I really liked how Willeford pulled the book together at the end. Lots of really kooky characters doing kooky stuff. I won't go into detail, just know that you will be entertained. Waiting on the final chapter of this series. Read it, you won't be disappointed.

Now that I have finished all four of Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley novels, all I can say is that I wish the author had lived long enough to write more of them. Sideswipe is my favorite of the police procedurals set in Miami. Hoke is a police sergeant in homicide who is tired of his work, so he decides to live on an island north of the city where his wealthy father owns a number of properties. Parallel to the tale of Hoke's disenchantment is the tale of a retiree whose wife leaves him because he has been accused (falsely) of molesting a 9-year-old girl. (It was she who molested him.) In prison, he meets Troy Loudon, a criminal psychopath who is planning a heist.

Willeford gives us one chapter of Hoke followed by another with Stanley Sienkewicz, the retiree, until they come together at the end.

Unlike most police novels, Willeford's detective is decidedly soft-edged. He keeps his false teeth in a glass at night, and he must put up with his teenaged daughters who have been foisted on him by his ex-wife, who ran off with a rich ballplayer. And, at the beginning, he is also living with his police squad partner, a pregnant Cuban woman who was thrown out by her parents for having a child out of wedlock (BTW not fathered by Hoke).

A delightful book.

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.

Quite a build up to the end. Did not see the ending coming.

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

There is a good reason why the forward to this edition is written by Elmore Leonard, because fans of his work have probably never heard of Charles Willeford, and they should devour all his novels. This is the 3rd Hoke Moseley book, and is in similar fashion to the others - skewed perspectives, dopey fringe characters, humorous descriptions, and sudden bursts of violence. While this is filed under Mystery, there is little mystery to the plot - the plot lines develop separately, then violently collide, sputtering off into unexpected directions. If you are a fan of noir or simply good gumshoe writing, this series is something else.

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’.

Due storie che viaggiano parallele fino all’inevitabile ma necessario scontro.
Due storie che non potrebbero più diverse: una crisi di mezza età di un poliziotto che dice basta e se ne va a gestire un motel fuori città e un anziano finito in galera per sbaglio, raggirato da un figlio di puttana cazzutissimo che se ne va in giro con una spogliarellista sfigurata.
Un epilogo inaspettato, devastante come i colpi della doppietta usata per fare il famoso “colpo che ti mette a posto tutta la vita” ma che ogni volta si trasforma in uno spettacolo circense che si conclude in tragedia.
Charles Willeford che ancora una volta tesse, con le sue storie e i suoi dialoghi, una ragnatela perfetta che ti intrappola nel libro e non ti lascia andare fino alle battute finali.

Not the best of the Hoke Mosley novels, and you'll probably be lost if you begin here because the plots are somewhat serial. I'd recommend Miami Blues.

Parte bene, si arena nel centro e ha un finale troppo accelerato che finisce per togliere pathos al libro.

Poor fare. Meandered to the main event, which wasn't any great shakes either. Having read other Willefords this is the weakest by a street. Takes away from the Moseley canon considerably.

En udda deckare med karaktärer som sticker ut.

Detta är tredje boken i en serie och jag har inte läst de andra. Det var därför en speciell öppning när boken började med att huvudpersonen som är polis går in i väggen och bestämmer sig för att sluta och göra allt för att förenkla sitt liv. Den historien och parallell historierna är behållningen snarare än krimalberättelsen.