HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Where to start? Sunburn is not just another comic Florida crime drama. There are too many of those right now, more than enough to make you wish Bill Clinton would take up a chainsaw and set that over-lit, over-moneyed peninsular adrift.

The bright lights and coke-dusted banknotes of Miami encourage the criminal fraternity like shit encourages flies. The overheated swamps can swallow a jet airliner whole, so it's no trouble to hide a corpse or two. But Willeford and Leonard got there first, and Willeford and Leonard did it better. Shames, however, is better than most.

Bert The Shirt (from 1992's Florida Straits, the first Key West book, followed by 1994's Scavenger Reef and now this) is running, to get the hell out of Florida. He's old, he's a retired gangster, but his pal Vincente Delgatto is far from out of the game. Vincente creaks when he bends down and he can't change the washer on a bathroom sink, but a Boss is still a Boss.

And this Boss is tired and wants to make a mark. He wants to leave it behind when he goes, to have his story down on paper even as the hearse rolls up to take the body away. So he'll tell it all to local newspaperman Arty, who is at once terrified of the man's authority and beguiled by his charm.

But what about the Boss's meat-headed son Gino? Always pushing on the organisation, always wanting to make a name even if that name means coming down from New York to see his old man and over-stepping it with the local families. Now they want him dead and his only way out of sleeping with the fishes is to rat on the man writing a book that'll tell where the bodies are buried . . .

Incident is even less thick on the ground here than it was the first time we met these characters in Shames's delirious debut novel Florida Straits. It's a book about character, and especially about old men and old ways. Vincente's other, bastard, son, Joey, is out of the family loop, but more like his old man. There are codes and there is respect, and if only Gino could learn that then nothing that happens need happen. By the turn of the last page not all of the above-the-title names will still be breathing.

Shames is a terrific writer, one who takes as much pride in the details as the big picture. Bert The Shirt finally comes into his own, and there is a certain pride to be taken from a book in which a dog's constipation is a major plot device.

The novel is too long (aren't they all?) and the end does rather sag given the expert build-up. But it is better than his last, Scavenger Reef, and the cover is spectacular. Until Uncle Elmore's latest, and assuming you've devoured the recent (and essential) No Exit Charles Willeford reissues, Sunburn will do very nicely to be getting on with. •

© THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.