This is the fourth and, sadly, the last entry in Charles Willeford’s series featuring Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. Hoke, to put it mildly, does not remotely resemble the homicide detectives that one usually encounters in crime fiction. Certainly, he’s nothing like Sonny Crockett and the other detectives of the television show, Miami Vice, which was so wildly popular at the same time this series was written.

Hoke is middle-aged and overweight; he dresses in leisure suits that be buys on the cheap. He has no teeth and is plagued by an ill-fitting set of dentures that constantly cause him problems. He lives in a small home that he shares with his two teenage daughters, the woman who was once his partner, and the ex-partner’s infant son. Hoke and his ex-partner are not romantically involved; they are both challenged financially and are sharing the house as a way of saving money. It’s a difficult arrangement which severely limits Hoke’s sex life, assuming that he had one. Obviously, it’s nothing like living alone on a great bachelor-pad houseboat with an alligator named Elvis.

Hoke is now working cold cases and is pursuing the case of a doctor who was murdered several years ago. He’s enjoying the challenge and is reasonably content until a man named Donald Hutton leases the house directly across the street. Years earlier, Hoke had arrested Hutton for first-degree murder. On the basis of the Hoke’s testimony, Hutton was sentenced to life in prison and publicly swore revenge against Hoke. But then ten years down the road, the conviction was overturned on a technicality; Hutton was freed and the D.A. decided not to retry the case. So now Hutton is living across the street from Hoke, sitting out in the yard all day, watching the comings and goings of Hoke’s daughters and his ex-partner, Ellita.

Hoke is obviously concerned about Hutton’s intentions, but there isn’t much he can do about the situation. Then, in the middle of all this, his boss assigns him to a very dangerous, one-man undercover operation in a neighboring county. Haitian immigrants are disappearing and the local sheriff fears that a particularly nasty farmer is employing the Haitians as migrant labor and then killing them rather than paying them off at the end of the season. As a favor to the sheriff, Hoke’s boss agrees to loan Hoke out to investigate.

All of these diverse strands come together to create another very entertaining story. Willeford invented some truly unique characters; the story is well-plotted, and there’s a fair amount of humor. The question that hangs over it all is whether Hoke will weather all the threats he suddenly faces to produce a solution to any of the crimes on his plate.

Charles Willeford toiled in the crime fiction genre for a number of years without getting the attention and respect that he genuinely deserved. That changed, finally, when he began the Hoke Moseley series. The books were critically acclaimed and sold much better than his earlier efforts. Sadly, though, Willeford died in 1988, the same year that this book appeared and didn’t get the chance to enjoy this success for very long. His passing was a loss for fans of crime fiction as well; it would have been great fun to follow Hoke Moseley through at least a few more books. But we are fortunate to have these four, and readers who haven’t yet discovered Willeford and Hoke Moseley might want to look for Miami Blues, the book that introduced this great character.

Published in 1988, The Way We Die Now is the fourth entry in Willeford’s quirky police detective series, set in Miami in the 1980’s with a irascible frustrated 42-year-old premature-balding Hoke Moseley trying to get by in a society that seems to have left old dinosaurs like him behind. The primary action in this one is an undercover operation off the books where Hoke goes out to the farmlands and seeks employment as a down-and-out foreman who is so down he is willing to accept employment from anyone, even a guy who is suspected of burying migrant farmworkers in the Florida swamps. His task is to nose around the farm and see what he can turn up in the way of evidence. He regrets the assignment as he soon as he takes it because he has no gun, no badge, no money, nothing to rely on. Little does he know how bad it could get and how quickly and how much a fiasco he has to walk away from him, surviving with his life but not being able to tell anyone what really happened or his role in it.

The second sub-plot is when a parolee who Hoke thought was put away for life takes a plea deal when his murder charge is reversed on appeal and decides to rent the house directly across the street from where Hoke is living with his teenage daughters. This makes him nervous as one can quite imagine and then you get the odd scene where Ellita invites the parolee to dinner at the house and Hoke sits across the table from him glaring. Shades of Hoke lunching with Junior in Miami Blues comes to mind. And, this gets even odder as Ellita decides to go out and date the parolee.

This is a solidly-written, compelling crime story told in Willeford’s offbeat, quirky manner. Willeford passed away the same year (1988) this was published so it became the final book in the Hoke Moseley saga. It is not clear if that was what Willeford planned.

Hoke Moseley's life is finally back on track. His youngest daughter Aileen is healthy again. His former partner Ellita is on disability pension and raising her infant son. Hoke is close to solving two cold case murders--the first, a successful surgeon gunned down outside his home, and the second, two unknown Haitian immigrants discovered dead inside a fumigation tent.

Then, a convict Hoke sent to prison eight years ago moves into the house directly across the street. Donald Hutton insinuates himself into the lives of Hoke's family, which Hoke believes is a prelude to some elaborate revenge scheme…

Major Whitely recruits him for an off-the-books, not entirely legal undercover operation. Someone has been killing Haitian day laborers and dumping their bodies in the Everglades. Hoke surrenders his gun, his badge, even his set of false teeth. For this assignment he is given only the name of a suspect and $8 in his wallet…

This is the fourth and final Hoke Moseley novel before the author's death in 1988. The various subplots are all over the place, weaving in and around each other, sometimes connecting but usually not. Despite being less than 250 pages long, it feels leisurely and meandering. It is a rumination on the various reasons people kill. Some kill for greed, some for hate, some for love, some for honor--but we all die the same.

Hoke remains very much an enigma, an embodiment of a machismo culture that has stunted his emotions. He does not understand why the sight of a neglected, severely disabled child makes him sick to his stomach. He is capable of killing men and dogs with barely a backward glance, but then he will put his life in danger to milk a goat "to give her some relief."

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Stephen Bowlby. 3 stars.

Unica Fine

Titolo profetico, questo dell'autore, che morirà subito dopo la pubblicazione.
Se solo ha vissuto metà delle situazioni del suo sergente Moseley - stando alla sua biografia, direi di sì -, allora è morto senza rimpianti e col sorriso a fior di labbra.

Un aspetto onesto e scanzonato delle sue storie è il modo in cui la quotidianità del protagonista convive con il giallo e il nero che spesso si trova a dover affrontare, senza per questo dover rispecchiare l'eroe senza macchia che molti sognano: come potrebbe esserlo, uno che
"Senza denti e con la barba grigia non rasata sul volto allungato, Hoke sembrava un barbone inselvatichito. Il sole gli strinava la schiena attraverso la camicia lisa, e in quel momento si sentiva assai riconoscente per il cappello di paglia da contadino con la visiera di plastica verde che gli proteggeva la pelata dai raggi diretti. Il sudore gli grondava lungo i fianchi, la camicia era madida e dentro i boxer si sentiva le palle fradice.".

Un'altra particolarità dell'autore è quella di saper creare sempre personaggi secondari caricaturali ma non improbabili, "attori" caratteristi a tutti gli effetti. Grazie ai loro piccoli interventi si resta sempre catturati dagli avvenimenti, anche quando manca l'azione a più riprese.

Inoltre Willeford, avendo imparato dalla realtà della vita, non chiude le sue storie. O meglio, le chiude, ma è solo una situazione che sta in coda alle altre, risparmia il lieto (o meno) fine a effetto, la quadratura del cerchio cara a tanti venditori di bestseller.
Come la Morte che l'ha portato via, però questa volta ci ha pensato lei a mettere la parola fine.

Se amate il genere e vi capita, leggete Willeford, qualcosa infilerà nelle vostre scarpe, anche solo per darvi fastidio.

CW doesn't strictly write crime fiction. It's all disgusting descriptions of food and people, repressed feelings of sexuality and desire, and digressions into the heavy personality of Miami and backwoods Florida. This is a fully formed world that is somehow realer than real. I was genuinely disturbed by the trailer park scene and the incident at the farm took me completely by surprise. His prose is great, spare but evocative. The characters are complex and full of warts. I really can't say enough good about this series. This book in particular would make for a wonderful film adaptation. This is the type of series that begs for future re-reads.

Great title---one of the best interextual noir spins on another title ever, in fact. Every time I think of Trollope (or John W. Aldridge, who copped THE WAY WE LIVE NOW from Trol), I think of Willeford, in the same way I can't think of "Stairway to Heaven" without conjuring the B-H Sufers' "Hairway to Steven." The novel itself is deceptively ramshackle. Subplots come and go, conflicts taper off, the prologue featuring the dastardly villain seems to have no relevance ... until, anyway, the hero is sent off on a secret undercover mission that involves a toothless henchman prodding what DeLillo would call his underworld. (No, the bad guys aren't TSA agents). The threat of homosexual rape that flushes through the bowels of noir gets a little tedious, but Willeford belonged to another generation in which that fear somehow clinched their masculinity precisely at the moment that they clenched. If the book seems a stroll rather than a beat-down, the knock-out uppercut comes in the final line, impeccably uttered by one of the hero's own daughters, which somehow manages to sum up every Hemingway-derived code hero ever created in a way that seems obvious and yet affecting. And what she says isn't "I love you, Daddypaddles."

comes close to rivaling the 1st book of the hokiad... really seems to raise the stakes somehow when he's forced to operate w/o his dentures, don't you think? there's an interesting ambiguity at the core of this one: more than ever you see the kinda viewpoints that remind you this char is a white cop in florida in the 1980s, & yet at a pivotal moment he basically does a mini harper's ferry on a guy who's keeping haitian laborers enslaved in the everglades. (was it in the name of justice, or was he just pissed about getting whaled on by the one-eyed guy? hoke's interiority is limited such that you could argue for either.) ending isn't what i'd call a cliffhanger per se but it seems clear this wasn't intended to be the end of the series. someone w/ a better command of florida geography than me better take a stab at #5 one of these days

Finished the four Hoke novels in record time (for someone with four jobs)! I loved this one a little more than a four-star review suggests, but at times this one seems disjointed and it really landed on the wrong foot (was Willeford ill when he finished it, I wonder?). THAT SAID, it contained almost everything I loved about the other three: great observation (social, psychological, departmental--of course), plenty of Hoke's eccentric thoughts and choices (who but Hoke would, with cracked ribs, a punctured chin, a bruised stomach, and the awareness of imminent death, pause to collect his thoughts while MILKING A GOAT), the usual "fear the cornhole" moment, and very, very unique humor. I missed the more thoroughly developed bad guys of the other three novels, but, if you loved the other three, you'll at least LIKE this one.

A "crime" novel that focuses on morality and character. Willeford finally hit paydirt with his Hoke novels, which this is the fourth and last as his heart attacked him and that was that. Elmore Leonard said, "No one writers a better crime novel." Whole portions of this book were not so much about crime as the threat of pernicious characters down there in Florida. There's limited blood and death but much atmosphere of bad things able to happen at any moment, with little control over them. A constant feeling of crime in the air and Hoke, in the middle of it, feeling unable or confused of how to combat it.

Wild. Another inventive Florida noir about life's punching bag Hoke Mosely, in which Hoke's actions and world are impossible to anticipate.

If there is a "problem" to the Hoke Mosely series, it's this: by being so unpredictable, Willeford dispenses with the tension his stories' events would otherwise garner. The reader has no confidence that anything at all will come from the wild scenarios that are set up, and so the books lack propulsion.

But they're unquestionably well-written and entertaining, and thoroughly unique.

Very long winded in his descriptions and the pace is very slow. I,m about a third through the book and i know all about his family life and not much else.

I believe this is the last of the four book Hoke Moseley series. Too bad , I’ve enjoyed the series. This one left some things unanswered but nothing serious. I enjoy the clear writing, characters, social situations and commentary on the times. The stories also show the underside of life in south Florida.