I really, really tried to make this book last since it's the last of the Hoke Moseley books and as you know from my previous reviews, I've developed a little crush thing on the guy, but I couldn't put it down. I'm so sad to be done with it. Feels a little weird writing this review so soon. Body's still warm, etc.

By this, the 4th book, I was starting to notice a pattern. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It was a pattern I liked: the first chapter obscurely references what will be the main crime of the book, then we get a bunch of Hoke being Hoke (making sandwiches, drinking Old Styles, being the best/worst dad ever), a side case for him to solve, a crazy awesome disgusting blood bath as the main crime plays out, and then a satisfying denouement, where Hoke is seemingly put out at first, but in the end things actually end up working out okay for him. But--slight spoilers--this was the first time that I actually sort of felt sad for Hoke at the end of the book. I might be projecting the sadness I feel about finishing the series, but I dunno, this one ended on a down note.

Other notes: Hoke pees his pants again! See! I have to love this guy. Here is a list of words/names that appear in this book: cornhole, Vinnie Testeverde. Hoke milks a goat. Out of the four, Sideswipe might be my favorite.

Oh, so there's also a 5th unpublished Hoke Moseley manuscript floating around called Grimhaven. But it's not actually a 5th book in the series. It's actually the second Hoke Moseley book. Willeford was told by his agent to turn his success off Miami Blues into a series, and Willeford wanted nothing of it so he wrote a big fuck-you sequel wherein Hoke does some horrendous, horrendous things. But his published wisely passed on it. Then I guess Willeford played ball and cannibalized the good parts of Grimhaven to create New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now. Anyway, apparently you can read the manuscript in some library in Florida, or it's fairly easy to find a PDF of it online. I might do it.

This fourth and final Hoke Moseley story is a heck of a lot more gritty and violent than the first, Miami Blues. There are several, unrelated story lines, each suspenseful, potentially volatile, and well developed. In typical fashion, the even keeled anti-hero detective barely manages to navigate some very dicey situations, coming out quite a bit worse for the wear. In fact, he goes through most of the story missing his dentures. The story ends with a twist, a surprise for Hoke that would seemingly be welcome, but is viewed with apprehension as someone who really does not like change. It's a shame there aren't more books in the series.

It's a crying shame that Charles Willeford went and died just as this series of Hoke Moseley novels was getting going. The Way We Die Now is the fourth and final chapter in Moseley's life on the Miami Police force in the 80s, and as usual you're treated to some fine existential musings, some witty commentary on the changing face of America and Moseley solving crimes in a largely straight forward manner.

The book opens with a chapter describing two men killing animals and people, setting the scene for an anticipated investigation you might expect, only Willeford ignores it for the next hundred pages whilst you get reacquainted with his protagonist and get caught up wondering about his new ineffectual partner in homicide, his former partner now retired to be a single mother, positive discrimination within the police force, the influx of Pakistani immigrants to Hoke's neighbourhood and the underhanded manner in which the WASPs try to keep them out, how his two teenaged daughters cope with only Hoke as parent/role model and on and on until when the two killers finally reappear you've completely forgotten that you're reading a crime novel. It's really something and a very special entry in to the ranks of highly lauded crime novels.

There's some unexpected and very matter of fact violence popping up in this one, the behaviour of Hoke causing the reader to completely reassess their opinion of him as an intelligent happy go lucky kind of guy with a strong line on doing what's right, to something a little darker perhaps. Oh, how I would have loved to have seen how Willeford developed that further.

The Way We Die Now (1988) is the fourth and last of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley crime novels; it was published just before Willeford’s death. Hoke is homicide detective sergeant in Miami homicide with a strange home life: he lives with his two teenage daughters, his former partner Ellita, and Ellita’s infant son by another man. Hoke’s relationship with Ellita is platonic and motivated by cost sharing.

Hoke has been assigned to the murder of Dr. Paul Russell in his own driveway. Prior to the murder, Dr. Russell’s garage door opener was stolen from his car, forcing him to park outside the garage and setting him up for the shooting. After the murder, Russell’s wife, Louise, married Dr. Leo Schwartz, one of Russell’s partners. Coincidence? Hoke’s nose is twitching as he and Gonzales, his incompetent partner, pursue the odor.

On the home front, who should rent the house across the street from Hoke but Donald Hutton, who just got out of prison after serving ten years for murdering his brother using the old rat poison trick; Hoke had been the arresting detective on that case. Coincidence? To add to Hoke’s discomfort, Ellita invites Hutton to dinner and starts to date him. What a recipe we’re getting?

While juggling the Russell murder and home issues, Hoke is asked to go on a covert assignment to investigate the possibility that a large farmland owner in Immokalee is taking a page from Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Peter Matthieson’s wonderful 1990 novel about a farmer in the Ten Thousand Islands area of southwest Florida circa 1900. Watson had a reputation for hiring seasonal workers at his sugar cane farm and murdering them at the end of the season; in local parlance, this is known as a “Watson Payday.” Hoke’s case has him go to a farm owned by Tiny Boch, where Haitian workers are kept in captivity. All hell breaks loose but Hoke survives to return to his life in Miami-- only to find that his mission had been a setup by his superiors.

This is not an emotion-evoking book—-Hoke is a seasoned cop—-though Hoke's daughters and Ellita provide some emotional substance. It is also not a rip-roaring thriller—-there are moments of good action but much of the story is devoted to seeing the cop’s life through the eyes of the cop; not just the street aspects of the job but also the bureaucratic bulls**t and the cover-your-ass aspects of police politics. It is a different kind of "thriller." For me, this was a good book, worth reading but not close to awesome.

3½ stars.

RTC.

Wow. I have a new definition of "tragedy," now: The fact that Charles Willeford died just as this book was published in 1988, so he was never able to pen another one/

Willeford, whom some credit with being the father of the modern Florida crime novel, led a wild life. He won a Purple Heart as a tank commander at the Battle of the Bulge, served in the military off and on for 20 years, studied art, taught creative writing, reviewed mysteries for the Miami Herald, and at various times worked as a flea-circus barker, a professional boxer, and an actor. He also wrote a series of bleak novels that included "Pick-Up" in 1955 and "Cockfighter" in 1962.

And then, in 1984, his first book about a detective sergeant named Hoke Mosely was published, and things would never be quite the same. Mosely is a wonderful character -- a grizzled veteran of the Miami-Dade homicide squad prone to wearing leisure suits, making comments about every minority group imaginable and looking for angles to exploit to avoid paying any money for anything.

Mosely is nothing if not practical -- to a fault. When his wife leaves him for a multimillionaire baseball player and dumps his two teenage daughters on him, he figures if he gives them a place to live and food to eat, he's done with his obligations. He spends little time giving them any sort of direction or instruction.

The first book, "Miami Blues," was almost an anti-detective story, and so were the subsequent sequels, "New Hope for the Dead" and "Sideswipe." In fact, in "Sideswipe," Hoke is almost an incidental character until the very end, where he helps save his Cuban-American partner, Elita, although she's wounded.

Hoke solves his cases through hunches and sometimes just luck. Not everybody liked this approach. At one point, Willeford opened his mail to find a copy of "Sideswipe" with five bullet holes in it, accompanied by an anonymous note saying the reader had been robbed.

"A case could be made that Willeford isn`t a crime novelist at all, but rather an exceptionally gifted author who happens to write about life`s marginal characters," Chauncey Mabe wrote in the Sun-Sentinel in 1988.

Yet the books were so popular that for "The Way We Die Now," Willeford -- constantly plagued by hard luck when it came to publishers -- managed to get a $225,000 advance.

It was worth every penny. In this book, Hoke actually manages to solve several murders, and works a bizarre undercover assignment that requires him to ditch his false teeth, badge and gun and pretend to be a farmworker in Immokalee. As always. Willeford's writing is vivid, his dialogue realistic and his sense of humor dark and twisted. His plotting is the real gift here, with a reader never knowing exactly which way the story is going to go next. There's a violent occurrence about halfway through that is just stunning. It proves just how practical -- and completely amoral -- Hoke can be when he's backed up against a wall.

The ending, though, takes everything into a new direction -- Hoke's career and his living situation both, and left me wishing Hoke could have had more adventures, and maybe an opportunity to talk to Elita at least one more time.

For more on Charles Willeford, here's a nicely done bio by someone who knew him: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

...and here's the Chauncey Mabe interview with Willeford:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1988...

It felt like Willeford wrote parts of this book in his sleep. I am not criticizing him. But its just that the two major crime investigations in THE WAY WE DIE NOW seemed to be arbitrarily written. Almost as if Willeford was saying - Hey look, I wanted to write this existential novel about a detective in Florida but then nobody would read it, so I am including a couple of ridiculous and over the top crime investigations so that my book would actually get published.

There is actually a short introduction to the characters at the beginning and an explanation of what happened to them in the previous novel, probably for the benefit of a reader who would randomly pick up this novel. It felt a bit out of place - it took away a bit from the weirdness and randomness of the novels plot development, I wonder if Willeford was under pressure from the publisher to write this intro. The crime investigations are used to emphasize Hoke Moseley’s approach to solving crimes – mostly by using common sense. One of the crime investigations is uncharacteristically violent. The appearance in Hoke’s neighborhood of a criminal whom he had put away years ago might suggest that maybe Hoke is not as thorough and efficient in solving crimes as it may seem.

MIAMI BLUES, the first book in the Hoke Moseley series was the tightest of the four novels with the bad guy planning a heist and Hoke Moseley the detective hunting him down even as he struggles with his everyday problems. But the sequels are more interesting because they are not really about the crime investigations, they are about life in Florida (and America) and the gradual meltdown of a really smart detective as life slowly gets to him. In between the investigations, Willeford tells you about the positive discrimination in the Miami police force, white flight, housing problems faced by white people and race relations within the police department (police officers of different races do not socialize after work) and outside it (an early breakfast table conversation between Hoke, his Cuban detective partner Elita and Hoke's two kids who all live together suggests that there is a bit of a culture clash between them).

Willeford’s genius lies in the characterization of Moseley. Moseley might be a police detective but he is not someone who can live anywhere he wants to. He cannot live in Black and Cuban neighbourhoods because he has to worry about the safety of his daughters. He is not some hard drinking beef cake who can beat up ten men and get laid whenever he wants to. Moseley is a smart man who likes the simple pleasures – watching Saturday Night Live, drinking Michelob/Old Style beer and eating good food. But he has to deal with spirit crushing everyday problems and he goes about it with the minimum amount of bitterness. He has his beautiful Cuban detective partner living with him but he seems to let go of the chance to start a relationship with her because of their jobs in the same police department and because he does not like the way she eats sandwiches and wears perfume. And then there are his two kids with whom he has some hilarious exchanges.

Willeford’s writing is almost like Mosley’s life. Like Moseley, he barely manages to rein things in. After the two crime investigations, he just about manages to balance things off with the social commentary, the weird humour and the horror of Moseley’s life which makes THE WAY WE DIE NOW a truly unique crime fiction novel. I really wish these novels were more widely read. You’ve really got to appreciate Willeford’s knowledge about a variety of topics. This is why I compared him to Philp.K.Dick in another comment. Like Dick, Willeford uses these snippets of knowledge to make interesting dialog or substantiate and fortify crime investigations (which might otherwise come across as absurd).

Norman Mailer wrote that only people with criminal instincts join the police force (I don’t remember the exact quote, but it was something to that effect). I don’t know how true this is. But Willeford portrays Moseley as an average man with the anxieties of the average man, almost as if he is saying that the police detective is as much a victim of the system as the average man. And that is why for me, Hoke Moseley is a much more memorable and identifiable American character who represents the horror and wickedness of the American dream than say more famous ones like Harry Rabbit Angstrom, Tommy Wilhelm or Stephen Rojack.

My least favorite in the series, but nice twist at the end.

I find myself really enjoying he Hoke Moseley novels of Charles Willeford. Two months ago, I read Miami Blues, and this evening I finished reading The Way We Die Now. In case you didn't know, Hoke Moseley is a homicide detective for the Miami police department, and his adventures partake of that special craziness which is Florida (and I speak as someone who has not only lived there, but visited several times).

There are two main threads in this novel, the larger one being an undercover gig investigating a corrupt redneck farmer who disappears his Haitian pickers rather than paying them. And just to add a little fillip to the scene, a murderer who has threatened to kill Hoke for putting him away suddenly has moved in across the street and spends his time staring at the Moseley household.

The title is a spoof on Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, my favorite among his Victorian novels.

"Miami isn't Cuba. We can do what we please here."
- Charles Willeford, The Way We Die Now



The final installment of Willeford's Hoke Moseley mysteries, and probably my favorite. It has all the middle-class Miami challenges: immigrants, a partner and daughters who seem way less plussed by the murderer Hoke put away 10-years-ago than he does, a dumb partner, an ambitious boss, office politics, etc. Hoke is asked to go undercover, his roommate and daughters disappear, his boss even has a surprise for him. Hoke is sore, bruised, and often near broke, but like a mutt -- there is something that draws people to him. I love how Donald Westlake described Hoke:

"Hoke is a good cop, or at least he tries to be a good cop, but in his Miami, one good cop is about as useful as one good paper towl in a hurricane. Hoke is constantly bested by people that are tougher and meaner than he is, he's constantly lied to and betrayed, he's constantly faced with the futility of what he's doing, and yet he keeps moving doggedly forward..."

Also, there is one revenge scene in this book that reminded my why Quentin Tarantino loved Willeford stuff so much. It is brutal and satisfying and cleansing in a way that American crime fiction sometimes achieves. It is both gratuitous and chaotically naturalistic.

Writers and readers are always bitching about the size of our to-be-read (TBR) piles.

I’m not sure if it’s related to the fact that there’s more books available, if they’re easier to access electronically or via on-line bookstores like Booktopia, or whether social media means we just need something to talk about, to look busy, so hell, why not talk about how we’ve just added another book to our TBR list.

Whatever, the upshot is it’s rare for many of us, well, for me anyway, to find ourselves in a situation where we don’t actually have anything on hand to read and we need to find something quickly. A situation that necessitates departing from our planned reading list and taking a chance on whatever book we can find.

This happened to me last week.

I was in Queensland’s Surfers Paradise for several days on personal business. I’d finished the book I was reading, Dennis Lehane’s excellent Live By Night, a lot quicker than I thought I would. I didn’t have my Kindle or any other reading material with me and there was nothing in the house I was staying in.

So I had to go out and find a book. Quickly.

Now Surfers is not exactly book lover’s paradise but it does have one or two okay second hand bookshops. In one of those I found a copy of Charles’ Willeford’s The Way We Die Now.

I love Willeford and I’ve read all the Hoke Moseley detective novels. So in that respect, I wasn’t stepping too far out of my comfort zone. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read them and I’d forgotten just how good they are.

Moseley is working cold cases for the Miami police when his commander gives him a special assignment, go to the south of Florida and find out who is murdering migrant Hispanic farm workers.

He’s living with his two daughters from his previous marriage and Ellita, his former Cuban female partner on the police force and her young baby. Moseley’s got to juggle cold case leads, with his special assignment and bringing up his two daughters. To top it off, a man he convicted for murder has got out of jail and moved in across the street from his house.

Willeford handling of all of this is masterful. He moves seamlessly between down and dirty action and Moseley’s ruminations on the changing nature of Miami. His writing has a classic fifties pulp feel fused with an off beat hard boiled style.

Moseley is a terrific character, a shabby, cheap skate, misanthropic, old school, right wing cop working in the increasingly multi-ethnic city of Miami in the eighties. He’s the perfect anecdote to so many of the politically correct police appearing in crime fiction these days. Indeed, after reading The Way We Die Now, I think the Moseley books should be used in writing courses on the subject of how not to do a boring police procedural.

On top of all this, it felt fitting reading the book in Surfers Paradise. The city took off in the late seventies as a prime destination for beach tourism and was modelled on aspects of Florida. Every second hotel and motel still seems to feature the words ‘tropic’, ‘villa’ ‘palms’ or ‘casa’ in its title.

New Hope For the Dead was the fourth Moseley book. Willeford died the same year it was published, 1988. A great pity because, if this book was anything to go by, Willeford had plans for Moseley and the series felt like it had a lot more gas left in the tank.

As a result of reading this, I’m going to be dusting off and re-reading my other Willeford books. I’ve also been inspired to find a good bio of the writer. Any suggestions would be very welcome.

And I’m going to be ignoring my TBR pile much more often.

The fourth and last book in the Hoke Moseley series, published in 1988; soon after the book was published (see title) Willeford died! Jinx much?! At any rate, it felt like when I read it as if he were not quite done with the series, as some things seemed set up for the future (i.e., what about Ellita, for those who have read it?). This is not my favorite of the four books, maybe third, 3.5, Sideswipe being the best imho. While all four are different, they all feature this sad-sack non-pc schleppy and average cop; we get to know a lot about his family life, his essentially non-parenting two daughters, his living (non-romantically) with his partner Ellita and her baby. There's lots about food, drinking Old Style, his weight struggles, his financial struggles. A regular guy, not admirable, sometimes not admirable.

When I read these books I wondered sometimes how much Willeford was like Hoke; okay, I'm prejudiced: I looked at his photograph and tried to deduce relationships between the author and his main character. Deep, right? I bet early on in my reading that Willeford was mildly racist and sexist, , based in part on the photograph (don't jump on me here, I'm confessing my shallowness)! But then I read a bot about the author and found he studied art in school, and after I finished this book, I read The Brunt Orange Heresy, finding a very different main character and much darker story. I learned his early stories like The Pick-Up were dark pulpy violent books, not at all like the more popular, lighter Hoke stories for which he became famous later in his life (the series became his best source of income in his life). The (I'll say mildly) racist/sexist Hoke I think, like most male characters in Willeford, were mainly being satirized by the former WWII vet author.

In this one Hoke solves some crimes, one of them with surprising violence. Sideswipe was mostly a comedy, and so I expected he had found his way to what he wanted to do with the tales there, and the so the set-up not surprisingly involves Hoke going undercover without his false teeth, a fun/silly detail, but no, Willeford pulls the rug out from under us, things turn uncharacteristically bloody, and so I am curious what might have happened as things in the Hoke series might have turned darker, in keeping with some of his early pulp novels. But the series is worthwhile, for sure, for mystery buffs.