Nice n squalid

I feel the need to review this because a friend recommended this book to me and I feel bad for giving it only 2 stars but I have reasons. I would say it's more of a 2.5 almost 3 star than a low 2 but I can't give half stars so there you go.
First I'd like to say I read a lot of crime/mystery novels so it's not the entire genre I don't like. I've heard this classified as noir and while I have pretty much no idea what that is I can say maybe its not for me? I've also watched movies that people said were "noir" and I didn't enjoy those either.
So far this is the 3rd Hoke Moseley novel I've read and the main thing that makes it hard to get through each book is he is an a**hole. However so is every single other person in the story. I guess being surrounded by a**holes after awhile you become one. Or maybe they just act like a**holes around him. Who knows. Either way, it's hard to care about any of the characters in the story. The could all get loaded onto a bus and drove off a cliff and I wouldn't feel a thing.
This story held my attention more than the other books because of Stanley. Idk why I felt so invested in what happened with him because he was also a terrible a**hole of a person- from the introduction he was poisoning neighborhood dogs because he was attacked as a child and now has a fear. From that point on so much weird s**t happens to him I found myself speeding through the parts with Hoke to get back to what was going on with Stanley. I even eventually almost felt bad for him.
To me the thing that is lacking in this series is that it's written with little to no emotion. There is a lot of telling instead of showing. It makes it hard to get sucked into the book and not want to put it down unless you make the person feel like they are actually there in the story. Maybe it's just me, other people seem to enjoy this series a lot.

4.5 stars. The plot of this third Hoke Mosely novel goes nowhere in a hurry, but that was fine with me. It's more of a character study, as Hoke suffers a midlife crisis and returns to his boyhood home on leave, aiming to simplify his life by cutting out everyone and everything he can. Alternating chapters follow a lonely elderly gentleman who seems harmless enough as he becomes entangled with, and bizarrely attached to, a psychotic criminal. Of course their paths eventually cross, though very late in the game, with a denouement that quickly comes full circle on a number of loose plot threads and is bittersweet and deeply poignant. I read these Hoke Moseley books a bit out of order, and this was the last one I had left unread. I finish it with a bittersweet feeling myself, wishing that Willeford had written more than just the four.

Imagine this: adding Grape-Nuts to a sieve so you can run hot water to soften them up so you can eat them without putting in your false teeth; then gumming them at the dining room table while reading the sports section. Hoke, a homicide investigator lives with his partner Ellita who has the unbearable habit of letting the egg yolks run through her teeth. Ellita, who is pregnant, helps with the rent and the care of Hoke two teenage daughters.

Shades of Ed McBain, the writing, I mean. Hoke gets fed up with trying to solve an interminable number of cold cases that seem to be forever piling up on his desk. He retreats into a catatonic state, finally decides to chuck it all, and leaves for his father's place on Riviera Beach. He has decided he wants the simple life. Right. We all know there is no such thing, and soon his bulimic daughter (recognized as such only by a neighbor) comes to visit (she gets shipped off to his ex,) he's having to deal with the myriad problems as manager of his father's apartment building (he gets free rent in one of the apartments) and Ellita calls for help in dealing with her mother's thoughts on amniocentisis.

A side plot (never fear, the two will intersect) involves a retired Ford employee falsely accused of molesting his neighbor's daughter, a problem that's soon rectified but not before Stanley meets Troy in jail who has a scheme to make lots of money, also involving a painter and a former stripper whose face was mutilated by her boss.

Enough of the plot. You can find that elsewhere. Hoke soon realizes that the simple life is effervescent.

First rate story and writing by a master. Mislabeled as a thriller, though, unless impending disaster provides you with the sense of thrill. An engrossing, very enjoyable story. If you like McBain, Moseley, Leonard, et al, you'll very much like Williford.

I enjoy Willford's writing style, lean, mean and never out of steam. His handling of his female characters is dated, even by the 80's standards. Maybe that was intentional.

Quite the banger of an ending to the book.

Detective-Sergeant Hoke Moseley suffers a mental breakdown, quits the Miami PD and heads to remote Singer Island to recuperate at his dad’s house and try his hand at a new, seemingly less-stressful career as a property manager. Meanwhile, retiree Stanley Sinkiewicz accidentally gets himself thrown in jail where he meets charismatic psychopath Troy Louden who ropes him into his web of crime and moider…

Charles Willeford’s Sideswipe is a journey. A very, very slow-burning journey where you wait and you wait and you wait for the two storylines to sync up, as you know they inevitably will - Hoke’s a cop, Troy’s a robber - but it takes the entire length of the novel until they do and then things are quickly wrapped up in the last 25 pages or so! I still say it was a worthwhile journey to take though.

Hoke’s storyline is definitely the least interesting out of two not particularly interesting storylines - at least to start with. He has his breakdown - which I’m sure is realistic; PTSD/mental breakdowns probably do come out of the blue and strike hard - then goes to convalesce at his dad’s place and begin his new life. But nothing that exciting happens at Singer Island.

At some point he helps solve the case of the burglaries at his dad’s wife’s apartment complex (considering she’s nearly his age, “stepmother” is a stretch), otherwise he’s doing diddly-squat for almost the entire novel. Still, as easy to put down as the novel was, it’s a credit to Willeford’s writing ability that I never considered abandoning it because the chapters always contained moments of uniquely surprising oddity and amusement.

Like the fact that Hoke decides, to simplify his life more, he’ll buy a pair of yellow poplin jumpsuits to wear - to cut down on the laundry, of course! Just the image alone of this maniac going about his days wearing yellow jumpsuits made me smile. And then later on his teenage daughter Aileen comes to stay with him - yeah, he just abandons his two daughters in Miami with his preggo partner, because that’s what you did in the ‘80s - and he finds out she’s bulimic but he doesn’t know what that means so he freaks out and sends her packing on a red eye to California where “the nuns'' will straighten her out (and amazingly they do!).

It’s just unexpectedly funny like that. And Hoke comes across some odd tenants like academic Itai (named after the Japanese word for “hurt”) who’s meant to be writing a novel but is really fascinated with horseflies.

The best part of the novel is when Troy is introduced after a similarly absurd episode lands hapless Stanley in the slammer temporarily. Willeford writes charismatic psychos superbly, like he did in Miami Blues, and Sideswipe is no exception. Troy’s charming and you can see why Stanley valued him so quickly as a friend, but he’s also very unpredictable and extremely violent at times. He’s a very compelling character to read about.

I liked how each time Stanley would meet Troy he would get dragged further and further into his dark criminal lifestyle but also didn’t mind it because they genuinely get along and retirement was clearly boring to Stanley. The novel became more engrossing the more Stanley stayed in Troy’s world and the supermarket heist is a helluva exciting chapter.

While the way Willeford wrote about Hoke’s PTSD at the start seemed realistic, Hoke just happens to snap out of it when he’s needed back in Miami to help catch Troy - is that realistic? I honestly don’t know but it seems a little convenient from a narrative perspective. One minute he can’t move out of his chair and is practically catatonic, the next he’s back to his old self, running a complex investigation. Hmm.

Sideswipe wasn’t as good as Miami Blues - which is seeming more and more a one-off firecracker of a book - but if you don't mind a very slow narrative/you’re a very patient reader, it’s worth checking out. Basically Sideswipe is a Willeford fans-only read.

“What's going to happen to me, Sergeant?"
"Hell, Pop," Hoke said, not unkindly, "except for the paperwork, it already has.”

following the botched supermarket heist things get real anticlimactic real fast, but willbro's command of what i would classify as "sad bachelor stuff" (games of solitaire; adding extra onions to canned stew; shooting the breeze with the downstairs neighbor about horseflies; having strong opinions about the best & worst stouffers frozen entrees) remains unrivaled. gotta love as well the perversity of a crime novel where the detective makes just wildly wrong deductions (lol @ concluding that stanley's spent his life in prison). on to moseley #4!

Weakest Hoke story so far.

Didn't finish it.

Protagonist is a cop who has a nervous breakdown thinking about all the cold case files he's in charge of.

Luckily he has a rich dad who has a low stress job (and lodgings) being an apartment manger lined up for him. He attempts to abandon his two daughters and try to live a life of as little responsibility as possible but the younger daughter comes to live with him anyway.

Meanwhile an old retiree gets a second chance at life when his wife leaves him and he gets mixed up with a self proclaimed psychopath criminal.

I just couldn't get invested enough in these characters to make it past the first half of the book.

love these books. this one might be my favorite.Hoke Moseley's my hero! i'm sad there's only one more!

Hoke Moseley truly is a one of a kind protagonist and Sideswipe is his most uniquely Willefordian case yet. A detective novel where the crime occurs in the last chapter, that alternates between the plotting of a heist and the workings of a policeman are not exactly rare you might say but in the hands of Charles Willeford this generic plot takes on a whole new life.

Instead of intricate details of who goes where and when, a recce of the bank in question and potential getaway routes led by a criminal mastermind we are treated to the chess like machinations of a criminal psychopath as seen through the eyes of a clueless Florida retiree.

And anybody who's picked up a Hoke Moseley novel will happily tell you that Hoke is no hero cop, no genius detective, no gumshoe with keen insight in to the criminal mind, Hoke is a middle aged man without any teeth currently going through a midlife crisis as he faces up to living with his two teenaged daughters and his former detective partner currently eight months pregnant, all the while being inundated with mind numbing desk work.

The majority of the novel then is NOT your typical pulp crime shenanigans; it is a treatise on how two men are lost in an America changing beyond their recognition or their abilities to cope, there's an affecting look at how family can mean many different things to different people and can be made up of many different people not just those you are born to, and yet Hoke is still a decent cop who does some solid work when not wearing yellow jumpsuits and moonlighting as an apartment manager to avoid responsibilities.

The invention of Stanley the retired automotive worker is a particular high point for me, the poor clueless guy who just wants to find a place for himself in society with what's left of his life has a true innocence to the way he sees the world and the way he is introduced to the reader is the work of a genius. Willeford twists and turns the reader around in that opening chapter until it ends with a full on "holy fuck, did that really just happen?!" moment. Willeford was a prolific and much respected author but this has to be right up there with his finest moments, and probably the finest moments ever captured in crime fiction.