A weridly great book, best of the Moseley series (so far, I've got one to go). Willeford has such a curious way of describing the detailed non-events of Moseley's life in a way that, while not fascinating, exactly, nevertheless compel one to keep reading. It's like he has a way of writing about what seems like nothing at all that includes an implicit promise of something exciting on the way.

This book is two stories in alternating chapters, one with Moseley giving up detective work do attempt doing absolutely nothing with his life, which he finds isn't as easy as he hoped, the other about an oldish retiree who meets a criminal with big plans. That half of the story is classic hilarious Willeford. Reminded me of the delusional protagonists of The Burnt Orange Heresy and The Woman Chaser.

So one waits for these two stories to intersect, and they do, to great effect. This isn't really a crime novel in any normal sense, and it isn't really noir. It's just... Willeford.

Both parallel threads of this novel seem to meander, never seeming to move the story forward. But don't be deceived—the two unrelated narratives come together in a crashing climax. Halfway through the book the action starts building momentum so slowly the reader is not fully aware that the story is moving forward at breakneck speed by the last two chapters.

Interestingly enough, the book is a rewrite of an earlier Willeford novel No Experience necessary, or at least the Pop Sinkiewicz half.

This is the third book in Charles Willeford's excellent series featuring Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. As the book opens, Hoke, although still only in his forties, wakes up to a full-blown mid-life crisis. He's completely unable to function irrespective of his responsibilities to his two teenage daughters who live with him, to his department, and to his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is eight months pregnant (not by Hoke) and who also lives in Hoke's home.

Unable to cope, Hoke takes a leave of absence from his job and retreats to Singer Island, where his wealthy father lives. He takes a job running a small apartment building for his father and swears that he will never leave the island again.

In the meantime, Stanley Sinkiewicz, an elderly retiree who has moved to Florida from Detroit has a brush with the law and, although he is completely innocent, he is briefly forced to share a jail cell with a man claiming to be Robert Smith.

"Smith" is really a psychopathic career criminal named Troy Louden. He has a gift for reading people and immediately pegs Stanley for the sad, lonely man he is at heart. Louden befriends Stanley, schooling him in the way to best deal with the authorities, and before long, Stanley is convinced that Troy is his new best friend.

Louden is desperately hoping to have the charges against him dropped before a fingerprint check is returned and the police discover his real identity. To this end, he asks Stanley to do him a "small favor" once he is released, and, totally won over by his new buddy, the old man agrees. The ploy works and Louden, now free, enlists Stanley to help him pull off a big job he is planning.

Meanwhile, Hoke Mosley is discovering that it's a lot harder to simplify his life than he had hoped. His father is determined to help him get a new job with the local police force, although Hoke has absolutely no interest in the job. His younger daughter joins him on the island further complicating matters, and the tenants in the apartment house generally prove to be a major pain in the butt.

The Mosley story and the Stanley/Louden story proceed along parallel tracks and for a while the reader is left to wonder how Willeford is ever going to link them up. But it really doesn't matter because both stories are very entertaining.

Willeford has populated this book with a number of unique and very interesting characters and between the lines, he has a great deal to say about the nature of family and about the workings of the capitalist system in the United States. All in all, it's a very entertaining book that should appeal to large numbers of readers.

Midlife crisis and murder

The Hoke Moseley novels are about a detective, but they are not novels in the detective genre. Charles Willeford never dangles any clues or misdirection in front of the readers, and the actual crime that needs to be solved doesn't happen until the tail end of the book. Instead, he holds the readers interest with remarkably vivid portraits of his characters, various locales in Miami area and of course the themes he brings up (How easily decent (but gullable) people can sometimes be turned to crime, the american dream, sub-urban life, modern art, mid-life crisis, public education, etc.). Charles keeps a swift pace and never lingers on any one particular issue, always rewarding the readers with more interesting tid-bits to chew on, but admittedly, readers accustomed to more formulaic crime novels will be left in the cold (not only does the crime only happen at the end of the book, but for the majority of the novel Hoke is on leave from the force and very intent on never coming back). This novel challenges the conventions of the set formulas and challenges the reader (if only so slightly), but hey, I would expect nothing less from a literary-genre novel.

One of four Hoke Mosely novels, Elmore Leonard wrote of Willeford: "No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford." I'd add, no one writes so genre-bending. Read the generic review to get the set up for this tale. And just know, that Willeford cuts back and forth between the story of Troy Louden's seduction of a simple retiree into a supermarket burglery scheme with Hoke Moseley's midlife crisis and the family dynamics of the Moseley family.

Willeford centers character in his tales, while writing from an almost deadpan neutrality seemingly avoiding any sense of emotionality. And in this one, the crime doesn't happen till page 235 of a 279 page novel. It's almost as if the crime were tangential to the story Willeford is really wanting to tell. And when he gets to the crime, his clinical tone of narrative doesn't change while detailing the absolute carnage that if filmed would most resemble of Quentin Terantino film! That doesn't mean this novel is any the less engrossing! I devoured it over the course or two days while being very busy visiting family in NYC!

Charles Willeford is the king of the zags--you might have a guess that some of the characters in the story are going to meet up in a climactic event, but you really don't see it coming, at least if you're me. These books are really something special.

Absolutely excruciating read and honestly I think what's so weird about these books is how they seemingly would not work but there's just such an attention to detail and with regards to character's situations and mental states that it all weirdly works. Do not read any of the plot summaries for this book. It's so strange how literally the entire plot occurs within about the last 30 pages and the rest of it is just this slow and agonising build-up, juxtaposing Hoke Moseley's perpetual mid-life crisis and his inability to ever truly cope with the world, with a bunch of inept criminals planning to get some cash by planning a heist on a supermarket and yeah. Both stories have such little to do with each other until inevitably they wind up intersecting but it's also just so revealing in terms of their juxtaposition and just how Moseley's own life is filled with such overwhelming weight on top of him being utterly clueless with regards to his own detective work.

Also god, like the way that Willeford just seemingly manages to introduce colourful characters out of the blue and how he's able to establish people within a couple of paragraphs or say. One character is called Itai which is Japanese for 'painful' and there's bits in this that almost suffocate you with the amount of detail that it has. Like yeah, there's also Moseley suddenly developing panic attacks and also him trying to come to terms with his teenage daughter suffering from an eating disorder, very revealing in terms of how he goes on about Jane Fonda and Karen Carpenter as having suffered from them, from what he can recall. If Sherlock Holmes is the master of deductive reasoning then Hoke Mosely is the antithesis of that - someone who is very easily distracted and has very little clue of how to properly contextualise nor process the information he's given or surrounding him. There's a lot of parts in this which ride this absolutely razor thin line between being absolutely grim and horrific yet also kind of comic in terms of the absurdity of it - there's a bit in this involving the movie Ghostbusters that immensely fits this bill. You'll know what I mean when you get to that part. Really can't ruin too many of the surprises in this book.

See, these books always kind of work in some understated way and just the lack of pretence in the writing and the astonishing and often amusing juxtaposition that forms in them. There's nothing idealistic here - just cold, hard, inexplicable reality, along with people and systems that can barely function around it. Probably not the most approachable Willeford book (would recommend Miami Blues to start off with, honestly) but it's nevertheless very colourful and self-assured in its storytelling.

Un detective della Squadra Omicidi di Miami esaurito che cerca di riciclarsi come amministratore di condominio, un pensionato che vuole ridare un po' di smalto alla propria insulsa vita, un criminale psicopatico e i suoi improbabili complici che tentano il colpo della vita. Abbiamo visto questo copione (anni dopo) nei migliori film di Tarantino. Qui lo si legge con grande gusto, soprattutto per il personaggio di Hoke Moseley, in perfetto stile hard boiled con le sue tute in popeline, lupo che perde il pelo ma non il vizio di fiutare il crimine anche sotto lo spesso strato di benessere di Miami Beach. Gustosissimo l'affresco della società WASP di pensionati che hanno scelto le lottizzazioni costiere della Florida come ultimo, noiosissimo rifugio.

This was my first Charles Willeford novel and I really enjoyed his writing style which reminded me of Donald E. Westlake, Elmore Leonard and Joe R. Lansdale.

The story focuses on a detective having a mid-life crisis and taking a leave of absence to go and live with his father on a tranquil Florida island to de-stress. There is a parallel tale of an elderly gentleman who is innocently locked up with a convicted felon and they strike up an unlikely friendship which ends up with the felon taking him on his next heist, which doesn't quite go according to plan.

These seemingly unrelated stories are brilliantly brought together in a violent, climatic couple of chapters at the end of the novel. Mr Willeford turns the formulaic crime novel on its head by putting the crime at the end of the book and using the first three quarters to develop the characters and go into minutiae detail about their lives, such as how the detective cheats at monopoly and how he likes to make beef stew!

This is quirky, zany, off-beat crime fiction at its best with engaging characters and an absurd story but which I really enjoyed. I'm looking forward to reading other books by this talented author.

This Hoke Moseley series is unexpectedly funny and unique. Good Read.

At the tail end of a long writing career, Willeford catapaulted to newfound fame with his four Hoke Moseley novels beginning with Miami Blues. What was it about this series that found new audiences for Willeford’s work? Lawrence Block in the introduction says that “Willeford wrote quirky books about quirky characters, and seems to have done so with a magnificent disregard for what anyone else thought.” Moseley is an odd hero for a police detective series. He is a prematurely-balding denture-wearing 43-year-old, divorced, and just has an odd lookout in life.

That odd lookout stands out quite clearly in “Sideswipe” which begins with Hoke having a nervous breakdown from dealing with too many cold cases, caring for his two teenage daughters who his ex-wife had shipped to him on the greyhound bus when she married a professional ballplayer who was not interested in having her kids around, and watching over his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is on maternity leave and living with him and his daughters in a suburban house he managed to borrow from a possible murderess since he needed a stable homestead. This fine day Hoke wakes up, gets the paper, sits in his chair on the back patio, and does not get up or say a word for hours. When he is shipped off to Singer Island where his father, Frank Moseley lives with second wife Helen, Hoke decides maybe he has had enough of everything and wants to simplify his life. He decides he is never leaving the little barrier island, that he will buy two sets of coveralls, and not get a telephone. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Willeford though offers us a parallel narrative with one Stanley Sinkiewicz in Riviera Beach, Florida, who had retired from the Ford Motor Plant’s assembly line where he hand-painted with a steady hand a stripe on the side of each car because a machine-ruled line lacked the raciness a hand-drawn line gives to a finished automobile. Maya, his wife, missed the cold slushy Detroit winters and her friends and family. Stanley just wanted to live his simple life on his pension and social security. But, unlike Hoke who rode the night train to simple life, Stanley’s life is about to turn upside down as he is unjustly accused of child molestation, makes pals with his cell mate until the complaint is withdrawn, and when his former cellmate who just happens to be a psychopathic killer, shows up at his now-bachelor pad in Florida, Stanley decides he will join in whatever his buddy Troy Louden is doing. That includes sending a threatening note to the guy Troy held up when he was hitchiking and joining Troy’s little quirky crime family which consists of Troy, a Barbadan painter, and a woman with a body that drew favorable looks from every man but a face destroyed so bad plastic surgery could never fix. It is an odd story about how Stanley, having no one else who seemed to care about him now that Maya had left him, throws in with this odd assortment of losers and psychopaths and plays his part in a violent affair that in retrospect seems a bit ill-planned and off-kilter.

But perhaps that is the magic that Willeford captured in the Hoke Moseley series in the 1980’s – the fact that, once you get to know people, you find out they are all a bit quirky and a bit off-kilter if given half a chance with nothing left to lose. Scratch the surface of the ticky-tacky suburban sprawl and you find that not all is peachy and that everyone you meet might just be treading water above a nervous breakdown.