Sideswipe

The Darkly Funny Story of a Detective Trying to Enjoy a Midlife Crisis

Sideswipe by Charles Willeford is the third of four novels to feature hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley.

This subtly comic take on inept criminals and middle-aged policemen is one of the funniest things I have read. But as a middle-aged man myself, I sit squarely in the target market.

Synopsis

Troy Louden is a handsome, cowboy hat wearing criminal who has been assessed as a psychopath and is proud of the label. Stanley Sinkiewicz is a pensioner unjustly accused of molesting children. They meet by chance in a jail cell.

Detective Sergeant Hoke Moseley is a man with an ex-wife, a bulimic teenage daughter and a pregnant female officer as a partner. He is a man hell-bent on quitting his job and enjoying a midlife crisis. Unfortunately, a brutal robbery gets in his way.

Review

Willeford’s Sideswipe is humorous and black. Charles Willeford had a talent for taking the mundane and the inept and, with deadpan prose spinning a beautifully nasty story. Willeford develops his characters slowly and powerfully. As a middle-aged man, I sympathise with Hoke and his midlife crisis. His mother-in-law’s desire to get him out of the house so that her friends don’t see the pants he has urinated in is, at best, shallow and, at worst, deeply unfair.

Willeford’s eye for the everyday humour of situations and criminal ineptness is compelling. My only regret is the speed at which the novel closed; after such a long slow buildup, Willeford left me feeling just a little cheated.

If you haven’t read Willeford, you really should try, though you might have to hunt in the secondhand book shops to find him.

Excerpt

‘Oh, a terrible thing happened Troy!  And I didn’t know what to do!  I was chased  and if I hadn’t cut off a pickup at the Miller exit they’d have caught me for sure!’

‘You didn’t lead anybody back here did you?’

‘No I made sure of that but I didn’t mean to take the baby!  I didn’t see it in the back when I got the car.  There was this old lady with packages at the curb in Dadeland, and a younger woman was driving -‘ He was trying to catch his breath. ‘Then when the woman got out to help the old lady with the packages, I jumped in and drove off.  The keys were in the car and the motor was running.  Both those ladies came running after me and then a taxi chased me down Kendal Drive.  I went through the red light and so did he, right on my back.  All the way down the Palmetto to Miller -‘

‘What Baby?’  Troy said, going over to the NewYorker and opening the back door. ‘Oh shit!’ he said as he looked at the baby strapped in its car- seat in the back.

‘I never looked in the back Troy, there wasn’t time, I just took the car, cause I only had a second or two to get into it and go.  He didn’t even start crying until I got onto Kendal Drive.’

‘This is a nice car, James, exactly what I wanted, but it is useless to us now…’

Sideswipe by Charles Willeford