(And Why You Haven't Read It Yet)
By Marv Newland
(And Why You Haven't Read It Yet)
By Marv Newland
Between 1984 and 1988, Charles Willeford wrote his four most popular books: Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe, and The Way We Die Now . All four featured Miami police homicide detective Hoke Moseley. Random House published all of these titles, and they came out later as Ballantine paperbacks with distinctive (but not attractive) yellow covers.
The Hoke Moseley character is key to the success of the four published novels and to Charles Willeford's greatest fame and fortune as a writer. The Moseley books were also the last books that Willeford would write. He died at his South Miami home of a heart attack in 1988 at age 69.
Hoke is a big guy, mid- to late forties, former U.S. Army, and long-time Miami police force member. He is an expert cost-cutter and is always on the alert for ways to trim such personal expenditures as alimony, child support, and rent. Hoke smokes Kools, drives a 1973 Pontiac Le Mans, and drinks his coffee with Sweet 'n Low and N-Rich Coffee Creamer.
In the first two novels, Hoke lives in a deteriorating hotel, the art deco El Dorado of South Miami Beach. In exchange for rent he works as the hotel's security officer. In Miami Blues, an ex-con, Freddy Frenger, goes to Hoke's hotel room and pistol-whips the detective. Frenger kicks Hoke twice while he is down, dislodging Hoke's false teeth, then steals his police badge, ID holder, handcuffs, sap, .38 police special and the false teeth. While in the room, Freddy snoops around:
In the bottom drawer of the dresser there was a one-ring hot plate, a small saucepan, a tablespoon, a knife, a fork, three cans of Chunky Turkey Soup with noodles, and a box of Krispy saltines. There was a half-loaf of rye bread, four eggs in a brown carton, a jar of instant coffee, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
What? No Sweet 'n Low?
Hoke may not be living a Miami Vice lifestyle, but he is good at his job and is quick to get to the bottom of whatever cases he tackles. He is talented and mean and he asks good questions, paying complete attention to detail.
Willeford's deadpan approach to character development, humour, setting, and exactly what is on a lunch plate gives more information than the reader would expect. Using straightforward language, he compresses character study, social criticism, suspense, and atmosphere into most of what he writes.
Right after Miami Blues , Willeford wrote another Hoke Moseley novel, Grimhaven . Although Grimhaven is one of the most elegantly downbeat stories ever written, it has never been published. It is a slow, highly realistic, quietly disturbing story of the decline of an ordinary human being. Unfortunately, that human being is Hoke Moseley.
Willeford's years of limited writing success, coupled with jobs teaching English at the University of Miami and at Miami-Dade Community College, may have driven him into just the right frame of mind to produce this morbid novel. Perhaps he grew tired of Hoke after the first book. Or maybe he wrote Grimhaven as a joke. Whatever the case, he underestimated the popularity of the character. By the time the manuscript was complete, Hoke Moseley was helping to sell many copies of Miami Blues as well as the movie rights to the book. (In 1990, actor Fred Ward portrayed Hoke in the well-crafted screen version of Miami Blues , directed by George Armitage and co-starring Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh.)
In the "real world", Hoke was a mighty success; in the manuscript for Grimhaven , his humanity was slowly unravelling. Toward the end of the story Hoke was in no condition to appear in future novels, and if he did only his most ardent fans would buy and read those books. Random House, Charles Willeford, and Betsy Willeford, Charles's wife, all must have realized that, no matter how well written, Grimhaven was not the right book to continue to fuel the sudden popularity of Hoke Moseley novels. So Willeford set aside Grimhaven and wrote another book instead, New Hope for the Dead .
More than ten years have since passed. We are now in the era of Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie and the murderous tracts of James Ellroy and Thomas Harris. If no psycho-killer sitcoms are currently on TV, they are certainly in development. Sex perverts prowl through schools, churches, and hockey stadiums. We live in a different world, our stomachs are stronger, and the time is right to publish the unpublishable, Grimhaven .
The manuscript is a depressing read, but it is also sublime and hard to put down. Hoke is off the Miami police force in Grimhaven and living alone, rent free, in his father's Riviera Beach duplex. Miami, Dade County, and south Florida are expertly rendered. The atmosphere is ripe, the humidity thick, and characters appear with awkward precision. There is the usual attention to excruciating details, the pace is slow and familiar, and the reader winces with the turn of each page. The beloved Hoke goes where few detective-fiction heroes have gone before. Grimhaven is not a creepy, hard-to-solve mystery about a homicide detective turned grisly serial killer. It's a story that ventures into much more disturbing territory.
As uncomfortable as it is to read, Grimhaven is an important contribution to crime literature. A perceptive publisher somewhere must be willing to put it into print.
Marv Newland lives in Vancouver and directs animated movies.
