James Hall - Miami Noir

As both a teacher and a writer, I have often been asked to explain why Miami is such fertile territory for writers who write well and truly of crime and violence and of the dark side of the human condition. Sometimes the question is put out of honest curiosity. Other times, it seems as if there is a challenge there. As if the questioner might have continued, given half a chance: Why aren’t you writing novels of manners down there? Drawing room comedies? Something literary, for God’s sake?

The former types are fine — honest curiosity is a good thing; as for the latter interrogators, they tend to become the models for the victims in our upcoming work. But let there be an attempt at an explanation:

The truth is that Miami, though naturally lovely, is a frontier town, perched on the border between the known and the rarely before experienced. The poet Richard Hugo once said that the natural place for the writer was on the edge, and “edge” might well be the definitive word when it comes to this city.

We are not only on the edge of the continent, we are to this country what New York was in Ellis Island’s heyday, what the West Coast was in the middle of the twentieth century. This is where the new arrivals debark these days, and it is no mistake that during the last decade of the last century, commentators as diverse as Joan Didion, David Rieff, and T.D. Allman devoted entire volumes to Miami’s role as the harbinger for America’s future.

All the flux of a beautiful city where everyone is on the make and almost nothing has quite been settled creates an exceptional place for writers to live and work — and to put it simply, we write what we observe. Once this part of the world has settled down a bit — the tide of newcomers calmed, all the hustlers gentrified, the gators chased away — perhaps our literary output will morph into something a bit more “civilized.” But for now, the novel of crime and punishment is the perfect vehicle to convey the spirit and the timbre of this brawling place to a wider world.

Nor is this exclusively a late — twentieth century development: In 1936, Francis Wallace published Kid Galahad , a novel of mob-influenced boxing set in Miami. In the 1940s, Leslie Charteris set an episode or two of The Saint series here. After Charteris came Davis Dresser, a.k.a., Brett Halliday, and his Mike Shayne series of the ’40s and ’50s, with such understated titles as Die Like a Dog, The Homicidal Virgin, and Blood on Biscayne Bay. In the 1960s, John D. MacDonald cranked the quality of the proceedings up several notches with the debut of his long-running Travis McGee series, set in the slightly less menacing environs of nearby Fort Lauderdale.

But the true founders of the so-called “Miami School” are Douglas Fairbairn, author of the quintessential Miami noir, Street 8 (1977), the story of a hustling car dealer up against Cuban zealots, and his contemporary Charles Willeford, creator of the Hoke Moseley novels, which include Miami Blues, New Hope for the Dead , and — perhaps my favorite title of them all — Kiss Your Ass Goodbye. What Nietzsche wondered about, Fairbairn and Willeford nailed flat out. These two pioneered a kind of writing that so many of us pay homage to: captivating stories rich in character and sense of place, carefully wrought, complex in theme. And what was the question about literature again, please?

Veterans of Miami mayhem will find many of their favorite authors in the lineup that follows. And they will also savor the appearance of several new perpetrators whose dark endeavors will fill the pages of many a novel to come. I was tempted to join in the fun myself, but given the plethora of talent, there seems no need to swell the rout. On the subject of Miami, I’ll give my last words to Vernon Driscoll, ex-Miami police detective and erstwhile sidekick of that endlessly put-upon South Florida building contractor Johnny Deal: “Do your worst,” Driscoll muses, while searching for his kidnapped pal in my novel Presidential Deal , “set off your explosions, spread your gases, litter the landscape with bodies, and when you tire of it all, in a few thousand years, the sawgrass will come creeping back, the roots will split the seams of the concrete, the heat and the moisture and the rot will do the necessary work, and all will be as it was before anybody got any big ideas. Big ideas. Miami. Yeah!”

Until Miami Noir 2 , then.

Les Standiford

Miami, Florida

September 2006

Coconut Grove

Jumpy was reaching for the door handle to get out when Guy took hold of his arm, saying, “Nothing weird this time. Promise me.”

Jumpy took a few seconds to turn his head and look at Guy.

“Define weird.”

He had a point. It was more than weird already, an oddball pair like them out on a Sunday morning, 4 a.m., parked in a gravel lane next to a boarded-up house, with the orange sulfur lights from Douglas Road flickering like sky-fire through the big banyans. Three blocks north was the rubble and peeling paint of the Coconut Grove ghetto, three blocks the other way the mansions rose like giant concrete hibiscus blooms, pink and yellow, surrounded by high fortress walls, video cams, and coconut palms. The have-nots getting the exhaust fumes from Dixie Highway, the haves taking nice sweet hits on the ocean breezes.

Thirty feet in front of where Guy was parked, standing next to a battered Oldsmobile, two black dudes were fidgeting while Guy and Jumpy stayed inside the white Chevy with the headlights off. Been there two, three minutes already. Doing deals with fidgety folks wasn’t Guy’s idea of good business practice.

“The soul train must have a station around here,” Jumpy said.

“You’re jacking yourself up, man. I told you. You freak out this time, it’s over, I walk.”

“I don’t like dreadlocks,” Jumpy said.

“It’s a hairstyle is all,” Guy told him. “A Rastafarian thing from Jamaica. Same as a crew cut is to you.”

“I never did like dreadlocks. It’s a gut reaction.”

“Okay, so you don’t like dreadlocks. But a little fashion incompatibility, that isn’t going to keep us from doing our business, right?”

“It looks dirty,” Jumpy said. “Unkempt.”

“Yeah, well, then let’s forget it. Start the car, get the hell out of here.”

“You losing your nerve, teach? Get right up close to the devil, feel his warm breath on your face, then you back away?”

“Nothing weird, okay? That’s all I’m asking.”

Jumpy was 6’4″, skinny as a greyhound, pasty-skinned, all knuckles and Adam’s apple. Kind of muscles that were easy to miss in that string bean body, like the braided steel cables holding a suspension bridge together. From what Guy had been able to learn, Jumpy had a couple of years of college, then he’d shipped out as a Marine for two hitches, then a lone-wolf mercenary for a while, off in Rwanda and Venezuela, spent a few years in a federal pen in Kansas, now he was on the prowl in Miami. Whatever unspeakable shit he’d been into never came up directly in conversation. Guy didn’t ask, Jumpy didn’t say. But it was there like a bad smell leaking from a locked room. The man was dangerous, and Guy loved it. Got a little tipsy from the proximity. So much to learn, so much to bring back to his own safe world. Riding the knife blade of violence, ever so careful not to get cut.