Sideswipe was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1987. The novel opens with Hoke Moseley having a breakdown. The accumulated stress of his job, his daughters, his poverty, and his loneliness have pushed him past his limit. He drives to a small town in central Florida with Aileen and Sue Ellen and takes a job managing a farm. The plan is to recover, to live simply, to escape Miami.
In a parallel narrative, Troy Louden — a young, empty-eyed sociopath — has attached himself to Stanley Sinkiewicz, an elderly retired con man who has no moral objections to crime but who operates by a professional code that Louden does not share. Stanley wants to pull small, elegant cons; Louden wants to kill people. Their partnership is a comedy of incompatibility that turns, inevitably, violent.
The two narratives converge in the novel’s final act, and the collision is characteristic of Willeford: sudden, brutal, and almost random. The violence does not arrive as the climax of a carefully constructed plot but as an eruption of chaos into ordinary life — the kind of meaningless violence that is, in Willeford’s world, the fundamental condition of existence.
Collecting Sideswipe
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$120
- Very good/very good: $20–$50