More to the point, my efforts on this score have involved visiting and revisiting a body of work that was of significant inspiration in getting my own career — and the John Deal mystery series — off the ground nearly 30 years ago. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the so-called “South Florida School” was in fact peopled exclusively by crime and mystery writers, including Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, Carl Hiaasen and many more. However, in contrast to such literary centers as New York, Boston and San Francisco, where literary legacies of all sorts reach back 100 years or more, literary activity in South Florida previous to the 1970s was almost nil, especially where it concerns crime and mystery offerings.
That complicates my task somewhat, but digging into what is available gives me the opportunity to share with contemporary audiences outtakes from some gems that might otherwise be overlooked. One of those is Street 8, a lovely, no-nonsense model of suspense by Douglas Fairbairn, which tells the story of down-and-out Anglo used-car dealer Bobby Mead, who is forced into collusion with Bay of Pigs organizers in need of a warehouse in which to store munitions for the upcoming invasion of Cuba. The novel, published in 1977, is not only the lodestar from which every subsequent Miami crime fiction is derived, it is a piece of writing that transcends the bounds of genre, demonstrating that there is no real distinction to be drawn between genre work and so-called “literary” work — there are simply good books and not-so-good books, and this, friends, is one of the former. You will never forget Street 8.
Another writer who must be mentioned is Charles Willeford, author of the Hoke Mosely series, as dark, outrageous and utterly original a compendium as you will ever experience. Try to imagine Charles Bukowski adopting enough discipline to write a set of carefully plotted gems of noir and you get some idea of Willeford’s work. His best-known novel is Miami Blues (1984), made into a feature film in 1990 starring Alec Baldwin. The film is dark and quirky, but the novel is in a league of its own, with a lead villain who makes Hannibal Lecter seem a Scout Troop leader. There is not an ounce of sentimentality or artifice in the whole of Willeford’s work.
Existentialists, eat your hearts out.
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This article appears in Dec 13-20, 2018.