I recently watched the film documentary The Last Resort because it checked the boxes of all my obsessions. Photographs cataloging a lost Miami Beach, whose postwar population averaged closer to 80 than 30? Check. A charismatic photographer who ended up murdered with a still-murky resolution, his archive nearly vanished forever before a concerted family member stepped in? Check. An appearance by the venerable independent bookseller Mitch Kaplan? Check. Voices and images of Holocaust survivors who wanted to recreate their vanished shtetls with a beachfront setting? Check, most definitely.
And then, a few minutes into the documentary, a woman in white, long blond hair cascading around her shoulders, cats in and out of the frame, appeared. She knew of what she spoke. Of course she did. She’s Edna Buchanan, her voice equally hardboiled and warm, the result of living nearly 60 years in Miami, covering thousands of murders for the Miami Sun and the Herald, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for her coverage, garnering a 1987 New Yorker profile by Calvin Trillin that is so memorable I still find myself sucked into the narrative, enthralled, with each reread.
Her appearance in The Last Resort answered, in part, what I’d wondered about Buchanan for the past few years: what was she up to lately? When would she publish something new? Because the Buchanan I knew best was less the crime reporter and more the crime novelist, though both career facets are inexorably intertwined. I’d first read her work as a high school student during my first proper exposure to crime fiction, along with—to name a scant few—Agatha Christie, Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Mosley, Gail Bowen, and Sue Grafton.
Britt Montero, Buchanan’s main series character (and clear alter-ego) was salty, lacked bullshit, and was consumed by the work she did, all traits the teenage, introverted, confidence-lacking me longed for. She lived and breathed Miami, like her creator, and the crimes she covered and the people she surrounded herself with, from cops to shop owners, seemed extra. I didn’t know then if I could love the Miami depicted in the novels, but it was already clear to me how much Buchanan did, and that was potent enough.
It would take years, decades, to realize that Buchanan was a mentor figure.It would take years, decades, to realize that Buchanan was a mentor figure. Someone who left her midsize-town New Jersey roots (along with her mother!) and relocated, in her early twenties, to a city she’d known was home from the first moment after stepping off the plane. Someone who found her way to crime reporting because that’s where the most interesting stories were. Someone who chronicled Miami as the demographics changed, as the crime rate skyrocketed, and then, when it was less taxing to rely on imagination than shoe leather, turned to crime fiction.
Buchanan is an OG Crime Lady, but like all originals, there are rough edges that can’t ever properly be smoothed over. Trillin, in his profile, got at essential truths about Buchanan, the reporter. Here’s where I pick it up, including the parts he skipped, and the parts he couldn’t know about.
***
Edna Rydzik, as she was known from birth until the short-lived marriage that bestowed her professional name, dreamed of the writer’s life at a young age. Dreaming was a good way to pass the time in Little Falls, New Jersey, a small town in Passaic County just outside of Paterson. It beat going to school, something she despised, as she told the Bergen County Record in 1987: “I dreaded Sunday night because Monday morning meant school. I have never dreaded anything as much since. Covering murders, rapes, and riots is a breeze by comparison.” And it certainly beat thinking about the most obvious future for her: working in a factory, like her mother, or a tavern, like her father, or staying at the Western Electric Plant as a switchboard operator.
The notion of writing about crime came later. The inciting incident happened early in the morning of Sunday, July 29, 1957. Rydzik, then nineteen, was driving her Nash Rambler along Lower Market Street in Paterson when she hit a 58-year-old homeless man named Archie Beal as he crossed the street. As the Herald-News described it the next day: “He landed on the car’s hood, which he dented and bounced into the windshield, which he cracked. Then he slid off the front of the hood and the car, still moving, rolled over him.”
When police and the ambulance arrived, Rydzik’s Rambler still lay on top of Beal. By some miracle he escaped real harm, treated for superficial head wounds before his hospital release. The Herald-News story noted Beal’s recurrent arrests for public intoxication; whether that contributed to his cheating death that night cannot be known. But for Rydzik, the ordeal’s aftermath made a permanent impression: how did the newspaper get so many details about what happened, and why did the cops talk to that reporter?
A decade and a half later, she was that reporter. Edna Rydzik, with a limited future in Paterson, had been wholly subsumed into Edna Buchanan, hard-driving, insatiably curious police beat reporter in Miami. Another short-lived marriage, this time to a cop, added insight, but far less than the daily calls to police stations wondering if there was a crime for her to write about. She liked to note, especially during the book tour phase for her 1987 nonfiction collection The Corpse Had A Familiar Face, that she had borne witness to more than 5,000 murders during her career and thousands more assaults, rapes, robberies, and other violent crimes in addition. (A side note: Buchanan was a guest on Late Night With David Letterman, at a time when authors were more customarily on late-night. It’s awkward to watch, though Buchanan is steely throughout.)
Buchanan in Miami, circa 1993 (AP).
Some of Buchanan’s coverage sticks out more than most. The beating death of Arthur McDuffie, a black man, at the hands of a group of white cops, whose acquittal in May 1980 led to race riots that killed 18 people, wounded many more, and caused all manner of fires in the Miami. Contents Under Pressure fictionalizes this story and inserts Britt Montero into the narrative; because it was published in 1992, many people assumed Buchanan was writing about Rodney King or Reginald Denny. As she explained, and as we now know with bitter truth, police kill unarmed black men in every town, in every state.
There was also Jack Murphy, nicknamed “Murph the Surf” whose theft of the Star of India jewel from the American Museum of Natural History in 1964 made him into a minor celebrity, one that persisted even after he was convicted of the murders of two young women five years later. Murphy was released from prison and speaks on the lecture circuit. Buchanan told an interviewer in 2016 that she’ll still get called up by other journalists for background information, but refuses to take part: “You’re just playing into his hands. All he wants is attention…It’s mean cold brutal murder and he doesn’t need to be aggrandized anymore for it.”
Or the story of Jack Maclean, the self-designated “Superthief” whose brazen heisting masked even more brazen sexual assaults, committed in costume, sometimes in broad daylight. Buchanan reported in the Miami Herald, with barely disguised outrage, that Maclean wouldn’t be prosecuted for the rapes. It took decades, but she was eventually proven wrong on that count.
But the crime story that took over Buchanan’s life for a number of years is one even I have trouble stomaching. It’s the basis for her first book, Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, published in 1979, crafted out of more than 120 hours of interviews she conducted with Robert Frederick Carr III, a serial killer and rapist who murdered boys, girls, and women from Florida to Connecticut and back throughout the 1970s. He was caught in 1976 attempting to rape a woman. After his arrest he recreated his cross-country travels with police so that they could unearth the mutilated and brutalized bodies of his victims.
Buchanan covered Carr’s trial for the Herald. After he was spared the death penalty and given concurrent life sentences for the murders of 11-year-olds Mark Wilson and Todd Payton and 16-year-old Tammy Ruth Huntley, Carr begged Buchanan to collaborate on a book. She agreed to do so, rationalizing that a full accounting of his crimes, told in his voice, might give comfort to his victims’ families and prevent similar serial murders from happening again.
It’s unclear whether those families felt that way, but Carr reads uncomfortably because it’s clear how much he revels in the details of his crimes. Buchanan, by documenting them, ends up complicit, as does the reader by reading about them in such graphic fashion. The people Carr killed and harmed recede to the background. But in the intervening 40 years, so has Carr, overshadowed by all of the serial killers to come—including Ted Bundy, whose trail of death ended in Florida in 1978.
Buchanan donated most of the proceeds for Carr to victims’ rights groups; Carr apparently assigned 5 percent of his share of the royalties to a 12-year-old boy tried for murder because, his lawyer stated, “he relates to that boy.” Carr garnered largely positive reviews for the apparent insight into a killer’s mind at a time when this was still novel territory. (The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit had only begun their research into psychopathic killers; Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, which fictionalized and immortalized such creatures, wouldn’t be published for another year.)
Carr, however, wasn’t pleased with the reception at all. He barraged Buchanan with so many angry, rambling letters she alerted the prison, telling them to cut off contact. When he died in prison in 2007, Buchanan told her former employer, the Herald, that he “was about the most evil person I ever met…It was such good news that he is no longer on the planet.”
No wonder Buchanan, by this time, preferred fictional crime to the real thing. The former she could control entirely. She at the utter mercy of the latter.
***
Edna Buchanan hasn’t only written about Britt Montero. She tried another series, featuring Miami’s Cold Case Squad and its leaders, Lieutenant K.C. Riley and Sergeant Craig Burch. She’s written standalones, including her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever (1990), and, most recently, the multi-generation epic A Dark and Lonely Place (2011). But she always goes back to Britt, even going so far as to team her up with Riley, Burch, and the Cold Case Squad in The Ice Maiden (2002) and Love Kills (2007).
Britt Montero felt real and larger-than-life at the same time. Reading the first five series books in rapid succession was a trap door into a different mindset.In fiction, Britt could grapple with clear real-life crime parallels that Buchanan couldn’t commit to newspaper print with the same creative flourish. (Florida, even as weird as the crimes can get, still left something to the imagination.) She could explore her love life on her own terms, especially through her on-again, off-again relationship with Lieutenant Kendall MacDonald. She could, because she was half-Cuban, delve more deeply into what Fidel Castro wrought upon Miami, whether by active investigation or in conversations with friends.
Britt Montero felt real and larger-than-life at the same time. Reading the first five series books in rapid succession was a trap door into a different mindset. I wanted more but Buchanan slowed down, and there were plenty of crime novelists to fill the void. When I returned to her later work, it didn’t speak to me as much, but the embers of what made Britt such an appealing series character still glowed, sometimes brilliantly.
Then, silence. A tenth Montero outing, Dead Man’s Daughter, has been listed on retailer websites for years. Buchanan’s website still claims the book is “almost finished” but that website was last updated in 2012. (Ignore the “2050” publication date, that’s a metadata placeholder signifying nothing.) Unlike her main character, Buchanan hasn’t silenced herself. There are annual appearances at the Miami Book Fair. She won the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017. She also wrote an op-ed for the Bradenton Herald, a week after the 2016 election, excoriating the media for its coverage of Donald Trump, that the media was to blame for him winning, and how shocked she was at the “ugly and nasty vitriol” lobbed her way after posting on Facebook her intent to vote for him. (“Donald Trump is not the bogeyman” reads much differently in 2019 than in November 2016.)
Edna Buchanan is in her early eighties now. Her crime reporting is, and helped create, Miami history. Her Britt Montero novels, especially the early ones, continue to mean the world to me. But Miami is different now. It has been for a long time. There’s no going back to the Miami depicted in The Last Resort. I’m not sure if Buchanan’s authorial silence, now almost a decade old, ever needs to be filled.
