Florida Straits
Laurence Shames
Pan pbk, 365 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1994)
Writing Floridan crime fiction these days seems absurdly easy. The late Charles Willeford defined the form with his Hoke Moseley cycle, but in the last five or so years fellow-travellers have tracked the great man's path, defining a sub-genre of sun, surf, cocaine and sleaze all its own. Carl Hiaasen, James Hall, Robert Campbell, Elmore Leonard have all visited in one way or another.
So welcome Laurence Shames, an author who divides his time between Key West and New York, and who divides his cast of characters equally between the city and the coast. Joey Goldman - almost inevitably the bastard son of a Mafia capo and Jewish mother - has always lived in the shadow of his more successful, American-Italian half-brother, Gino. For this second division conman then a shiny new future beckons from the potential scams of Key West.
But Joey soon finds what he's learned on the narrow, mean streets of Noo York means next to diddly on the wide, sun-soaked freeways of the south. And anyway, as his old friend Bert the Shirt says, down here all scams come from the sea. For Joey Goldman fate has more than a hand in the big-time to deal him when gangsters come to blows over coke and emeralds and he finds himself an unlikely hero.
The best thing about Shames' book is an ability to get things moving and keep them moving without ever really doing too much; take it apart and you won't be finding much plot to boil-down. Like Leonard, Shames invests his book with something of a free-wheeling attitude and a keen ear for dialogue. Just how much events spring out of the characters they propel only the author really knows, but certainly there is a naturalism here that belies effort.
That said, the book succumbs like so many of its contemporaries to the plague of over-length, and the seaborne race to recover the jewels at the end has the lightweight feel of character substituted for nondescript action. Which is especially disappointing given that Shames' cast are a particularly vital bunch - the elder statesman Bert (and his self-possessed, incontinent dog Don Giovanni), the endearingly crumpled, irate mobster Ponte, and Joey's girlfriend Sandra, who may not have all that much to do, but successfully rises above the dumb strap-on accessory she could so easily have been.
Lose a good 50 pages and this would be a great novel. As it is (a rather gratuitously Hiaasen-esque cover notwithstanding - this is less frenetic than the Miami journo; more tongue-in-cheek than Hall) it's just a damn good one.