Miami Noir: The Classics
Introduction
Long on Beauty, Short on Rectitude
When I wrote the introduction to the original Miami Noir in 2007, I spoke of the relative youth of the city, barely more than one century and one decade old at the time, and of the appropriate fact of the irascible crime story as its reigning literary emblem. There might come a day, I theorized, when Miami — having acquired its art and science museums, and its thriving opera house and shimmering performing arts centers — would have developed the ease and the multifaceted cultural and historical backdrop from which reserved and careful works exhibiting the decorum of literature some purists denote with a capital “L” might be spawned.
But, said I, Miami remained at the time essentially a frontier town, a city on the edge of the continent, inviting all comers, full of fractious delight, where nothing of import had been settled, where no special interest group could yet claim control of politics or culture, and every day brought a new melee between some subset of those on the make and destined for collision. The perfect literary medium to give voice to such a place, I ventured, was the story of crime and punishment.
As I write today, despite the fact that Miami has in the past decade-plus added a downtown performing arts complex to outdo all but the Kennedy Center in DC, a jaw-dropping art museum by the Biscayne Bay, an exemplary science museum, the establishment of the world-renowned Art Basel festival on Miami Beach, and so much more, I am sticking to my metaphorical guns: the operative literary form to portray Miami — the essential aria of the Magic City — is spun from threads of mystery and yearning and darkness.
The lure of Miami remains to this day essentially what it was when Ponce de León and his men crossed the Atlantic in search of streets paved with gold and glistening with waters that spilled over from a fountain of youth. By the thousands, each year, they still come — immigrants, retirees, high rollers, jokers and midnight tokers, by yacht, by raft, by RV, by thumb — all in search of one or another version of the same impossible promise. Who would expect a series of drawing room comedies to emerge from such a scene?
And here is one more consideration: when terrible things threaten in some ominous neighborhoods, in some tough cities, a reader of a story set in those locales might be forgiven for expecting the worst; but when calamity takes place against the backdrop of paradise, as we have here in Miami, the impact is all the greater.
And yet with all that said, when Johnny Temple from Akashic Books first proposed a second volume of Miami Noir, I was doubtful. The sequel was to be subtitled “The Classics,” Johnny explained. Unlike the first collection, which invited original stories from a set of working Miami writers, this was to be a collection of previously published stories in the genre, one to give a sense of how the story of crime and punishment had developed along with the history of the place.
“But we don’t have a history,” I protested to Johnny. “At least not one that includes much story publishing, let alone noir publishing.”
“I don’t believe it,” was the essence of Johnny’s response. “Go to work and get back to me when you’ve got something.”
Though I thought there was about as much possibility as me coming up with a volume of Des Moines Noir, I took Johnny at his word and began the search. Having penned a series of crime thrillers of my own featuring the travails of honest (!) Miami building contractor John Deal, I was familiar with the work of the so-called “Miami School” of crime writers who came to attention in the eighties and nineties, including Charles Willeford, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, James W. Hall, James Grippando, Barbara Parker, and so many others. But most of us were writing novels, the paying markets for short crime and mystery fiction having shrunk to relatively nothing by the time.
Furthermore, prior to that great flowering that came with such titles as Miami Blues and Stick and Strip Tease, Miami was simply not much of a writer’s town, let alone a mystery writer’s town. John D. MacDonald had of course immortalized fictional South Florida detective Travis McGee in a series of twenty-one novels published from 1964 to 1985, but McGee operated out of his houseboat The Busted Flush, docked thirty miles up the road at the Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale, and while MacDonald produced a few short stories set in various South Florida locations, none were set in Miami.
I by chance learned of the work of Douglas Fairbairn back in the early 1980s shortly after I arrived in Miami, when his niece, playwright Susan Westfall, put me onto his matchless thriller, Street 8, which tells the story of used-car dealer Bobby Mead and his ill-fated run-in with a group of Cuban expatriates looking for a warehouse in which to store munitions destined for a Bay of Pigs — styled invasion. I found the book astonishing — in my view the very prototype of nearly all the best Miami crime novels that have followed — and even though Fairbairn, who fell victim to early onset dementia, never wrote another piece of Miami-based fiction, much of Street 8 (Fairbairn’s original title was Calle Ocho but his publishers complained that English-speaking readers would be puzzled and leaned on the author to come up with an alternate title) is told episodically, enabling me to convince Johnny to include an excerpt of this very important work.
In fact, it was that decision which came to form the philosophical cornerstone for this collection, something of the opposite of the original intention. Here is what I mean: while there may be something of an overview of the development of the Miami crime story over the past century to be found in these pages, I think there is a much greater cogency to be found in the overview of the history of a most unusual and distinctive place reflected here. Furthermore, that sense of history is delivered with none of the typically dusty overtones of an all-too-often dry and arcane subject, given that at the forefront of nearly all the tales are questions of life or death.
The Fairbairn material would be the perfect linchpin between the past and the contemporary crime writers, I reasoned, as I set out in earnest on my search for what had come before. I could only hope that there were short stories to be found to illustrate the point.
As I detailed in the introduction to the original Miami Noir, there have been a number of early crime novels set in Miami, including Kid Galahad (1936) by Francis Wallace, about mob-influenced boxing; Leslie Charteris’s The Saint in Miami (1940), an installment in the British series; and several Brett Halliday — penned Mike Shayne novels of the forties and fifties, with Shayne operating as pretty much the lone capable moral force in a tropical landscape long on beauty but short on rectitude.
The Brett Halliday moniker was in fact only one pen name employed by Davis Dresser, who (while spending much of his time in Santa Barbara) wrote dozens of novels of all stripes, but, as it turns out, nary a single short story to be found set in Miami, with the exception of the bordering-on-novella-length piece included in this volume, “A Taste for Cognac,” originally published in Black Mask magazine in 1944. In fact, the story was later published as a stand-alone “dime novel” in 1951 and bundled with another story/novella, “Dead Man’s Diary,” as a kind of omnibus in 1959. While it may test the limit of what can be termed a “short” story, the piece is not only relatively compact, it contains the usual tropes and carries the blunt force typical of a Shayne novel.