Who's Hoke Moseley?

And what's wrong with him?

Who is Hoke Moseley?

Hoke Moseley is a fictional detective with the Miami police department.

Before we go any further we have to talk about Florida crime novels.

But first, we have to talk about Florida.

I will assume you are familiar with the game “Florida Man.” You type “Florida Man” into a search engine, select for news, and see what you get. Things like “Florida man charged with assault with a deadly weapon after throwing alligator through Wendy’s drive-through window.” That’s currently fifth on a list of top sixty results. Try it for yourself.

Once upon a time, an author of books that were not best-sellers realized that Florida provided a great setting for crime novels.

He was just the man to write them. His name was Charles Willeford. He broke into new literary territory. He was soon followed by others. A lot of others. He invented the eccentric Florida crime novel with the publication of Miami Blues. It is a Hoke Moseley book.

It’s a different kind of book. For a long time, it seems that the detective is not even going to be a major character. He is a minor character in the first act of the book. In the second act, he becomes a more important character after he is assaulted by the criminal who seems to be the major character. The third act is Hoke Moseley all the way. Willeford brings what had been a meandering novel into sharp focus for the exciting finish of Miami Blues.

The writing throughout is brilliant, tight, and often funny. You don’t notice how well written it is until you do notice, and then you start to get a sense of the layers of this book, and the other three in the series.

So, what’s wrong with Hoke Moseley? He has been divorced for ten years. He’s barely seen his own kids, a pair of girls, during that time. He sends his ex-wife fifty percent of his income as part of a terrible alimony judgment. He smokes Kools, but he’s trying to quit. He’s overweight, constantly battling the same twenty or thirty pounds. He has false teeth, which were made for him by someone who never made a set of false teeth before. He lives in a squalid little residence hotel room for free because he serves as the hotel security man, or “house dick” as they were once known. Professionally he is an overworked but reliable cop.

Moseley, as a character, is closer to Columbo, the detective character portrayed by Peter Falk on television, than to Phillip Marlowe. He doesn’t seem to have anything going on, his life is chaotic, but he is able to put a few things together. He’s rumpled and often distracted. Surprisingly, he can fight when he has to. In his own offhand way, he becomes a durable and resourceful character. Much of his durability springs from stubbornness.

Willeford’s approach to plot is one of the elements that sets his books apart. The plots take sudden turns, often after long sections of the book feature the characters facing normal real-life challenges, or as normal as it gets for a Florida man. Willeford doesn’t mind the reader getting bored for a bit, as he introduces a major new element. In one book Moseley is ordered by his supervisor to grow a beard, and the next thing he knows he is on a dangerous undercover mission that is truly outrageous. This comes after chapters of Moseley and his domestic problems. In another book in the series, most of the action revolves around his search for a new, preferably free, place to live. There is a murder to solve, but he’s the only one in the police department who thinks foul play is involved. Meanwhile, his unmarried partner is pregnant, and his wife is sending his kids back to live with him. At work, he is assigned fifty cold cases and is charged with solving them as soon as possible. All of this in one book of less than two hundred and fifty pages. It is breezy, funny part of the time, packed with great characters and oddball situations.

There are four books by Charles Willeford that feature Hoke Moseley. They are highly entertaining and are considered classics of the genre. The wonderful author, Donald Westlake, has said “Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.”

The good news is, once you have read the four Hoke Moseley books, you will be happy to discover that there are a number of other books by Willeford that are now available. One of those is The Burnt Orange Heresy. This book was originally published in 1971. A movie was made of it in 2019 and has been brought out again in 2021 after the delays of the COVID pandemic. When I first started reading Charles Willeford I had no idea that he was the author of a book that had been made into a movie that was now receiving a big publicity push. Mick Jagger is one of the actors in the movie. I thought I was reading someone obscure.

The Burnt Orange Heresy is considered his best novel. He didn’t publish a novel again until 1984. That book was Miami Blues, featuring Hoke Moseley. In 1990 Miami Blues was released as a movie. It starred a young Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Moseley is played by Fred Ward. Fred Ward is a fine actor, but I never felt like he was right for Moseley. Still, the film has become kind of a post-Miami Vice classic.

The genre that Willeford started has been adopted by others. Elmore Leonard, who wrote the introduction to Miami Blues, has a few entries in the Florida man category. This includes Rum Punch, which was made into the movie Jackie Brown. The movie changed the setting to Los Angeles, but the book is pure Florida.

Carl Hiassen has made a career of creating a more humorous version of the Florida man crime novel. Even Dave Barry, a humor columnist, and friend of Hiassen, got in on it. A number of other authors have adopted the genre. ¹

The pleasure of reading books by Charles Willeford is not necessarily in the payoff at the end but in the journey. Half the fun, they say, is getting there. I look forward to reading the rest of his books.

1. Photo of Charles Willeford from Wikipedia, attributed to Dennis McMillan publicity photograph.