Synopsis
Larry Dolman, Eddie Miller, and Don Luchessi, fellow residents at Dade Towers, a singles-only apartment house in Miami, help their friend, Hank Norton, when the strange girl he brings back from a drive-in dies unexpectedly
Reviews
This dated and nihilistic tale from Willeford ( Miami Blues and Sideswipe ), who died in 1988 just as his largely underground reputation was drawing mainstream attention, leads readers into some nasty territory. The protagonists, including the narrator, are four young men of the 1970s, swingers who live in a singles-only apartment block in Miami and seem at the outset pretty harmless. Gradually, however, through bad luck, greed and and even innocence, each is corrupted, stripped bare and revealed as utterly corruptible, weak, misogynist and lost. The plot begins as they bet on successfully picking up a woman; the bet leads to farce about hiding a dead body, which then necessitates another murder. One falls in love with a married woman and tangles with the man she lives with; another returns to the marriage he hates and then schemes his way out of it. As the years pass, the four move out of their original lifestyle but all retain some gruesome habits. Female readers especially may find many of these pages sad and shocking. But, especially in his early noir period, Willeford never aimed for cute; the legions of fans he snared with his later Hoke Mosely quartet of novels are in for a dark ride. Fair warning.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Another trip to the Willeford vaults has unearthed this mid- 1970's romp on the wild side with four Miami bachelors--whose episodic plans for routine fun keep turning into deadpan felonies, inadvertent or otherwise. The senior tenants in singles-only Dade Towers--two of them have been there over two years--are tight as friends can be; and when pharmaceutical detail man Hank Norton, responding to a bet that he can't pick up a date in two hours at a drive-in, reels in a spaced-out 13-year-old who dies moments later of a drug overdose (``The girl- -Hildy--whimpered like a puppy, coughed, choked slightly, and fell over sideways in the seat....`She's dead,' Hank said''), they naturally band together to find the supplier responsible for her death--an adventure that takes another brisk turn before it's over. Several months later, when Mr. Wright, irate husband of Hank's current heartthrob Jannaire, tells Hank he's going to kill him and demonstrates through a series of near-misses just how easy it would be, Hank decides he's got to kill Mr. Wright first. This episode ends with Hank and fellow-bachelor Larry Dolman, a can-do security man, bound for wintry Chicago, where they're eventually joined by the remaining members of the quartet: Eddie Miller, a pilot on the run from his exigent live-in Gladys Wilson, and Don Lucchesi, a silverware salesman whose plan to snatch his spoiled daughter Marie out from under his hateful wife's nose has, well, gone awry. A birthday party for Don's first day in the brand-new identity that Larry's constructed for him provides a jazzy finale, reminding you how much ground the riffs have covered without exactly drawing them together. Even more disjointed, then, than Sideswipe (1987)--but Willeford fans looking for a collection of great scenes and sentences rather than a tightly wound story will find this posthumous treat irresistible. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Longtime writer Willeford did not gain popularity until the 1980s, when he wrote the four Hoke Moseley novels, beginning with Miami Blues (Bantam, 1985. reprint). Now, five years after his death, a long-forgotten work is being published. It tells the story of four young men who live in a Miami complex and become friends. One night, as a result of a bet, a 14-year-old girl who is picked up by one of the friends dies of an overdose. Her drug supplier is then killed and their bodies left in his car in a parking lot. The men must play out their roles in a friendship held together by trust and the events of that fatal night. The novel is decidedly not polished and is a trifle dated but has that distinctive prose touch and twist-of-fate ending that are Willeford's trademarks. Recommended for general collections.
- Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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