Miami Blues.

It's a mystery. Not the book, but why I started reading it. I start and abandon books all the time but there were three of them this week. I know why I started those others. The writers were on lists of literary prize winners. They came highly recommended, and yet I bailed on them all. Instead I found myself reading Miami Blues. I found it because I searched for Charles Willeford in some context other than fiction. Poetry? Literary criticism? But instead I turned up crime novels and was surprised to find he wrote them; surprised enough to obtain one of them. So when I rejected three books in a row (maybe there were four!) that I had been expecting to be something special, I started this one expecting it to be unspecial but it's all I had with me.

This turned out to be the special book. Instead of the cliches I associate with the genre, this book had things like incest (but not as a major plot point), a discussion of the literary form of haiku, a recipe for vinegar pie, a police detective whose wife subscribes to Ms. magazine, a Hare Krishna beggar who dies of shock from a broken finger. None of these were gratuitous references put in to be clever but made sense in their context.

I still can't figure out what led me to Mr. Willeford, but I'm now going to read the next book in the series.