Miami Blues by Charles Willeford

Title: Miami Blues / Author: Charles Willeford / Publisher: Orion (The Murder Room) / Release Date: 14 August 2015 / Rating: 5/5

If you've ever doubted that the crime novel could be an art form, then you should take a look at the works of Charles Willeford, particularly his series of titles, dating from the '80s, concerning Detective Hoke Moseley, a beleaguered figure forever distracted by worries about his false teeth and crippling alimony payments as he struggles to deal with the seamy side of life in Miami.

In Miami Blues, Moseley is obliged to clear up the mess caused by the arrival in town of Freddy Frenger, “a blithe psychopath from California” who steals wallets and identities and breaks people's bones with the muscles he's built up in prison. While Freddy enjoys the high life and does as he pleased, Moseley has to put up with any number of small daily indignities, such as the fact that he lives in a tiny room in the deceptively named Eldorado Hotel, a crumbling flea-pit populated by decrepit old ladies and dodgy Cubans. For all that he's a lawbreaking misfit, Freddy is arguably more in tune with the Miami way of doing things that Moseley is.

There are no criminal masterminds in the Hoke Moseley novels, no personifications of outright evil. Even as he's leaving bodies scattered all around Miami, Frank thinks wistfully about turning over a new leaf and finding prosperity through more orthodox routes. On the other hand, there's very little in the way of outright good either. Miami is a city distinctly lacking in grace and mercy, whatever walk of life you're in. The police share this hardness of outlook, as typified by Moseley's competent but occasionally sinister partner Henderson: “Hoke knew that when Henderson smiled, something horrible about human nature had been reconfirmed for his partner.” In a world where might and ruthlessness are admired, Moseley himself is despised to some degree for his softness and tender-heartedness.

It's an unremittingly bleak view of humanity and the American way, captured in prose that recalls Nathaniel West in its wry tone and economy with words. For all its darkness, the novel is touched with affection for these flawed human beings, and a commitment to seeing things lucidly, as they are, as when Moseley looks across from the rooftop of the Eldorado Hotel at the sprawl of Miami: “At this distance it was a white smile. There was even a gum-coloured sunset above the skyline.”

Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss

Title: Hothouse / Author: Brian W. Aldiss / Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media / Release Date: Out Now / Rating: 5/5

Brian Aldiss has written many fine novels over his long career, but even by his high standards Hothouse is something special. This Hugo Award-winning tale describes a future world in which the earth has stalled on its axis, with the side exposed to the sun becoming a riot of deadly flora. Man – “the last animal species in all the all-conquering vegetable world” – has shrunk in size and intelligence and dropped to the bottom of the food chain.

The book's protagonist, Gren, is a member of a dwindling tribe who live in the branches of a dense tropical jungle that consists of one vast banyan tree: “It had become the king of the forest, then the forest itself.” Very quickly, however, the tribe breaks up and Gren and a few other youngsters are forced to fend for themselves and go on a voyage of discovery into this terminal world.

The tale Aldiss tells is a both a thrilling, breakneck adventure and an extraordinary imaginative feat. Almost every chapter introduces some mind-boggling new phenomenon – plants that create fire by focusing sunlight, an intelligent fungus that can strike up a symbiotic relationship with its victims – culminating in the introduction of the traversers, huge, spider-like plants that bask in the solar rays outside the earth's atmosphere and that have entangled the moon in their vast webs.

Aldiss describes all this in haunting, hallucinatory prose that's all the more powerful for being clipped and controlled – it's like Edgar Rice Burroughs rewritten by William Golding. The scenes involving the moon, in particular, are some of the most inspired in all of British science fiction. Later on, the pace slackens somewhat and tone of the novel becomes more discursive, while the ending feels slightly rushed, but this scarcely detracts from what is a remarkable tour de force and a genuine SF classic.

The Mysterious Mickey Finn by Elliot Paul

Title: The Mysterious Mickey Finn / Author: Elliot Paul / Publisher: Dover Publications / Release Date: Out Now / Rating: 3/5

Almost as soon as the rules of detective fiction were formulated, writers began exploiting them for their comic potential. Dating from 1939, The Mysterious Mickey Finn is a spirited parody of S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance stories, in which the omniscient Vance solves convoluted mysteries against a background of high European culture. Huge hits in their day, they now seem thoroughly deserving of mockery.

Here, the Vance figure is Homer Evans, an independently wealthy American who excels at whatever he attempts and is much sought after for his worldly wisdom, but who prefers to live a quiet life among the Bohemians of Paris' Montparnasse district. However, never one to leave a friend in need, he finds himself drawn into various shenanigans which take a serious turn when a millionaire philanthropist goes missing.

As the French police blunder about, clues are misinterpreted, misunderstandings proliferate and the prison cells fill up with a motley crew of wrongfully arrested characters, the first half of the book seems less like a mystery novel than a Howard Hawks screwball comedy or a forerunner of the Inspector Clouseau films. Elliot Paul builds the farce expertly, piling complication upon complication.

The one real problem is Homer Evans himself – Philo Vance parody he may be, but he's just as unlikely and strangely colourless as the original. That said, the subsidiary characters come off well – Miriam, Homer's gun-toting girlfriend, the long-suffering Sergeant Fremont, and Hjalmar Jansen, a roistering, larger than life painter – as does the local colour. Having lived in Paris himself in the 1920s, Elliot Paul knew all about the ways of the Left Bank, and his descriptions of wild parties at nightspots with names such as Rendez-vous des Imprevoyants have a ring of first-hand experience about them.