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Staff Picks: Our Favorite Stories of July
From essays to interviews, excerpts and reading lists, we publish around 80 features a month. And though we’re proud of each day’s offerings, we do have our personal favorites. Below are some of our...
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Alex Segura on Miami, Music and Celebrating Contemporary Crime Fiction
In 2016, Alex Segura introduced us to a different kind of private investigator. Not slick, not cocky, not the smooth dude with all the answers, shrouded in a haze of cigarette smoke and mystery, candy...
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The Life and Times of Charles Willeford—Miami’s Weird, Wonderful Master of Noir
Orphan, hobo, painter, poet, boxer, book critic, decorated tank commander, actor, truck driver, teacher, author and inveterate prankster—Charles Willeford led a life that could provide him with a...
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The Difficult Art of Ending a Crime Fiction Series
Even though Alex Segura and I are writing about opposite ends of the Sunshine State, the paths of our respective crime fiction series—Alex’s Miami PI Pete Fernandez and my North Florida Cannon...
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Elmore Leonard, Florida Man
“Now they were in Florida postcardland, surf and sunny sky, lush tropical greenery. Stick took it all in, watched it get better and better….worlds away from a bleached house in Norman on an oil lease,...
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The Deadly High-Speed Chase That Launched Miami into the 1980s
APRIL 23, 1979 At noon, amid light traffic on the Florida Turnpike, a black Audi swerved at high speed attempting to outrun a Pontiac Grand Prix. The cars careened toward the end of the highway, where...
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The Classics of Miami Noir: 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...
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Drug Smugglers, Miami Outlaws, and the Mad Quest to Sell “Hemingway’s Picasso”
It’s more or less impossible to describe the new true crime podcast “Hemingway’s Picasso” in a few lines, but here it goes: there was a man named Steve Kough who probably played in the NFL, but that’s...
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Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity, and the Making of a Neo-Noir Classic
Has there ever been a literary heroine like Sherri Parlay of Miami, Florida? A stripper in her mid-30s with a weakness for men, dogs and peppermint schnapps, she starts her story by confessing to...
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The Making of a Cuban-American Detective Novel
I was born in the Bronx, N.Y. to a Cuban father and a Puerto Rican mother. We lived in a Spanish–speaking neighborhood, but just before I turned four, we moved to a small town in New Jersey. That was...
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James Grippando: 30 Years of Lightning Bolts, Percolators, and other Sources...
“How do you get your ideas?” Novelists are asked that question all the time. Answering it is a little like trying to explain how you got your personality or why you keep having that dream about...
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