Miami Blues

VERY GOOD condition — DUST JACKET: Minor wear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. Very minor scuffs to laminate face in places. BOARDS: Very good condition. BOOK: Very good condition. Very minor staining (vertical) to pastedowns. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of Charles Willeford's first novel in the Hoke Moseley crime series, Miami Blues, which was the basis for the 1990 film of the same name starring Alec Baldwin. This copy is a 1st trade edition, 1st printing of the work published by St. Martin's Press in 1984. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

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"After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious El Dorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy. With his guard down, he doesn't think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly bruised and with his jaw wired shut. He thinks back over ten years of cases wondering who would want to beat him into unconsciousness, steal his gun and badge, and most importantly, make off with his prized dentures. But the pieces never quite add up to revenge, and the few clues he has keep connecting to a dimwitted hooker, and her ex-con boyfriend and the bizarre murder of a Hare Krishna pimp.

Chronically depressed, constantly strapped for money, always willing to bend the rules a bit, Hoke Moseley is hardly what you think of as the perfect cop, but he is one of the the greatest detective creations of all time."

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Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 – March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. Willeford published steadily from the 1940s on, but vaulted to wider attention with the first Hoke Moseley book, Miami Blues (1984), which is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of four of Willeford's novels: Cockfighter, Miami Blues, The Woman Chaser, and The Burnt Orange Heresy. . . .

"Nobody writes a better crime novel," Elmore Leonard said of Willeford. Sean McCann credits Willeford—along with Jim Thompson and David Goodis—as one of the writers responsible for bringing the "hard-boiled crime story to a new stage in its development during the 'paperback revolution' of the 50s." Centered around criminal protagonists rather than private eyes and "focused on those features of the genre that seemed most grotesque or cruel or uncanny and, extending them to new extremes, [they] remade the hard-boiled story into a drama of psychopathology." According to bookseller Mitch Kaplan, an expert on the South Florida literary scene, "Miami Blues launched the modern era of Miami crime fiction. There's a direct line from [Willeford] through just about everyone writing crime fiction in Miami today." . . .

The above text was taken from, respectively, Knopf Doubleday publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.
[Willeford, Charles. Miami Blues. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.]