REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:


CHARLES WILLEFORD – The Way We Die Now. Hoke Moseley #4. Random House, hardcover, 1988. Ballantine, paperback, 1989.

   The last of the Hoke Moseley series unless a manuscript turns up among Willwoford’s papers. (*) This is not the most glorious of exits for wither Moseley or Willeford. The detective work is minimal since Moseley spends most of his time moping around the house after Donald Hutton, whom Hoke thought he had put away for a while, moves into the house across the street.

   Moseley closes the books on an unsolved case, and goes undercover on another case, but nothing really gets in the way of his general dissatisfaction with the way things are going in his personal life.

   Willeford is, I think, incapable of writing a novel that does not capture the reader’s interest, and his characterizations are as sharp as ever, but I found this meandering and somewhat shapeless. So is life, but I like to see more point to the fiction I read than to the life I see people living.

— Reprinted from The French Connection #75, November 1989.


(*) Editorial Note: Taken from Wikipedia: “Grimhaven is the manuscript for an unpublished book by hard-boiled crime writer Charles Willeford. Originally intended as Willeford’s sequel to Miami Blues, the novel was deemed too dark for publication, and his agent refused to send it on to the publisher. The novel New Hope for the Dead was later written and published as the second book in the Hoke Moseley series.”