Robert Smith.

"Smith" is really a psychopathic career criminal named Troy Louden. He has a gift for reading people and immediately pegs Stanley for the sad, lonely man he is at heart. Louden befriends Stanley, schooling him in the way to best deal with the authorities, and before long, Stanley is convinced that Troy is his new best friend.

Louden is desperately hoping to have the charges against him dropped before a fingerprint check is returned and the police discover his real identity. To this end, he asks Stanley to do him a "small favor" once he is released, and, totally won over by his new buddy, the old man agrees. The ploy works and Louden, now free, enlists Stanley to help him pull off a big job he is planning.

Meanwhile, Hoke Mosley is discovering that it's a lot harder to simplify his life than he had hoped. His father is determined to help him get a new job with the local police force, although Hoke has absolutely no interest in the job. His younger daughter joins him on the island further complicating matters, and the tenants in the apartment house generally prove to be a major pain in the butt.

The Mosley story and the Stanley/Louden story proceed along parallel tracks and for a while the reader is left to wonder how Willeford is ever going to link them up. But it really doesn't matter because both stories are very entertaining.

Willeford has populated this book with a number of unique and very interesting characters and between the lines, he has a great deal to say about the nature of family and about the workings of the capitalist system in the United States. All in all, it's a very entertaining book that should appeal to large numbers of readers.