This Hoke Moseley series has to be one of the strangest collections of “crime” stories ever put together. All three books so far have been vastly different and each one has increasingly surprising character decisions and more plot bobbing and weaving than you would ever expect—and not in the traditional pulp novel sort of way. These books are totally character studies, and they’re very dryly funny. The parallel structures work in this story and you find yourself caring for Stanley’s plight, caught in the grips of a true manipulative sociopath. Willeford has a real warmth for his characters and writes uncynically which makes these stories a blast to read. Though, as I’ve noted in some other reviews of Willeford’s work, there is some misogyny and racism throughout. Usually it’s in service of character, but some of the narrative language is cavalier when not couched in a character’s perspective. For me, it isn’t enough to write him off, mainly because the character work is so good and the stories are so fun. Anyway, so far I rank them as such from favorite to least favorite: New Hope, Sideswipe, Miami Blues. I have the final book in the series left as well as a copy of Grimhaven to try out. If you’re thinking of trying this series, just go ahead and do it.

Didn't finish it.

Protagonist is a cop who has a nervous breakdown thinking about all the cold case files he's in charge of.

Luckily he has a rich dad who has a low stress job (and lodgings) being an apartment manger lined up for him. He attempts to abandon his two daughters and try to live a life of as little responsibility as possible but the younger daughter comes to live with him anyway.

Meanwhile an old retiree gets a second chance at life when his wife leaves him and he gets mixed up with a self proclaimed psychopath criminal.

I just couldn't get invested enough in these characters to make it past the first half of the book.

https://andywolverton.substack.com/p/...

Weakest Hoke story so far.

Readers addicted to Elmore Leonard will find in Willeford’s Sideswipe a candidate for the best novel Leonard never wrote. Leonard thought so too, and graciously permitted the publisher to use his self-deprecating praise in their advertisements: ‘No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.’ A close-run thing, fans would say.
Like Leonard’s Swag, Sideswipe is a story of that most banal of modern American crimes, the supermarket stick-up. It flirts with another threadbare cliché (‘the gang that couldn’t shoot straight’) in the form of the inept band of villains who make up the dramatis personae. At the forefront is Stanley Sinkiewicz, a seventy-one-year-old retiree from Ford’s Detroit assembly plant who is living (call it that) his last years in Riviera Beach, Florida. Stanley is the last of a breed – the men who used to hand-paint the decorative stripes on the sides of Ford cars. Under pressure from Japanese competition, he was automated out of a job just in time for retirement. And the cars have lost their last humanising touch, ‘because a ruled line is a “dead” line, and a perfect, ruled line lacked the insouciant raciness a hand-drawn line gives to a finished automobile’. As with automobiles, so with modern America, we understand. As Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom observes, modern cars don’t express anything about America. They’re tin cans on wheels. The same glum point was made on screen by Clint Eastwood in his valediction to old America, Gran Torino (2008). You want to know where the country went wrong – look at the freeways.
A bizarre series of accidents deposits the dumb but upright Stanley in jail for child molesting. In the cells, he meets a disarmingly friendly sociopath, Troy Loudon, who instructs him on how to manipulate the psychiatrists who will soon be examining him. Stanley is duly released, and in return dispatches a note which will discourage Troy’s accuser (‘If you don’t drop the charges, I’ll kill your baby and your wife and then you’). It works, Troy stays some time with Stanley (now deserted by his unsympathetically prudish wife) and continues to mesmerise the old man with romantic claptrap about the old, ‘live’ America that used to be before automated straight lines took over. Stanley follows Troy to Miami Beach, where the misfit gang musters. There is geriatric Stanley, sociopathic Troy, a Bajan non-objective painter (whom Stanley helpfully instructs in the art of painting an unruled straight line), and Dale, a go-go dancer with a delicious body whose face was beaten into pulp by an enraged protector: ‘Her nose was crushed almost flat and the left nostril was partly missing, as if cut away with a razor blade. Both of her sunken cheeks contained rough and jagged scars, and some of those holes looked large enough to contain marbles.’ The delusion fostered by Troy is that the takings of the hold-up will allow the artist to study in New York and enable Dale to get plastic surgery in Haiti. Stanley goes along out of misplaced paternal motives, to look after Troy.
The trick in Sideswipe is keeping the preliminary comedy bubbling until a genuinely horrific and blood-curdling last chapter which fairly clubs the still chuckling reader. It’s very well done. At the same time, and with the same consummate sleight of hand, Willeford contrives to connect the hold-up fiasco with the apparently irrelevant story of a burned-out detective-turned-hotel-manager he’s kept going on the sidelines of the main business. That detective is Willeford’s series hero, Hoke Moseley, who features in a string of novels, beginning with Miami Blues (1984), which may be aptly summed up by the words of a congenially sardonic Karl Kraus: ‘Life is an effort that deserves a better cause’.

Willeford's plots and characters are quirky, but engaging. This, the third book in the Hoke Moseley series, meanders through a burnout-breakdown on Hoke's part while developing slowly an independent plot line involving unlikely characters conspiring to rob a supermarket. The separate plot lines crash together in the end to provide an exciting, satisfying conclusion. Willeford is a master of suspense developed in a unique, strange way.

Charles Willeford is the king of the zags--you might have a guess that some of the characters in the story are going to meet up in a climactic event, but you really don't see it coming, at least if you're me. These books are really something special.

True noir, gritty and sensational, and yet the funniest crime book I have ever read ... told in a voice so dry and dead-pan that you can miss outrageous lines. And the story is full of the best bad guys ever.

Homicide detective Hoke Moseley suffers a mid-life crisis and shuts down, literally. He won't talk and won't get out of bed, so his family and partner bundle him off to his father's house.
"Hoke Moseley spent the next three days in the back guest bedroom in his father's house. ....
"He didn't know why he couldn't bring himself to answer Ellita, his daughters, Bill Henderson, or old Doc Fairbain ... but he had known somehow, cunningly, that if he didn't say anything to anyone, eventually they would all let him alone and he would never have to go down to the Homicide Division and work on those cold fucking cases again. ....
"Hoke did not, after his first night's troubled sleep, take any more of the tiny black Equavils. They hadn't made him feel funny while he was awake (although they must have been responsible for his weird and frightening dreams), but while he WAS awake, they had robbed him of any feelings, and his mind became numb. If he took four of them a day, as the doctor ordered, he would soon become a zombie. Besides, Hoke didn't need any chemicals to maintain the wonderful peace of mind he now enjoyed. The bedroom was cool, and although he wasn't hungry, the little he did eat when Inocencia brought in his trays was delicious. He told himself that he would never have to go back to the police department. All he had to do was lie quietly on the bed, or sit by the glass doors and look out at the blue-green pool or at the occasional boats that passed on the inland waterway ignoring the NO WAKE signs, and everything would be all right. There was no need to think about anything, to worry about anything, because, as long as he kept his mouth closed and refused to react to anybody, he would be let alone. When a man didn't talk back or answer questions, people couldn't stand it for very long.
"When Hoke looked back later, those three days had been the happiest he had ever known, and he often wondered if he would ever have such peace again. But he had also known, or suspected - even at the time - that it was too wonderful to last." pp. 27-28

The description on the back of the jacket begins with the line, “There comes a time in every detective's life when he's had enough.” After reading that, and not knowing anything about the character, Hoke Mosely, you might assume this story was about a law and order man pushed to the edge of sanity by the degenerate dredges of society, akin to a right-wing revenge fantasy like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish. You’d be wrong, kind of, but you’d also be pleasantly surprised.

What pushes Hoke Mosley to the edge isn’t so much the scum of the earth committing senseless acts of depravity—although there’s plenty of this; Willeford is delightfully unafraid of being politically incorrect in his depictions of police life—but more mundane, everyday problems: a teenage daughter who wants to drop out of high school, another daughter who develops an eating disorder, busywork at the office, financial strife, and a pregnant roommate/coworker who eats her eggs in the most excruciating way possible. All this leads Hoke to a nervous breakdown that takes him out of Miami and back to the sleepy rural Florida vacation community he grew up in, charged with only the mundane tasks of maintaining his father’s hotel in an effort to “simplify his life.”

Meanwhile, adopting the same parallel narrative structure from Miami Blues, Willeford introduces us to Stanley, a retired auto-worker who disowns his family after they fail to rush to his aid when he’s falsely accused of molesting a child, and Troy, a self-described psychopath who enlists Stanley’s aid to get out of prison and later recruits Stanley for his gang/family (Troy also admits to being an admirer of Charles Manson), along with a struggling Barbadian painter, and an emotionally damaged and physically deformed stripper.

The middle of the story dragged a little, and at first the premise of Hoke having a nervous breakdown seemed a little forced, but by the time you reach the climax, almost everything seems to come together brilliantly. Willeford has a gift for using minute but bizarre details to either set up jaw-dropping plot twists or hilarious diatribes that seem to stem from his own cynical grievances. Without giving too much away, the robbery gone awry—again an element repeated from Miami Blues—is one of the best, and most brutal chapters of crime fiction I’ve ever read. It might be his personal history as a decorated combat veteran, but the man knows how to write a gruesome gunshot wound.

What I didn’t like: If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that he writes pretty weak female and minority characters. A reoccurring theme between this book and Miami Blues is whores who are good at housework, weak-willed and irrational, they sit around being told what to do by a man who abuses and exploits them, although this could be Willeford commenting on the degrading effects on the psyche of life in the sex industry. Or he could just be a misogynist.

What I did like: The parallels. He jokes about this with a throwaway line in the last chapter, but I really enjoyed the way Willeford juxtaposes events in Stanley’s/Troy’s timeline with events in Hoke’s. He emulates but differentiates the climax and the ending of this book from the ending and climax of Miami Blues. Ellita, Hoke’s partner, attempts to apprehend Troy by the book, firing a warning shot when she attempts to apprehend him, and she’s punished for this, but when Hoke encounters Junior at the end of Miami Blues, he takes the law into his own hands, executing him coldly and deliberately. At the beginning of the book as Hoke’s family falls apart, Troy’s family assembles, and at the end of the book as Hoke’s family rejoins in resolution, Troy’s family disperses in bloody carnage. We’re left not entirely sure if Troy really wanted to live happily ever after at The Hotel Oluffsson (I’ve been there!) with his family/gang, or if he merely snapped when a seemingly routine robbery went haywire due to mundane details overlooked, thus serving as a callback to the inciting incident of Hoke’s nervous breakdown.

A brave sure-handed mystery to save the crime and the hunt for the killer until the last 20 pages

What a unique work of crime fiction—well, I think it transcends the genre. Observant, witty, subtly socially conscious, filled with fascinating characters and shot through with local color, it also audaciously confines the hardcore crime action to about five pages, and the rest is absorbing character development and what would normally be backdrop! I’m reading the other three Hokes, no doubt!

I read this when it first came out in my late teens, I didn't get it, but thought like the whole series it was something special. Re reading it now as an old fart I get it and its brilliantly humorous, has a lot to say about older men and life in general and how we cope with it.
That said do not bother to read this book if you are under 40, save it. 50 would be best.

Midlife issues, a really fun psycho with a great cast of supporting characters, and imo the best book in the series.