Miami Blues was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1984 and introduced Hoke Moseley, one of the great characters in American crime fiction. Hoke is a Miami homicide detective who is overweight, underpaid, recently divorced, and living in a fleabag hotel. His dentures don’t fit. His car is falling apart. His daughters barely acknowledge him. He is, in short, the anti-hero as failure — a man whose competence at his job is undermined by his incompetence at everything else.
Frederick J. Frenger Jr., called Junior, is a psychopath fresh out of prison who kills a Hare Krishna devotee at Miami International Airport by breaking his finger — the man dies of shock — and subsequently robs Hoke of his badge, his gun, his ID, and his false teeth. Junior uses the badge to set himself up as a freelance cop, shaking down criminals and playing house with Susie Waggoner, a naive prostitute whom he treats with a mixture of affection and casual cruelty.
Willeford’s Miami is a character in its own right — a city of strip malls, retirement communities, Cuban exiles, Haitian immigrants, and a criminal underclass that operates in plain sight. The novel’s tone oscillates between comedy and violence with a speed that is disorienting and deliberate: Willeford wants the reader to laugh and then be horrified by what they laughed at. The violence is sudden, pointless, and realistic — people die for no good reason, and their deaths are not aestheticized or moralized.
Collecting Miami Blues
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200
- Paperback original (Ballantine, 1984): $20–$50