Don't Watch the movie, read the book, in fact read all the books by Mr. Willeford. Sadly he is not creating any new books. Published in 1984 and this is the second time I have read this book. High rating for enjoy-ability if you like a bit of a hard boiled edge, and a great place to be introduced to this author.In “Miami blues” by Charles Willeford, the first of his Hoke Mosely series, we find Freddy Frenger,28, a body builder, fresh out of San Quentin. Freddy arrives in Miami with some stolen c...

I first read Miami Blues sometime in the eighties - before the 1990 movie - but rereading it now thirty years later, it's hard to read it without picturing the characters as portrayed in the movie. That there is the power of cinema. It's still an awesome book even rereading it and knowing full well what's going to happen. It is strikingly different in tone and affect from Willeford's earlier pulp works so much so that you wonder how that could be. What's really remarkable about Miami Blues and i...

Treasure of the Rubbermaids 10: Good Cop - Bad CopThe on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths. Junior Frenger has just gotten out of prison in California, and he promptly heads to Miami with a pocket full of stolen cash and credit cards...

With Miami Blues, veteran crime fiction writer Charles Willeford introduces Miami Homicide detective Hoke Moseley who has to rank as one of the most unique and interesting fictional homicide cops ever to work a case. He's middle-aged, divorced, poverty-stricken (because of the divorce) and living in a crappy hotel room. He's not particularly attractive and has little luck with women. (Did I mention that he wears dentures which he seems to be losing all too often?) Still, for all that, he's a ver...

Miami Blues is a bacon-decked, cheese-drenched, all-beef burger with a side of crisp, greasy, cayenne-peppered fries and a combo-size (Xtra-large) plastic cup full of more whiskey than cola. In other words it's an off-beat, breezy crime novel that I swallowed more than chewed over the course of one evening of reading and drinking alone. One star is a burp, the next a congratulatory pat on my tummy, then a satisfied knick at my teeth with a toothpick, and the fourth the pleasant surprise of a few...

I picked this up after reading the review by my GR Friend Cbj, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you read his review. You can find it on the top page of the community reviews section.I find it hard to define why I like some crime novels and not others, but in my opinion, some suffer from over-elaborate plots or overdone characters. Charles Willeford avoids both those pitfalls in the first of his books featuring Miami detective Hoke Moseley, who isn’t one of life’s winners. A forty-something se...

“I just want to go back to Okeechobee. All I’ve had is trouble of some kind or other ever since I came down here. What I’d say, if you asked me about Miami, I’d say it’s not a good place for a single girl to be”--Sally Waggoner, a call-girl who had an abortion of a fetus conceived with her brother Marty, who was just killed in his work as a Hare Krishna, begging money at the Miami Internatioal Airport.After reading the beautiful but anguished Wallander series by Henning Mankell, and seeing the B...

Very entertaining crime caper written with a simple, effortless style and a compelling narrative structure. Chapters alternate POV between the criminal, "Junior" Frenger and his dimwitted girlfriend, and Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. These eventually converge in a final showdown of sorts.This one is all about the characters, and they are wonderfully amusing. Hoke, a sad sack of a detective is middle aged, divorced, deeply in debt and lives alone in a cheap hotel in Miami Beach. He's not...

I just want to go back to Okeechobee. All I’ve had is trouble of some kind or other ever since I came down here. What I’d say, if you asked me about Miami, I’d say it’s not a good place for a single girl to be.Susan Waggoner has reasons aplenty to complain. She’s barely in her twenties, and she’s already a runaway from her small town in the Glades, has been abused by her own brother, had an abortion followed by a budding career in prostitution. And that’s all before she gets caught in a deadly

Fantastic novel.It starts off ultra-strong. Perhaps with a stronger personality than any other third person-narrated detective novels and kind of meanders after a while, but it went above and beyond of what I expected. Charles Willeford writes like Elmore Leonard meets Quentin Tarantino meets Dashiell Hammett. He has a keen sense of observation, tremendous humor and originality. If you're going to read one detective novel this summer, read this one.

Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley series starts off with a bang, it's a strange and twisted and outrageously funny at times bang too. His protagonist is a strange beast of a detective with all kinds of odd quirks and is a supporting character to the newly released criminal who spends the entire novel compulsively lying and cheating and making some of the craziest decisions you might expect to find in an Elmore Leonard criminal farce.Willeford packs out the cast with some wonderfully drawn charact...

Check out the movie trailer and review @http://more2read.com/review/miami-blues-hoke-moseley-1-by-charles-willeford/This story is reminiscent of the novel the killer inside me by Jim Thompson, in that it features an anti-hero Freddy Frenger jr AkA Ramon Mendez a mean psychopath who is a compulsive liar and thief similar to Thompsons creation of Sheriff Lou Ford. You'd love to have these two mean specimens on the same page. The whole story plays out into one brutal and bloody series of events tak...

This was great. It is like a police procedural with strong existential elements. This novel gives a slight indication of what Willeford intended to do with the vastly superior sequels of MIAMI BLUES. Unlike SIDESWIPE, the barbarian in MIAMI BLUES is not described from somebody else's point of view. Here his accomplice - a seemingly stupid prostitute is described from his point of view. So we don't know how reliable his account of her is, especially when you consider the ending. The book is off t...

I lived in Miami at the time that Miami Blues was first published, and I love the references to the Miami of the 1980s: the beloved late columnist John Keasler; South Beach before it became an exorbitant destination for the pretty people and the plutocrats, when it was still a shopworn, cheap place for retired Jews from the Northeast and dubious Mariel refugees; Kendall still nestled next to tomato farms, and the Omni Mall still existed so that I could get highlights and a haircut at the salon.

After landing in Miami, Freddy Frenger Jr. (or Junior as he prefers to be called) steals three wallets and begins to plan his new life. While leaving the airport he snatches a suitcase and leaves a corpse of a Hare Krishna behind. Detective Hoke Moseley is on the case; chasing Junior and his new hooker girlfriend through luxury hotels and the suburban streets of Miami.If this sounds really familiar then you’ve probably seen the 1990 movie of the same name starring Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason...

This book by Charles Willeford (along with The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins) is the basis of the great crime fiction of Elmore Leonard. He was heavily influenced by these two authors and it shows. This is not to say that Leonard copied the style – instead he has improved upon the approach to writing that these authors have themselves mastered.In Miami Blues, the reader spends just as much time with the bad guy as the good guy (maybe even more time..) and he seems like a real perso...

I don't why it took me so long to get to the Hoke Moseley books. I've read and enjoyed a lot of Willeford, but somehow these books just remained on my ever-growing stack.A spare, quick read. There is no fat on this one. Great characters and an original approach. I highly recommend this one (Made into a good, underrated movie, too).If I had any gripe, it is that some of the story hinges on a pretty big coincidence. But if you're willing to suspend a tad of disbelief, then you're in for a great ri...

Well written & an entertaining read. Just not AMAZING!I'll likely read the other 4 books in this series, but I'm in no hurry to do so. Not being a fan of series, i can't help but think this book would have been better if the effort put into writing all 5 books in the series, were condensed into one outstanding novel rather than diluted into 5.

Note sure I appreciate a vicious psychopath carrying the name Freddy, but he does and, as the girl he never got around to killing notes "He does have his good points." Book is an interesting time warp, seeing Miami in the 80s with reference on one page to Woolworths, Burdines, and Eckerd Drugs which no longer grace the Florida retail scene, constant smoking anywhere and everywhere by most of the characters, police officers needing to borrow a phone on scene to report in, etc. The story is intere...

I liked this enough that I might read the sequels. Though I've developed an aversion to series the longer I've lived. I thought it interesting, in the introduction, Elmore Leonard mentions how Willeford said he'd written against genre until he was old. That explains why, of the four of his I've read from the 50s and early 60s, only Wild Wives seemed like noir.

"Even when people talk about the weather, fair doesn’t mean anything."- Charles Willeford, Miami BluesThe first of Willeford's Hoke Moseley mystery novels, Miami Blues introduced the world (obviously not the world, I don't think Willeford was that widely read until late in his life) to one of the best characters in modern crime fiction. Hoke Moseley is depressed, with dentures, a dad bod, in debt, living in a crappy dive down by the Beach. But he's a fantastic detective. In this novel, Hoke's pa...

It's either my bias against Miami (and Florida as a whole) or the misogyny that runs through crime fiction, but this introduction to Willeford's work left me underwhelmed. Primarily this is because the world of vice in 1980s Miami, with its humidity drenched violence, misogyny, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink racism, while authentic and crisply written, is not a place I'd like to visit, even in fiction. That said, I'm willing to revisit more of Willeford's work. I liked his writing, the way Willeford

A fun read. I’m not a big fan of the crime genre and don’t remember what I read or heard that caused me to put this on my to-read list (or rather to-listen since I did this on Audible) list. But I’m glad to have done so. Mosely is definitely an engaging cop protagonist and I may lsiten to other novels in the series. Compared to other works I encountered in the genre, this was just plain fun and completely unselfconscious (I’m not into heavy noir.)It was also fun to revisit a time before cell pho...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.The massive coincidence at the beginning almost ruined the book for me. I demand not to be put out of the story... Fortunately what comes next more than makes up for the faltering beginning.Miami Blues is a wonderful novel: off-the-wall, fun, off-target with a clean, sublime prose style. Detective Hoke Moseley is quite pathetic (he even has false teeth...), but what I really liked were the villain and the hooker.

This was a very good "cop pursuing a villain" yarn. Freddy, who is an intelligent, adaptable, improvising, psychopathic criminal, stole the show for me. The Mosely character was a good take on the homicide detective. As a broke slob who wears dentures, I found character to be believable. There is some really fabulous dialogue and some wonderful minor characters. A small part with a crooked Vice officer was my favorite.Highly recommended for the fans of the classic crime genre. I look forward to

I loved this book. The quirky characters, the weird situations, the interaction. Junior Frenger, a freeloading sociopath recently released from prison, arrives in Miami, where he uses his skills at deception and violence to twist situations into his advantage.Weary police detective Hoke Moseley investigates the carnage in Frenger's wake and falls victim himself, which leads to hilarious situations.Strongly recommended to fans of Elmore Leonard and noir crime novels.

I'd read this before, but it was years ago and right after I'd watched the movie (which is one of my favorite movies), so all I saw were the similarities and differences. This time around I could appreciate the thing in and of itself. Which is hilarious and strange and wonderful! Now to read all the sequels...

This was a pretty odd--yet good--crime novel. Much of the book follows a cop and a criminal as they go about their daily lives (although their daily lives consist of checking out crime scenes and robbing people blind, so it's not as boring as it sounds). Eventually, their lives intersect and all hell breaks loose. It was hard to tell where Willeford was going with this story at first, but once it gets going it really sucks you in. It's also a really gritty story. Everyone is kind of mean, everyt...

Hoke Moseley is old school, hard-boiled and hard-wired to distrust change but his Miami world of the late 80's is changing fast.'It used to be a lot different when Hoke was still married. Four or five couples would get together for a barbecue and some beer. Then, after they ate, the women would all sit in the living room and talk about how difficult their deliveries had been, and the men would sit in the kitchen and play poker ... That had been real Florida living, but now all the white families...

Book Reaction (not a full review)I picked up Miami Blues because the author is supposedly one of the core members of the hardboiled/noir canon. I'm not sure what I was expecting; Philip Marlowe in Miami, perhaps.In actuality, Miami Blues focuses mostly on the perspective of the antagonist, a two-bit sociopath, during his post-prison spree in Miami. While his rampage starts with an accidental (and ridiculously improbable) death, the killer immediately settles down to make some money and find a Bo...