Sideswipe: A Hoke Moseley Novel (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
The description on the back of the jacket begins with the line, “There comes a time in every detective's life when he's had enough.” After reading that, and not knowing anything about the character, Hoke Mosely, you might assume this story was about a law and order man pushed to the edge of sanity by the degenerate dredges of society, akin to a right-wing revenge fantasy like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish. You’d be wrong, kind of, but you’d also be pleasantly surprised.What pushes Hoke Mosley to the edge isn’t so much the scum of the earth committing senseless acts of depravity—although there’s plenty of this; Willeford is delightfully unafraid of being politically incorrect in his depictions of police life—but more mundane, everyday problems: a teenage daughter who wants to drop out of high school, another daughter who develops an eating disorder, busywork at the office, financial strife, and a pregnant roommate/coworker who eats her eggs in the most excruciating way possible. All this leads Hoke to a nervous breakdown that takes him out of Miami and back to the sleepy rural Florida vacation community he grew up in, charged with only the mundane tasks of maintaining his father’s hotel in an effort to “simplify his life.”Meanwhile, adopting the same parallel narrative structure from Miami Blues, Willeford introduces us to Stanley, a retired auto-worker who disowns his family after they fail to rush to his aid when he’s falsely accused of molesting a child, and Troy, a self-described psychopath who enlists Stanley’s aid to get out of prison and later recruits Stanley for his gang/family (Troy also admits to being an admirer of Charles Manson), along with a struggling Barbadian painter, and an emotionally damaged and physically deformed stripper.The middle of the story dragged a little, and at first the premise of Hoke having a nervous breakdown seemed a little forced, but by the time you reach the climax, almost everything seems to come together brilliantly. Willeford has a gift for using minute but bizarre details to either set up jaw-dropping plot twists or hilarious diatribes that seem to stem from his own cynical grievances. Without giving too much away, the robbery gone awry—again an element repeated from Miami Blues—is one of the best, and most brutal chapters of crime fiction I’ve ever read. It might be his personal history as a decorated combat veteran, but the man knows how to write a gruesome gunshot wound.What I didn’t like: If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that he writes pretty weak female and minority characters. A reoccurring theme between this book and Miami Blues is whores who are good at housework, weak-willed and irrational, they sit around being told what to do by a man who abuses and exploits them, although this could be Willeford commenting on the degrading effects on the psyche of life in the sex industry. Or he could just be a misogynist.What I did like: The parallels. He jokes about this with a throwaway line in the last chapter, but I really enjoyed the way Willeford juxtaposes events in Stanley’s/Troy’s timeline with events in Hoke’s. He emulates but differentiates the climax and the ending of this book from the ending and climax of Miami Blues. Ellita, Hoke’s partner, attempts to apprehend Troy by the book, firing a warning shot when she attempts to apprehend him, and she’s punished for this, but when Hoke encounters Junior at the end of Miami Blues, he takes the law into his own hands, executing him coldly and deliberately. At the beginning of the book as Hoke’s family falls apart, Troy’s family assembles, and at the end of the book as Hoke’s family rejoins in resolution, Troy’s family disperses in bloody carnage. We’re left not entirely sure if Troy really wanted to live happily ever after at The Hotel Oluffsson (I’ve been there!) with his family/gang, or if he merely snapped when a seemingly routine robbery went haywire due to mundane details overlooked, thus serving as a callback to the inciting incident of Hoke’s nervous breakdown.
Sideswipe (1987) is Charles Willeford’s third in his Hoke Moseley series and was published just before Willeford’s death in 1988. It is a very different detective thriller—-zany and offbeat, a mix of James Thane’s mysteries and Dave Barry’s wit.The story opens with a newspaper report of the murder of a Los Angeles liquor store owner and his wife in a daytime holdup. Then it shifts to Miami, where Hoke Moseley is a detective on the Miami police force. He is assigned to lead a cold case squad where all the detectives dump their cases, whether cold or lukewarm. Hoke is forty-three, has false teeth, and lives with his detective partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is eight-months pregnant. (No, the relationship is platonic—-they are roommates.) Hoke’s two teen-age children live with him after his ex-wife, now married to a major League baseball player, dumped them on him. Hoke’s father is well off and married to a woman Hoke’s age. Among his assets is El Pelicano Hotel on Singer Island in Riviera Beach (near Palm Beach).Hoke is having a breakdown of sorts, termed a “burnout” by his doctor: he just stares unresponsively at the wall. His boss puts him on a 30-day leave and Hoke’s father offers him a temporary position as the El Pelicano's manager. Hoke takes it and moves to Riviera Beach, vowing to simplify his life and to never ever leave the Island. The children? Hoke tries to dump them back on the ex-wife.Meanwhile, back in Miami, Stanley Sinkiwicz, a retired Ford pinstriper who can paint a perfectly straight line blindfolded, has been placed in a difficult position. A prepubescent girl in the neighborhood, Pammi Sneider, has been earning pennies from old men in the nearby park by giving out kisses and look-sees. Stanley is asleep on a park bench when Pammi hits on him, shedding her shorts. When he wakes up with a tongue in his mouth, Stanley tries to put her pants back on just as his wife, Maya, appears. Maya rushes off to tell Mr. Sneider, who bops Stanley on the nose and calls the cops. Stanley is put in jail but released when Pammi admits she was at fault. But by then Maya has fled to Detroit to stay with their son, who welcomes her with closed arms. The son doesn’t want her, and Stanley won’t take her back. We imagine Maya eternally driving back and forth between Miami and Detroit.So we have a murder in LA, a burned-out cop in Miami relocated to Riviera Beach, and an old man mistakenly jailed as a pervert. But wait! There’s More! During his brief jail visit, Stanley meets Troy Louden, a smooth-talking thief with a large ego and a plan; Troy's last residence was in LA. After Troy gets bail, he gloms onto Stanley as the financial support for the new venture Troy is starting. Stanley sees Troy as the only person who's ever loved him. As the Gang-That-Can’t-Shoot- Straight gathers, Stanley is once again naively drawn into the appearance, if not the fact, of illegal activity.Willeford writes with a subtle hand, lending humor to his story. At one point, Hoke’s daughter is staying in a nunnery and he is told that the Mother Superior is “…giving her Novenas.” Hoke’s response is that he didn’t know his daughter took drugs. These are the moments to savor in this delightfully bizarre tale of human foibles. Four stars.
What do You think about Sideswipe: A Hoke Moseley Novel (2005)?
Overwhelmed by an abundance of cold cases Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley retreats into a fugue state, abandons his pregnant partner/housemate Ellita Sanchez and his two daughters to seek a simpler life managing his father’s apartment complex in Riviera Beach.Hoke soon finds the simple life is easier to envision than to envelop.Like others in the series, "Sideswipe" is packed with action and wry, off-beat humor. Elmore Leonard says no one writes a better crime novel. Who am I to argue with that?
—J.R.
This is the third book in Charles Willeford's excellent series featuring Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley. As the book opens, Hoke, although still only in his forties, wakes up to a full-blown mid-life crisis. He's completely unable to function irrespective of his responsibilities to his two teenage daughters who live with him, to his department, and to his partner, Ellita Sanchez, who is eight months pregnant (not by Hoke) and who also lives in Hoke's home.Unable to cope, Hoke takes a leave of absence from his job and retreats to Singer Island, where his wealthy father lives. He takes a job running a small apartment building for his father and vows that he will never leave the island again.In the meantime, Stanley Sinkiewicz, an elderly retiree who has moved to Florida from Detroit has a brush with the law and, although he is completely innocent, he is briefly forced to share a jail cell with a man claiming to be Robert Smith. "Smith" is really a psychopathic career criminal named Troy Louden. He has a gift for reading people and immediately pegs Stanley for the sad, lonely man he is at heart. Louden befriends Stanley, schooling him in the way to best deal with the authorities, and before long, Stanley is convinced that Troy is his new best friend. Louden is desperately hoping to have the charges against him dropped before a fingerprint check is returned and the police discover his real identity. To this end, he asks Stanley to do him a "small favor" once he is released, and, totally won over by his new buddy, the old man agrees. The ploy works and Louden, now free, enlists Stanley to help him pull off a big job he is planning.Meanwhile, Hoke Mosley is discovering that it's a lot harder to simplify his life than he had hoped. His father is determined to help him get a new job with the local police force, although Hoke has absolutely no interest in the job. His younger daughter joins him on the island further complicating matters, and the tenants in the apartment house generally prove to be a major pain in the butt.The Mosley story and the Stanley/Louden story proceed along parallel tracks and for a while the reader is left to wonder how Willeford is ever going to link them up. But it really doesn't matter because both stories are very entertaining.Willeford has populated this book with a number of unique and very interesting characters and between the lines, he has a great deal to say about the nature of family and about the workings of the capitalist system in the United States. All in all, it's a very entertaining book that should appeal to large numbers of readers.
—James Thane
The Hoke Moseley novels are about a detective, but they are not novels in the detective genre. Charles Willeford never dangles any clues or misdirection in front of the readers, and the actual crime that needs to be solved doesn't happen until the tail end of the book. Instead, he holds the readers interest with remarkably vivid portraits of his characters, various locales in Miami area and of course the themes he brings up (How easily decent (but gullable) people can sometimes be turned to crime, the american dream, sub-urban life, modern art, mid-life crisis, public education, etc.). Charles keeps a swift pace and never lingers on any one particular issue, always rewarding the readers with more interesting tid-bits to chew on, but admittedly, readers accustomed to more formulaic crime novels will be left in the cold (not only does the crime only happen at the end of the book, but for the majority of the novel Hoke is on leave from the force and very intent on never coming back). This novel challenges the conventions of the set formulas and challenges the reader (if only so slightly), but hey, I would expect nothing less from a literary-genre novel.
—Igor Trushevsky
