Hey, I'm not crazy on detective series, or any series for that matter, especially trilogies. Yawn. With a few exceptions I'd rather avoid them. But this...this... is different. Hoke Moseley is one of the best characters ever created in fiction, by anybody. Many of Willeford's characters are.
The guy was a hecking genius, no mistake.

This one features Moseley nearing the end of his career, burnt out and fed up, planning on bailing out of the Miami PD. to kick things off, he has a kind of fugue and decides to not go back to work. From here, it's a 'gators crawl with Willeford exploring Hoke's options. Sure, it's slow, but it's never, ever boring. In fact, it might be slow, but it's also pacey. Meanwhile Stanley "Pop" Sinkiewincz, who may or may not be the same Stanley Sinkiewincz in 1953's The High Priest of California, winds up in gaol for a crime he didn't commit, his wife leaves him he and hooks up with charming psychopath Troy Louden, a disfigured hooker and a talent-less artist from the Caribbean and these chapters are really something.

Eventually the two alternating stories link up but it's not how they link up that's interesting -- you assume the linking is a given -- it's the ending. The climax, which is the actual crime that makes this a 'crime novel' is so shockingly violent that it's kind of unexpected, though I should have expected it.

But it's not the action, it's the minutiae of the characters lives, the microscopic dissection, the top draw dialogue and quirkiness that makes Sideswipe, and Willeford himself, stand tall.

Sideswipe is a darkly funny novel. Charles Willeford had a talent for taking the mundane and the inept and, with deadpan prose spinning a beautifully nasty story. Willeford develops his characters slowly and powerfully. As a middle-aged man myself, I have huge sympathy for Hoke and his midlife crisis. His mother-in-law's desire to get him out of the house so that her friends don’t see the pants he has urinated in is at best shallow and at worst deeply unfair.

Willeford’s eye for the very day humour of situations and criminal ineptness is compelling. My only regret is the speed at which the novel closed, after such a long slow buildup I was left feeling just a little cheated.

Read a little more here: https://crimebooks.uk/?books=sideswipe

I love this series. The writing is terrific, funny and occasionally shocking in a crass way. I must have laughed out loud ten times and the audiobook is excellent.

Terzo capitolo della saga del detective Hoke Moseley.

This was the third book in the series and was another interesting but different read. Not a strong 5 but I am enjoying the series.

Hoke continues to have personal issues and is not able to simplify his life.
I liked the way Willeford brought this story together.

I felt like I was reading a crime fiction novel written by Raymond Carver. Melancholic crime fiction? I don't know if Sideswipe can be classified as a crime fiction novel. After Willeford achieved success with Miami Blues, he really cranked it up a few notches, wrote the novels that he wanted to write. Hoke Moseley is the exact opposite of a tough cop. He seems to be resigned to his fate, stops talking to his police partner and daughter and moves back in with his father who gives him a job managing a vacation resort sort of place.

But Moseley springs into action when a suave, smooth talking barbarian carries out violent robberies of department stores. The character of the barbarian is described from the point of view of an aging middle class drone who finances his most ambitious operation (mostly to find some kind of excitement in what has been a dull life). So we are not really sure if his narrative is completely reliable.

The best Charles Willeford novel I have read so far.

No wonder Elmore Leonard loved Chales Willeford's work.

If you are a fan of Willeford, one of the most underrated of crime novelists in America, despite the films ("Cockfighter," and "Miami Blues") made from his work, then this novel will appeal to you. There is irreverent humor that will make the book and its story vivid and immediate for interested readers. If you have never encountered Willeford, "Miami Blues" might be a good place to start. It's too bad there aren't more Hoke Moseley novels, for his account of life as a Miami detective is true to its era (1980s Reagan America) and to the craft of good novel-writing. The characters, one of whom is a sociopath who really knows his own psychology, are a rich array of the citizens of a city that has changed a great deal in the decades since Charles Willeford made it come alive. Quirky, with a restless intellect ever at play, Willeford is, like Jim Thompson, a writer only America and its ironies could have produced.

I know that it is time to reassess just how police/crime novels function in the second decade of the 21st century, for the policeman is, even if honest and enlightened, still a source of justifiable fear to many Americans. Hoke Moseley is no racist cop, however, just a clear-eyed (and honest) portrayal of what it means to want to enhance justice rather than dispense it as a sometimes murderous corrective. Hope that's not too vague, and I would be willing to engage in a discussion with anyone else who realizes that some police procedurals are overdue to be re-assessed in light of the events of police "overzealousness" and displaced fear leading to outright murder of ordinary citizens during a period that has gone on too long. Willeford does not glorify police excesses in any way, and I think instead offers some insight to what makes law enforcement such a chancy and disordered proposition in our society.

Enjoyable read although nothing much happens.

Another entertaining Moseley "thriller". I read that Willeford didn't want to write any sequels to Miami Blues but, the fact that it was a hit, put pressure on him to write more. I think Willeford got around it by subverting the genre and writing a different kind of book for each volume.

This time around, the first book is almost like a family drama until the last 1/3 which, after a particularly bloody holdup, gets to the business of detecting. This might put some people off, but Willerford's writing and characterizations always keep me reading.

In at least one respect this book reminded me of what a critic once said of Jane Austen's work, and I paraphrase: nothing much happens for page after page but you keeping wanting to turn them. Mr. Willeford, like his friend, Elmore Leonard, had a gift for storytelling. Leonard is quoted on Sideswipe's dust jacket as saying, "Nobody writes a better crime novel," which is no mean praise, considering the source. But I might use the example of Sideswipe to go a step further. Nobody writes a better story. Sideswipe is another of Willeford's Hoke Mosley yarns but unlike Miami Blues there isn't a lot going on for much of the novel's length, no real crime to speak of. Instead, Willeford engages in character study. On the one hand he has a burn-out cop looking to simplify his life and on the other a self-described criminal psychopath looking to complicate his own. That these two will come into violent contact is as certain as the turning of the earth, but Willeford is not in a hurry and because he has the gift, neither is the reader.

Più una satira sulla vita in Florida negli anni '80 che un noir.Divertente e caustico.