4.5*

What do broken fingers, Miami, an airhead, a haiku, missing dentures, stolen credit cards, a pawn shop, a Ritz cracker box and a guy nicknamed Junior all have in common? They are all part of Miami Blues, Charles Willeford’s first in the series of Hoke Moseley crime novels.

When thug Junior (aka Freddy Frenger) accidentally kills a man an airport by breaking his finger, the mystery of who did this is afoot, and the authorities are on it. Junior meets up with an airhead prostitute named Susan, and the two soon develop a “platonic” marriage. Susan is unaware of most of Junior’s past crimes. Junior soon devises his street smarts in hopes of staying ahead of authorities and possibly making a big score. Detective Hoke Moseley gets wind of this “airport incident”, an investigation ensues, and soon Moseley realizes that Junior has a lot more on his plate than this one incident. Things really get rolling once Detective Moseley gets attacked and winds up in the hospital with his mouth wired shut, his gun, badge and dentures all stolen. Moseley knows he has made plenty of enemies over the years, but what kind of psycho steals a man’s dentures?

Miami Blues was a mixed bag for me. I was wavering between 2 or 3 stars but ultimately gave it 3 stars because, by novel’s end, I could appreciate Moseley as a very flawed, but definitely gritty kind of detective. The cat and mouse game between Junior and Moseley in the second half was also engaging, especially as we head towards the conclusion through the seedy parts of Miami. Still, there were some aspects I didn’t really care for. Some of the details and dialogue were a bit mundane and didn’t give much in the way of building or moving the plot forward. Also, I thought the brand of odd humor and gritty viciousness was a strange mix and sort of distracting. Two of the lead characters, Susan and Junior (Freddy), were a bit underwhelming, and the novel focuses mainly on them, as they are on the run. Susan is sort of an airhead who latches onto Freddy even though it is clear he is one bad dude. Freddy was an underwhelming villain. The plot wavers between action-packed, bumbling and ridiculous, and the story is a bit dated, sometimes not in a necessarily good way.

Still, I can see how others liked this, and maybe it gets better in the next installment of the series, but I don’t think I’ll be moving on to see what is in store for old Hoke. Maybe someone can recommend something from Willeford outside this series.

In ending, I liked to offer a little haiku especially inspired by this novel:

Beware false badges
Junior causing havoc now
Moseley: game is on!

There is also a 1990 film with Alec Baldwin. I haven’t check it out yet, but it seems to have been given some favorable reviews from those who read this novel.

After landing in Miami, Freddy Frenger Jr. (or Junior as he prefers to be called) steals three wallets and begins to plan his new life. While leaving the airport he snatches a suitcase and leaves a corpse of a Hare Krishna behind. Detective Hoke Moseley is on the case; chasing Junior and his new hooker girlfriend through luxury hotels and the suburban streets of Miami.

If this sounds really familiar then you’ve probably seen the 1990 movie of the same name starring Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh. While there are some major differences to the two, the majority of the book is exactly the same. I’m a little disappointed when I found out this was the first in the Hoke Moseley series, because I always thought of the detective as a supporting role. In the movie Junior steals Moseley’s badge and starts pretending to be a cop to con people; this was the best part of the movie. Sadly in the book there isn’t much of that going on.

Charlies Williford is an author of fiction, poetry, an autobiography, and literary criticism but he is best known for his hard-boiled writing. I think it is weird that he was a poet and literary critic as well as pulp writer, but then again I really shouldn’t be. It’s just an interesting fact about the author. When you think 1980’s hard-boiled novels, Miami Blues is probably going to be one of the top nominations on that list. Charlies Williford was such a prolific writer, with over forty novels published, it is kind of sad that he is best known for the Hoke Moseley series that he wrote very late in his life. I wonder what some of his other books were like, there seems to be a whole lot of hard-boiled novels in the 1950’s and 1960’s that look interesting.

This book is an example of the noir sub-genre Florida glare which is basically a crime novel set in Florida where the heat and the culture play a role in the story as well. Noir is typically associated to LA and there have been some writers out there that wanted to depict Florida as the perfect location for crime stories as well. Some examples of this include the Travis McGee (by John D. MacDonald), Jack Ryan (by Elmore Leonard), and Dexter Morgan (by Jeff Lindsay) series and I’m sure many more. It is an interesting concept though do we really need another genre? I like how the heat of Florida plays a part in the book and the environment is almost like a supporting character.

This was a quick read and one of the rare cases where I think I prefer the movie over the book. I wonder if there are any more noir novels where a character pretends to be a cop in order to con people; I’m sure there are plenty out there, I like the concept and would like to read more of them. I think I’ll have to try another Charlies Williford, maybe something earlier. Does anyone want to recommend me a good Charlies Williford novel?

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...

an interesting idea from the elmore leonard introduction:
we had discovered that featuring bad guys as the central character was more fun than being stuck w/some good guy's p.o.v.--unless the good guy was hard to tell from the bad guy.

yes....diablo ex machinery.

onward and upward

okay so i'm 26% down...on the kindle.

willeford is a hoot...this story is a hoot. so this psycho (he acts normal, somewhat) out of prison heads to miami, ends up killing a hare krishna at the airport.

detective hoke mosely and his partner...bill henderson i think is his name...investigate.

the thing w/willeford, you learn snuff. like what is a krishna kricket? heh! i remember heading in to the san diego zoo, yay, verily all those years ago and this guy corrals me...had some beatle albums...the vinyl...yeah...long time passing.

i needed a krishna kricket!

and i guess miami is not on the ocean?

heh! i get into miami in the long ago, come across the glades....big mistake, going down u.s. 41--cause it's like home, man--bumper to bumper...they have an interstate now, but early 80s...whatever the road was, alligator alley or something...brings you into the part of town not frequented by tourist...anyway, miami is not on the ocean.

i think this one could easily become my favorite willeford story...anxious to see what ole freddie will do next.

update: finished, 8:54 p.m. est...
ole freddy...w/a "y" and not like i had it earlier...is a piece-of-work...

this is an entertaining story!

there's a multitude of characters...when the story-line is on the streets of miami (and the means the whole area down there---willeford makes distinctions, miami beach , other place names that have since slipped my mind...broward county just came back....) anyway, when the action moves around, you see other people.

i'd read this other story a bit ago, the butterfly conspiracy, and the action also takes place in chicago. well, i been there and there's people around, right, but in the story, seemed like the character was in a vacuum...not so w/willeford.

there's other people and that makes the story seem more real, like you're watching it on film....a lesson there...for me certainly. take it for what it's worth.

so...entertaining. no point in rehashing the story...crime...freddy the ex-con, psycho...a girl that's too-honest for her own good though she does right at the right moment...hoke. heh!

and it read quick, i'd say, as i started this earlier today...

and what else?....said you learn things earlier...heh heh! yep! seems like there was some other tidbits i picked up though they've slipped my mind at the moment...i'll go back through my bookmarks--reading on the kindle does have that advantage--and see what else. nothing mind-numbing...there was one phrase that was new to me. that's the other thing about willeford i've discovered...one does read/come-across different expressions one might not read elsewhere.

good read...onward and upward

charles willeford has to be the hungriest writer ever... every single page is chock full of descriptions of peoples' meals...

Willeford creates a memorable psychopath in Frederick J. Frenger. Although detective Hoke Moseley is the ostensible protagonist, evil Freddy is much more interesting. (Incidentally, he made me think of one of inspector Rebus' adversaries, I think it was the one from Question of Blood; I wouldn't be surprised if Rankin is familiar with Willeford's work.)
It's not so much Freddy's capacity for violence that is interesting as his curious mix of sly premeditation and thoughtless blundering, and the deep lack of purpose that turns out to underlie his seemingly purposeful trajectory.
Quotes like this are rather hilarious from the mouth of a man responsible for numerous murders:

Hitting the unconscious man had given him no pleasure; he still didn’t know why the cop in Santa Barbara had tapped him with the sap. Policemen undoubtedly had some kind of inborn perverted streak that normal men like himself didn’t have.

But it's not so much that he's smug. It's more that he is looking for a purpose in life – and he does it with the methodical rigour of the American self improvement literature.
Or this look into his 'soul':

My problem is that I can have everything and anything I want, but what do I want?
He didn’t want anything, including the cigarette he had thought he wanted. What did he want? Nothing. In prison he had made mental lists of all kinds of things he would get when he was released, ranging from milk shakes to powder blue Caddy convertibles. But he didn’t like milk shakes because of the furry aftertaste, and a convertible in Florida would be too uncomfortably hot—unless he kept the top up and the air conditioning going full blast. So who would want a convertible?

Or this philosophical rumination:

He had turned selflessness to self-interest, learning the lesson that everyone must come to eventually: what a man gives up voluntarily cannot be taken away from him.

The problem is that Willeford hardly provides little to balance these views. As a result the novel's moral center is rather diffuse, and Freddy's outlook sometimes seems to coincide with Willeford's. When he writes that 'Freddy reviewed his life and realized that altruism had been his major fault', the problem is that to some extent the narrative tends to prove Freddy right: from Freddy's viewpoint and with his autistic logic, it is indeed Freddy's peculiar brand of 'altruism' that does get him in trouble.
Besides, Willeford seems to be looking for a plot as much as Freddy is looking for a purpose. The story is rather rambling and lacking in direction – there are rather a lot of coincidences and nothing very clever or ingenious in the way of plot development. (This relative lack of direction, incidentally, is also something which this book shares with the Rebus thrillers, in my opinion.)

In addition to which, the dialogues are sometimes a little contrived, a little flat. Certainly not as dropdown realistic as those of George V. Higgins, and not as wry and funny as the best I've read of Elmore Leonard or (a totally different kind of author) Ross Macdonald. They're often okay and sometimes quite good. But sometimes they're just stale, especially the talks of detective Moseley with his colleagues.
And there is the occasional false note in charactarization. E.g. when I read that 'the tall unfinished buildings in Kendall Pines Terrace reminded Hoke of the Roman apartment houses he had seen in Italian neorealist movies', I think: how did Moseley suddenly get interested in 'Italian neorealist movies', let alone the terminology to categorize those movies as such? Otherwise he's not depicted as someone with very intellectual tastes. In fact, apart from the usual signs of the messed up private life that is the stock-in-trade of many crime fiction detectives, his character doesn't become very vivid at all.

So all in all I found this a rather disappointing novel. I was pleasantly surprised by Willeford's Pick Up because it had some surprises in store that really caught me unawares, and because it was obviously so much better written than what I'd expect of pulp. But maybe he's not quite the sophisticated author I though I'd discovered.

Incidentally, it is interesting again to note in this novel how deeply modern technology has influenced the plots of crime fiction. One wonders how this will impress future readers. Take this sentence: 'Hoke checked his mailbox.' Had the novel been written about 20 years later, the meaning would have been entirely different. But will a reader 100 years from now still realize this?

“I just want to go back to Okeechobee. All I’ve had is trouble of some kind or other ever since I came down here. What I’d say, if you asked me about Miami, I’d say it’s not a good place for a single girl to be”--Sally Waggoner, a call-girl who had an abortion of a fetus conceived with her brother Marty, who was just killed in his work as a Hare Krishna, begging money at the Miami Internatioal Airport.

After reading the beautiful but anguished Wallander series by Henning Mankell, and seeing the BBC film series adaptation ending in tears, I was looking for a few books that were lighter, older, books I had never read that were seen by readers in the mystery/ detective/noir genre as classics, and this came up. I’ve already read Ride the Pink Horse and Fat City, both great but neither of which are a relief from the existential despair of Wallander. I wasn’t looking for screwball level funny, but just something relatively light.

So Miami Blues, by Charles Willeford sort of fit the bill; it’s kinda sleazy-lite, with some real police work and a few laughs, featuring ex-con Junior Frenger and Susan Waggoner, a community college student putting herself through school as a call girl, through which she meets Junior. These two are great, entertaining characters, not the brightest lights on the tree, let’s say, but not completely cartoon characters, either. The writing is really good, actually.

This might be offensive to some of you, I warn you, but I found it funny: Junior moves in with Susan, but gets a little jealous of Pablo, her pimp: “Did you have sex with him before you started working for him?!” “No, no! Well, I did give him a blow job, and then he gave me SO MANY many tips! Boy, that Pablo knows a LOT! But no, no sex.”

Junior insists that they have a “platonic” relationship, though they do have sex regularly with each other. Neither of them know what the word “platonic” means.

The book opens with Junior, arriving to Miami from California where he was in prison, meeting the annoying Hare Krishna brother in the airport, bending his finger back on him. Marty goes into shock, has a heart attack, and dies. Then Junior meets Susan, who actually takes him along to her community college English class, where they are studying haiku. After she has to identify her brother’s body, she doesn’t seem that upset, until class time approaches:

“After everything that has happened, I was afraid my teacher was going to make us write a haiku.”
“That’s okay,” Junior says. “I’ll write it for you, and then i’ll explain it to you in case he asks you about it.”

The detective in the novel is Hoke Moseley, another pretty much loser. He has false teeth, which get thrown out of the window a couple times. He’s divorced, broke, living in a flop house. He’s featured in a series of novels, I guess, but is so far less interesting than the two hapless villains. In the end, Hoke catches up to the fact that it was Junior who had done the finger-bending, and Susan finally learns this, too. And so, this supposedly dumb hooker? Well, let’s just say in the last chapter there’s a couple amusing surprises.

So it’s a good book! It does what it sets out to do, to entertain! I’ll check out the second in the series before I return to gloom and doom.

Well written & an entertaining read. Just not AMAZING!

I'll likely read the other 4 books in this series, but I'm in no hurry to do so.

Not being a fan of series, i can't help but think this book would have been better if the effort put into writing all 5 books in the series, were condensed into one outstanding novel rather than diluted into 5.

Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley series starts off with a bang, it's a strange and twisted and outrageously funny at times bang too. His protagonist is a strange beast of a detective with all kinds of odd quirks and is a supporting character to the newly released criminal who spends the entire novel compulsively lying and cheating and making some of the craziest decisions you might expect to find in an Elmore Leonard criminal farce.

Willeford packs out the cast with some wonderfully drawn characters who feel completely authentic to the time and place (whether they are or not I will obviously never know having not lived in Miami in the early 80s) and despite the existential nature of the two leads the supporting cast are used to great comic effect. My personal favourite being the jaded college tutor who abuses his pathetic students to their face and readily admits to preparing for his lectures in a nearby bar.

With Miami Blues I have discovered has a unique voice in the noir field, different even to Willeford's earlier pulp novels, from the first page he had me grinning and despite some lag in pacing towards the middle this is clearly the work of an author with a lifetime of experience under his belt.

My first author re-read of the year due to a delay in shipping times for a few books I had ordered. A friend of mine called out an insecurity of mine that I am not reading enough woman and trans authors so it feels kind of funny to post another male author—and Willeford is a particularly masculine writer—knowing that I will be reading more women but haven’t received the shipment yet. Anyhow, this is a great book, I would love to adapt it into a film. It’s very funny, the prose gives you some insight into the characters. It’s got the tone of Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and even bits of Uncut Gems—in the sense that the villain is on a nonstop path of self destruction pushing con after con with no need game in sight and the hero isn’t a much better person. Willeford writes a different kind of crime book, more of a character study where we see a lot of the characters being people, not just playing cat and mouse. He’s an economical writer, doing a lot with relatively spare language and effectively plays with noir tropes like giving the characters doses of casual misogyny in the right places to comment on what type of person that character is. Willeford is a fantastic easy read for anyone who likes detective/crime/noir fiction. I’ll probably check the other books out in this series, so don’t be surprised if his name reappears a few more times throughout this year of reading. -
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tl;dr—Great, easy reading crime fiction that is better than it has any right to be. Big recommend.

I devoured this gritty tale of cops and bad guys. It’s a tightly plotted, kinetic tale, full of screeching twists and turns, all set in sweltering Miami heat in the 1980s. If you like noir, you will love this book.

This is a real find. Charles Willeford is a precursor of Carl Hiaasen, John D McDonald, and Tim Dorsey.
I found out about him on a podcast with Dorsey.
Hoke Mosley is the Miami Detective Sergeant we follow...but the protagonist is the crook Freddy Frenger. His crime streak is awe inspiring, and author Willeford’s attention to detail is terrific.
These characters and the 1970’s Miami make for a huge treat. Find this guy’s books.
Four jimmys out of five