“Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.”
–Charles Willeford
Before I set out to write my first novel back in the mid-Nineties, I read just about every crime and detective book in the 58th Street branch of the New York Public Library.
I’d chosen the location for the convenient reason that it was right around the corner from the Park Avenue building where I worked as a doorman at the time.
Not wishing to be a doorman anymore but a writer, I spent every lunch break reading through the mystery stacks. There I sat (or usually stood considering the sardine can-like density of midtown Manhattan’s population during the work week) for half an hour at a go, cracking the crackly plastic-covered mystery book spines that were all stamped with a memorably terrifying black skull.
From Block to Cain to Connelly to Harris to McBain to Patterson to Westlake and Woolrich, I read in a quest to determine what kind of crime novel I wanted to emulate.
I discovered my answer in the W’s.
I wanted to write a book just like Charles Willeford.
Willeford’s novels, especially his Miami PD Detective Hoke Moseley novels, stood out to my taste at the time as second to none.
I wasn’t the only one to think this.
Of him the high master of the crime genre Elmore Leonard said,
“Nobody writes a better crime novel.”
Exactly what the subtle and mysterious and unique appeal of Hoke Moseley is has been pondered over by many.
Lawrence Block, another super master of the detective genre, summarized Willeford’s Hoke Moseley as quirky.
Hoke is quite quirky.
In the four-novel series, he does things that are…well…rather puzzling.
For example, in the beginning of the series, to save on funds, we learn that Hoke lives and moonlights as a kind of security guard in a rundown welfare hotel/old age home in Miami Beach. In his discounted room in a bureau drawer, we are memorably told he stores cans of Dinty Moore stew beside his spare dentures.
Why does Hoke choose to live like an old hobo or a soldier in a barracks or a prisoner in a jail cell?
This is never discussed or explained.
Hoke just does.
That’s the thing.
Hoke, like the criminal psychopaths he comes up against in the series, just does things.
Often very surprising things.
In one scene in the series, Hoke comes home from work to find that his teenage daughters have been dumped off in his tiny hotel room by his divorced wife to now live with him.
Seeing that one of them has braces, he asks her if they hurt.
Yes, she replies.
Do you want to take them off? Hoke asks.
She does.
Hoke then promptly and shockingly follows her wishes by removing them himself with a pair of pliers.
Hoke certainly walks to the beat of his own drummer all right.
In another notable scene from The Way We Die Now, Hoke comes home after a truly eye-popping day at work to find that his female ex-partner whom he lives with (and whom he has taken into his home with her baby when her parents kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant out of wedlock) has gotten married.
Not only has she gotten married out of the blue without telling him, she has married a man that Hoke had sent away for murder. A convicted killer who, after getting off on some legal technicality, had menacingly moved in across the street from Hoke’s house.
After learning of this gut punch betrayal Hoke, who has just been through a very violent and traumatic experience himself, reacts with a surprising calm.
He goes out and gets a haircut and buys a new tie. He watches TV with his daughters. Then after they go to sleep, Hoke, after a few beers, goes across the street to his ex-partner’s new husband’s beautiful vintage car and pops all four tires with an ice pick.
“There’s a wedding present for you, you bastard,” Hoke says softly when he is done.
Sherlock Holmes this man was not!
What I think made Hoke remarkable, like many of the remarkable people we come across in real life, was the fact that he was a free thinker and a free actor.
While most people and characters in stories always kind of just go with the flow and do what is expected of them by social convention, Hoke only sometimes does this.
And sometimes—and the reader never knows when, which adds to the tension and suspense of the books—he suddenly up and freely does (be it legal or wise or not) whatever he thinks to his own mind will satisfy his best interests at a given moment.
Hoke never speaks or thinks about these sudden surprising actions.
He is usually very rational and reticent and reserved.
Then suddenly, he acts.
In this sense, Hoke is much like the sociopaths he is often pitted against. What is different about them and why they meet their doom is that they almost always do whatever they want whenever they want to do it. They throw off the civilized facade all human beings in society are required to wear and run roughshod with reckless abandon like a rabid dog until they are stopped.
Hoke, instead, only sometimes drops his civilized facade to let the inner savage Mr. Hyde monster within him have its way and then quickly puts the civilized cop mask back on again.
It is here where we see the literary brilliance of Willeford.
He took the whole genre of the detective novel and used its conventional expectations to reveal some of the deepest truths about human nature and society.
What kind of truth was Willeford interested in?
The kind of painful truth most do not like to look at very much.
The painful truth found out by those who participate in war.
War was something Mr. Willeford knew a lot about first hand.
There are many writers who invent detective heroes. But Charles Willeford was unique by the fact that he was a detective writer who was an actual hero himself.
Enlisting in the California National Guard at the age of sixteen in 1935, Willeford basically grew up in the U.S. Army. By the time World War II started a decade later, he was a tank commander who saw incredibly bloody combat in the Battle of the Bulge. Twice wounded in action, he won not just a Bronze Star and a Silver Star but also the Luxembourg Cross that was bestowed on Allied Forces for acts of particular bravery or valor during the liberation of Luxembourg.
I think it is this heavy combat experience of Willeford and its implications that can help explain the subtle, hard-to-pin-down attraction of Willeford’s, Hoke Moseley.
I believe that with Hoke, Willeford was revealing a fundamental truth about our society that many people are either blissfully ignorant of or perhaps too afraid to look at.
What many war veterans come to realize is that there is a fundamental schizophrenic contradiction in human society. On one hand, most people are raised by society to be good and honest and decent and peaceful law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working productive citizens who respect their fellow men.
But then after dutifully learning this positive and rational seeming social lesson of peace from polite society, as was in Willeford’s case (and the case of all combat soldiers and even sometimes police officers) in a complete shocking reversal, soldiers are then told by this same polite society that they now must become incredibly violent, blood thirsty, murdering savage killers who must have utter and complete disregard for human life.
And then if that wasn’t a hard enough mental square to circle, after this patriotically demanded psychic plunge into the irrational bloodbath hell that is war, these same soldiers are told to please now return to being joyously peaceful and orderly and sane again in polite society.
As he rarely discussed or wrote about his war experiences, we do not know whether Willeford himself ever killed anyone in war. But what we do know is that he said that he modeled his Hoke Moseley novels’ sociopathic villains on some of his fellow American soldiers that he had seen with his own eyes pay other American soldiers to execute German POWs.
He said he wondered what such normal seeming Americans who were psychologically capable of this might do when they returned to citizen life in the United States.
The kind of dangerous impact those who became unhinged by combat could inflict on society can be seen in beginning of the series’ first entry, Miami Blues. When the just released from prison sociopathic antagonist, Frenger, gets off a plane in Miami, he is confronted by a Hare Krishna beggar. (Hare Krishna was a kind of cultish religious movement whose adherents used to haunt airports and bus stations in the 70s and 80s asking for money.)
When this new age beggar in a gesture of peace and love pins a piece of candy to Frenger’s new jacket, Frenger responds in a rage by immediately breaking the pacifist’s finger. This pacifist—perhaps never before being confronted with any violence let alone such an instant and brutal display of it—has a heart attack and dies.
How, Willeford seems to be asking in this scene, can an orderly society logically contain and demand both peace and war?
It logically cannot, Willeford shows us.
Those whom society completely unhinges by war will come home to stomp on the peaceful.
That is unless other slightly less unhinged warriors stop them.
Which is where Hoke comes in.
What is never said but is subtly implied is that Hoke, like Willeford, is a war vet who saw a tremendous amount of combat.
It is this reason why Hoke is most of the time very rational and orderly and why he keeps his hotel bureau drawer like an army footlocker. Like a soldier, he holds it together most of time just dealing with bureaucratic matters at his job but then suddenly at times under stress, like a soldier, he suddenly acts out with a shocking and violent directness.
This vision of Hoke as wounded soldier can be seen in book one, Miami Blues, where it says that Hoke was once shot in the chest during an arrest by a twelve-year-old with a .22.
What also points toward Hoke’s probable war PTSD is where in the beginning of the third book, Sideswipe, Hoke, out of the clear blue with zero preamble or explanation, suffers a sudden mental breakdown where he is unable to speak or to get out of his chair and actually goes into a catatonic state.
After this happens, his former cop partner who is called to see what is wrong with Hoke says,
“What it looks like to me, and I’ve seen it more than once in Vietnam, is combat fatigue. That’s what we used to call it. A man’s mind gets overwhelmed with everything in combat you see and then his mind blanks it all out.”
Yet like a disciplined soldier, Hoke never ever speaks of his combat trauma or even thinks about it in his own mind.
I believe it is this unspoken war woundedness that is Hoke’s quirky appeal. It is this unspoken psychic war trauma—that combat soldiers like Willeford and his brothers-in-arms stoically and silently and patriotically bore—this sorrowful yet reticent manly grace, that makes Hoke (and Willeford himself as the two seem very alike) so inspiring and memorable.
With this subtle literary testament to the hard and horrible truth of what war does to human beings and society, I believe Willeford holds his own with another former soldier and great writer, Leo Tolstoy.
Those who have read War and Peace know that Tolstoy, a former cavalry lieutenant in the Russian army, also understood the completely irrational and utterly immoral mindless insanity of war.
In that famous novel, that many consider the greatest novel of all time, Tolstoy reveals the true evil that lies at the top of supposedly sane and rational and benevolent national governments.
Why in the name of all that is good and holy, Tolstoy asks, do countries periodically suddenly goad and legally demand and even brainwash, through thoroughly evil and deceptive mind-controlling propaganda, a nation’s beautiful young men to either kill or be killed by another nation’s beautiful young men, whom they have never met before, in the most horrific and indescribably painful ways possible by stabbing, shooting, maiming, butchering, and obliterating them?
As anyone can tell you who has read both Willeford and War and Peace (especially its soul shocking battle hospital scenes), on the subject of war, Willeford and Tolstoy seem to be of the very same highly informed and morally disgusted mind.
The tragic yet noble silent way that Hoke (and Willeford himself by accounts of those who knew and admired him) bears the terrible moral injury of war in civilian life is shown in a conversation with his daughter in the sad final lines of the series, the spare beauty and power of which could have been encountered in the pages of War and Peace.
“Suddenly, Aileen began to cry. Tears, unchecked, streamed down her cheeks.
‘What’s the matter? Why are you crying?’ [Hoke asks his daughter.]
‘Be-because,’ she said, finally, still sobbing, ‘because you can’t!'”
These would be the lasting final written words of the great and decorated war hero and American writer, Charles Ray Willeford III.
The Way We Die Now was published on March 12,1988.
After heroically serving America in war and then serving the reading public of the world in peace with his compassionate and superlative literary talent, Mr. Willeford, at the age of 69, died just fifteen days later.
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