Another author high on the wish list was the master of the wise guy form, Damon Runyon. While much of Runyon’s short story work was of course set in New York, he was a widely traveled reporter and correspondent not averse to the occasional Florida trip to inspect how the ponies might be running during the winter and to escape the snowdrifts for a bit. “A Job for the Macarone,” published originally in a 1937 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, is proof of the latter and perhaps the only Miami-based story to be penned by Runyon.
Lester Dent may be best remembered today as the creator of the long-running Doc Savage series, but in the mid-1930s, as that phenomenon was gathering steam, Dent was exploring other possibilities, including a series based around the exploits of a Miami-based detective named Oscar Sail living aboard a schooner anchored in Biscayne Bay. That series never came to fruition, but tantalizing hints of what it might have become are found in two stories published by Dent in Black Mask magazine. “Luck,” included here, was Dent’s original version of the story finally published in 1936 as “Sail,” the latter somewhat diminished by changes demanded of the author by the magazine’s editors. There are some who contend that Oscar Sail came to live on as the prototype for that other live-aboard private investigator just up A1A a few miles, but if John D. MacDonald found Oscar Sail a viable model for Travis McGee, he never said so.
A somewhat anomalous addition to this volume is the segment from the later pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the tough-about-the-edges novel published by Zora Neale Hurston in 1937. While an excerpt, it is nonetheless a self-contained one, detailing the dark and tragic end of narrator Janie’s third marriage in the aftermath of a powerful hurricane that sweeps through the Everglades, one very likely modeled after the real-life monster storm of 1928. Given the vivid detailing of an often-overlooked segment of South Florida’s population, the theme-appropriate nature of the book’s climax, and the ever-growing critical stature and influence that Ms. Hurston’s work has gained over the past half century, it seemed to this writer a crime not to include the passage.
The earliest publication in the volume — and perhaps the first piece of Miami crime fiction to be published — comes from the pen of a writer seldom associated with the genre: Marjory Stoneman Douglas, more commonly lionized by conservationists for her classic 1947 work of nonfiction, The Everglades: River of Grass, a book generally given credit for the eventual establishment of Everglades National Park. From 1915 to 1923, however, she was a hardworking reporter for the Miami Herald, which her father had helped establish, and she was also submitting poetry, plays, and fiction to outlets across the country. One of her first big scores was White Midnight, a novella about sunken treasure in the West Indies, for which Black Mask paid her six hundred dollars in 1924. “Pineland,” included here, was originally published by the Saturday Evening Post in August of 1925 and, along with the work of Zora Neale Hurston, provides ample evidence that tough, capable women have populated South Florida for a good long time.
There were a few other short stories from the pre-Fairbairn years that surfaced, but not many, and none, in the opinion of this writer, with a great deal to recommend them. In fact, the efforts of Douglas, Dent, Hurston, Runyon, and Halliday exhibit collectively the archetypal trove for just about everything that has appeared in the genre ever after, including literary excellence.
And while it has seemed to me to be appropriate and even necessary to lend a few words of context to those works penned by those who are no longer with us, I am not so sure I want to put myself in the position of interloper between readers and the still-working colleagues collected here. Better to let the work of these fine and able practitioners do the talking, with the only presumption of the editor being this: I would not have included any of these works if I did not find them captivating, well-wrought, and in one way or another, exemplary.
Which of course leads me to a few last words, given that two of the modern masters included have in fact passed on. It seems impossible that Charles Willeford has been gone for more than thirty years, for the legacy of his work continues to burn bright for all of us in the field and for anyone who has read it. Many in fact refer to Willeford as the godfather of the Miami School, and his in-your-face approach continues to inspire young writers who might have been a bit too cautious before reading Sideswipe or Kiss Your Ass Goodbye. Charles once proudly showed me a copy of one of his novels, sent back to him by a fan, accompanied by a terse note: Just thought you’d like to see what I thought of your new book, it said. The book had been punctured dead center by what must have been a .45 slug, shards of its innards blown out and curled against the back cover in perfect symmetry. He thought it one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.
There were a number of Willeford stories to choose from, but I thought it would be a disservice to an old pal if I were to pick something that lacked an outrageous component. As a promotional line for a film adaptation of the Terry Southern novel Candy once stated: “This movie has something in it to offend almost anyone.” So, included in this volume is “Saturday Night Special.” I’ll add only this: Willeford did not write in order to present models of decent behavior. He simply saw us for what we truly are, and he wrote accordingly.
The last I’ll single out is Elmore Leonard, sometimes referred to as the Dickens of Detroit — but “Dutch,” as he was known to his friends, was also the Maestro of the Miami Academy of Crime. Leonard could effortlessly propel a story almost entirely via dialogue, yet there was never any mistaking that the fuel for his characters’ repartee came from the streets where they lived, whether they be those of the Motor City or of South Beach. And like Willeford, humor played a large part in most of the darkest of Leonard’s Miami proceedings, though in Willeford’s case the guffaws grew out of the macabre, while the humor in the latter’s was more of the eye-rolling type derived from Runyon. The sole Miami-based short story penned by Leonard was not available for this volume, but included here is his chapter created for the peerless pass-along novel of Miami, Naked Came the Manatee, where each author did her or his best to keep a steadily compounding tale going, adding an episode to whatever stage the yarn was at when it landed on the desk. In fact, Leonard’s so-called chapter “The Odyssey,” included here, strikes this writer as a fully self-contained piece that Leonard had already on hand when the invitation to participate in Naked Came the Manatee arrived.
All the above, then, will have to serve as the companion notes for the enjoyment of this volume, though I might offer one final observation. Some of the older stories contain language that, though used as part of the popular parlance of the time, are frankly racist and deeply offensive today. A character in the Douglas story refers to nigras working and living as field hands in close proximity to her home, and in the Dent story there is an offhand reference to a darkie working as a service person in a restaurant. Even the Hurston excerpt uses phonetic reproduction of dialect spoken by the characters that might raise an eyebrow. Yet it has been the editorial decision for this volume to reproduce the stories exactly as they were originally published. This does not constitute endorsement of any failings of an earlier time in history, by any means, but it does permit the contemporary reader the opportunity to consider the shortcomings of another era, and allows for each reader to make independent judgments as to the impact of such upon the whole and upon the continuing value of the works at hand.