Don Herron has led the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977. He met Charles Willeford when he came on the tour in 1984, the same year Miami Blues saw print. Herron wrote the book-length study Willeford (1997) in tribute.

Resident antihero of four Charles Willeford novels, Hoke Moseley is a grubby, slightly soused police sergeant with a penchant for misplacing his dentures. On a good day they can be found pickled in whiskey next to his rumpled bed. (Hoke is played by Fred Ward, who seems to be on this earth just for this role-no one, but no one, wears a wrinkled shirt better than Fred.) Into Hoke's life comes Junior Frenger, a carefree sociopath played by Alec Baldwin with a $2 buzz cut. Fresh out of the slammer, Junior blows into Miami like an off-season hurricane, catching in his headwind Pepper (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a poetry student working her way through college as a call girl. Together, violent nut and gullible slut become a sly parody of the nuclear family, their seediness bathed in the tropical pastels of Miami. For his part, Hoke doggedly pursues the unsavory psycho, though, freed of dentures, his bark is worse than his bite.