Murder Room
12 total works
Ex-con Freddy 'Junior' Frenger lands in Miami with three stolen wallets and plans for a new life of crime, and leaves the airport with a snatched suitcase and the corpse of a Hare Krishna behind him. Homicide detective Hoke Moseley is soon on his case, chasing the utterly immoral Junior and his hooker girlfriend through the Cuban ghettoes, luxury hotels and seedy suburban sprawl of Miami in a game of hide and seek that will leave Hoke beaten, robbed - but determined to get his man.
A brutal, thrilling ride, Miami Blues is a classic of Florida crime fiction, revealing the sordid side of the Sunshine State.
'Pure pleasure... Mr. Willeford never puts a foot wrong' The New Yorker
This is the first in the Hoke Mosely series; other titles in Penguin Modern Classics include New Hope for the Dead, Sideswipe and The Way We Die Now, while fans of the books include Quentin Tarantino, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.
'No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford' Elmore Leonard
Frank Mansfield is the cockfighter, a man obsessed with an illegal sport which is unspeakably cruel, unthinkably bloody - and incredibly exciting. His pursuit of the champion's medal takes him into the seamy underbelly of rural Southern life - into the hot, dusty small-town circuits, where greed and corruption vie only with lust and violence . . .
A masterly tale of both mid-life crisis and murder, Sideswipe is a page-turning thriller packed with laughs, loaded with suspense, and featuring one of the truly original detectives of all time.
'No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford' Elmore Leonard
I Was Looking For a Street tells the story of the author's childhood and adolescence as an orphan, as he moves from railroad yard to hobo tent citiy, to soup kitchen and desert around Los Angeles and across the United States. The ensuing tale is at once a picaresque adventure through Depression-era America and a portrait of the writer as a young man of seemingly little promise but great spirit.
Written late in Willeford's career, this memoir is the work of a writer at the height of his powers looking back without nostalgia or regret, and preserving in his clear and powerful prose the great American adventure of his youth.
'No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford' Elmore Leonard
Russell Haxby is a ruthless used-car salesman obsessed with manipulating and cavorting with married women. In this classic or hard-boiled fiction, Willeford crafts a wry, sardonic tale of hypocrisy, intrigue and lust set in San Francisco in the early fifties, in which every sentence masks innuendo and every detail hides a clue.
Hoke Moseley's boss has dumped fifty 'cold cases', old unsolved homicides, on his desk. His ex-wife has dumped his two teenage daughters on his doorstep. His voluptuous partner, Cuban Ellita Sanchez, has been kicked out of her house for immoral goings-on. The Miami police chief is kicking Hoke out of his house for illegal goings-on. Happily, however, the wanton stepmother of the OD'd teenage junkie wants Hoke in her bed. But that could just turn out to be the biggest shocker of all.
'I had a hunch that madness was a predominant theme and normal condition for Americans living in the second half of this century' Charles Willeford
Willeford's pulp classic features six incisive tales as fresh as the day they were first published in 1963. Writing at a time when we still had some faith in our elected leaders, Willeford laid bare the American Dream - and 50 years later his revelations are as chilling and relevant as ever.