"Hoke strikes me as an itinerant samurai, after feudalism had
begun
to collapse, and he had nobody housing and feeding him. Sort
of like
Toshiro Mifune in Sanjuro. All he had left was his sword and
warrior code,
bushido. A homicide detective has much less leeway to bend
the law, or
interpret the rules as he pleases than a private eye, yet
Hoke lets one
killer go, in order to have a house to live in for himself
and his girls,
kills a character he could probably have brought in alive,
shoots bad guys
and sets fire to the house, to destroy evidence. He doesn't
blindly serve
the system he's a part of, which protects the rich from the
consequences of
white-collar crime, while punishing the poor who steal to
eat.
It's interesting that his bosses threw him into a bad
situation in
The Way We Die Now, knowing he would take the law into his
own hands, so
they could blackmail him into taking the job as head of
internal affairs.
Sort of like Sal Riglioni having to take the sergeant's
stripe in The Wax
Boom because if he didn't, whoever did would be more likely
to get the
squad killed than Sal himself.
I wish Willeford had lived to write the book about Hoke
cleaning up
the police department. Would he start with his boss giving
him the answers
to the test for the lieutenant exam? Miami had a special
corruption
problem because of affirmative action. They were under court
order to hire
so many Latins, and they got them wherever they could, even
hiring
Marielitos Castro deported as bad apples. And you couldn't
touch them
because they were minority hires.
Willeford humanizes the people in the struggle, such as his
Cuban
female partner and his African-American boss, without ever
making them
appear like they came from Central Casting, or that Hoke's
outlook was
tempered by a fear of sounding racist, sexist, or homophobic,
to his
colleagues, his employer, or book reviewers.
The idea of killing a woman so he wouldn't have to move to
Buffalo,
or Cleveland, is realistic, to me. Probably the motive for
more murders
than jealousy or revenge. In Kiss Your Ass Goodbye. And that
scene where
his boss interviews him about taking a promotion, and a
transfer, he
doesn't want, debunks the myth of success in corporate
America better than
Death of a Salesman or The Man in the Grey Flannel
Suit.
In fact, all the characters in The Shark-Infested Custard
have seen
through the myth, know they are trapped, and just try to get
by the best
they can, in a world that's rigged against them-by wives,
mortgage, kids to
educate, job, business cycle, economic system, and Zeitgeist.
The
climactic moment for a man is when he realizes he is doomed
and changes his
own world-view. Sometimes this has already happened, and is
backstory to
whatever is happening in the book we're reading. But the
hard-boiled
detective is nothing if not disenchanted. "
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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