Men in Miami Hotels

May 27, 2013
The hero of Smith’s latest venture into poeticized genre fiction is Cot Sims, a Miami gangster with a fondness for Virgil’s Georgics who returns to Key West to visit his estranged mother. Hoping to help her out of financial difficulties, Cot makes the fatal misstep of stealing precious emeralds from his ruthless boss, Albertson. His recklessness unleashes a torrent of reprisals that send him—along with his mother, brother, and married sometimes-lover, Marcella—on a desperate flight for survival. Dodging bullets and outwitting assassins, Cot struggles with his tempestuous love life and family relationships, all while fighting off a sense of existential homelessness. A poet as well as a novelist, Smith (Three Delays) writes in a curious blend of registers that has the narrative drive of an airplane read and the mystical resonance of verse, juxtaposing lyrical musings on memory and evocative descriptions of the Florida landscape with obligatory twists and betrayals. While the cartoonish violence sometimes seems at odds with the novel’s metaphysical depths, Smith nonetheless deserves credit for demonstrating that clichéd grindhouse plots are not incompatible with ravishing sentences. The result is a haunting and starkly grim fantasia on love, mourning, and the alienation inflicted by time. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

May 15, 2013
Smith's eighth novel is an offbeat crime story that portrays a gangster with more soul than smarts. Cot Sims has returned to his hometown of Key West, and that's bad news. What alarms the locals is not that Cot is a gangster (he's one of their own, so they'll cut him some slack), but that he's a screw-up, trailing woe. For 18 years, Cot has been a utility guy for Albertson, head of a major drug smuggling operation in Miami. He's come home to help his mother, Ella; the town won't let her move back into her house (hurricane damage). Palms need to be greased. Cot's dilemma is that he's just blown his last dollar at the track. Then he gets word Albertson wants him to check on a stash of emeralds. Why not buy off the inspector with a gem? It's twisted logic, inviting Albertson's retribution, but vintage Cot. Before that can happen, Cot's oldest friend, CJ, a cross-dressing entertainer guarding the gems, is found dead on the beach, the stones gone. Meanwhile, Cot has resumed his on-again, off-again affair with his moll Marcella, a lawyer defiantly unfaithful to her prosecutor husband, while still finding time to read Virgil, his favorite author, and ruminate on the whole sad mess of life and death; he's more like one of Graham Greene's spiritual wrecks than the killer he is. Is he credible? The Virgil is a bit much, but readers will be willing to believe in Cot's self-destructive spree until the plot becomes altogether too wild and woolly. The introspection outweighs the action, though there's plenty of that too, including a kidnapping, a scary flight to the Gulf Coast, a showdown with Albertson (the climax in a more restrained novel), a Key West shootout between cops and mobsters, and a corpse-strewn finale in Havana. Cot racks up many kills: Give him his due, the guy can shoot.

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Starred review from July 1, 2013
Smith's literary fever is still running high, following his blistering Three Delays (2010). But in this Florida tale of diabolical passion, he brings heretofore subtle noir elements to the foreground. Cot, a stone-cold gangster working in Miami, returns to his home on Key West to help his estranged mother in the wake of a hurricane and to see Marcella. He and she are incurably mad for each other, even though she's a lawyer, and her husband is the county prosecutor. Feral to the core, Cot steals his boss' secret stash of emeralds, thus endangering everyone he knows as gunmen arrive from the mainland to hunt him down. Strung as tight as a bow even as he spoons out tropical banter, Cot is a wizard of vigilance, stealth, and decisive attacks as smoldering rivalries reignite, and evasive tactics involving bicycles, boats, and planes keep everyone in motion. The tension is as thick as the heat and humidity. Smith's edgy prose is as arresting as Miami art deco, and the psychology at work here is as tangled and dark as a mangrove swamp. With his murderously charismatic protagonist calming himself by quoting Virgil's Georgics, Smith turns a rogue gangster's tale into a glimmering, sharply faceted, hauntingly philosophical tragedy of cosmic flaws, stunning betrayals, and bloody revenge.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)