A week or so back I had cause to visit one of those big out of town discount shopping places. Fun it wasn't. However, I picked up a few books that were going cheap, one of which is Miami Blues, by Charles Willeford. It was written in 1984 and Willeford died in 1988.
What I want to know is, why didn't anyone have the decency to tell me about this guy before? Why do the big bookshops not stock him? Miami Blues is excellent and stands comparison with Pelecanos, although I would bet the likes of (the also criminally neglected) Lawrence Shames and Carl Hiaason have read him. I don't klnow what his other books are like, but I will be buying them as and when I see them. I love it when a find an author previously unknown to me who has a large back catalogue to get through. You can find plenty about him here, he seems to have been an intersesting dude. There is a sort of bibliography with a brief synopsis for each book here.