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The back of this particular edition of Key West trumpets as follows: "What...Hirschfeld did for Aspen and Provincetown, he now does for Key West. He lays it bare." And that is what this book certainly purports to do - to expose to the reader the seamy underside of life in a Florida resort town. Allow me to sum up this underside for you; people in Key West, apparently, do little besides killing each other and having monumental amounts of sex (I somehow suspect, without any intention of putting it to the test, that Hirschfeld's take on life in Aspen and Provincetown is much the same). The main "plot" of this book susposedly deals with corruption on the Key West police force, but there are other sub-plots concerning a planned invasion of Cuba and the sexual appetites of a famous writer oh-so-based on Ernest Hemingway. None of this is really particularly important, however - the book is mainly, nay entirely, about murder and sex.
Key West is comically bad. The supposed good guy, a police officer named Hollinger, is apparently a "longtime loser at love." This statement, translated, means that he has prodigious amounts of sex, but does feel mildly guilty about it. The bad guy, another police officer, is very villainous indeed. Most of the other characters are just lurid, as is the prose. Ah well, at least I learned where the name "Key West" comes from; no, I'm not going to tell you. I suffered through this amazing waste of paper, and so can you. Oh, and if you want to read something actually worthwhile about sleazy behaviour in Florida, try any of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books.
Reviewed by Patrick Conway on Saturday, July 18, 1998. Photograph from Key West Historic Seaport at the Bight.
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