Miami Purity [Hardcover]

Vicki Hendricks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 29, 1996

Sherry has been in Miami for a couple of years, but she's seen nothing except the insides of the bars where she dances. Having just dried out after a three-month bender, she decides that she's hit bottom for the last time and is determined to get herself into the daylight.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

White trash women find a voice for the ages in Henricks's simple yet searing first novel. Sherry Parlay, 36, may be the most oversexed antiheroine in noir-a genre rife with hotblooded femmes-and she's one of the more fatale, in the first sentence here knocking her "old man" dead after he slugs her. Sherry slays two more people before her story ends, but killing isn't what she does best: "He climbed on top and I put a bite on that lower lip. We got a sweat worked up real fast. He had me lathered inside and out. He was all I could take, but I could take him over and over." The guy who just "got his" is Payne Mahoney, hunky underboss of the Miami dry cleaner where Sherry has gone to work to escape the fate of an aging stripper. The overboss is Payne's mom, who turns out also to be sleeping with Payne-a situation Sherry remedies by suffocating her rival with a plastic clothes bag. It's at this point that Hendricks's tale loses some of its power, as the plot unravels like a tossed ball of thread: Jim Thompson this author may want to be, but she isn't. Further killings and sexual betrayals seem contrived, and characters appear to act not out of natural motivation but simply to propel the increasingly predictable plot. Still, the self-loathing Sherry remains as mesmerizing as a rattler about to strike (readers' knuckles will whiten as she plays Russian roulette with a .357 magnum inserted into an orifice that isn't her mouth). And, if what Hendricks finally offers us is a one-note novel, it's a piercing one that few will forget. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Watching the noir novel go mainstream has been a painful experience, like listening to a classic R & B song covered by one of those squeaky clean white-bread groups in the fifties. Noir is no longer a worldview; it isn't even a style, really; it's a pose, an excuse to turn the lights down and smoke cigarettes. Soon, it will probably be a perfume: "Noir, for the femme fatale in you." It's so rare to encounter the real thing these days that when you do, as in Hendricks' sledgehammer of a first novel, the effect is all the more intense: "Hank was drunk and he slugged me--it wasn't the first time--and I picked up the radio and caught him across the forehead with it. It was one of those big boom boxes with the cassette player and recorder, but I didn't think it would kill him."

That's the first sentence in the story of Sherri Parlay, a topless dancer who tries, in her fashion, to go straight. Like the doomed heroes in a James M. Cain or Jim Thompson novel, though, Sherri isn't going anywhere but down. A job at a dry cleaner called Miami Purity seems safe enough, a symbolic step out of the night life, but the boss lady has a son, a cute son, and before the postman can ring even once, the sexual heat makes the steam rising from the pressing machines seem like an ocean breeze. The most memorable noir heroes, even the most depraved of them, all seek purity; when they don't find it, the killers inside them are unleashed. Hendricks makes unflinching use of the archetypal noir story--flawed character in a flawed world wants more, gets less--but she does it in a voice that's all her own: matter-of-fact yet outrageously funny, grotesque yet discordantly tender. This is no ordinary first novel: when Sherri Parlay enters a room, you pay attention. Bill Ott --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd (January 29, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0436203421
• ISBN-13: 978-0436203428
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,479,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I'm a Florida writer, published mostly in the crime field over the last fifteen years, with five noir novels, MIAMI PURITY, IGUANA LOVE, VOLUNTARY MADNESS, SKY BLUES, and a collection of short stories, FLORIDA GOTHIC STORIES. In 2008, my novel CRUEL POETRY was a finalist for an Edgar Award. If you like the works of James M. Cain, author of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, you will enjoy my novels; however, they contain graphic sex that was not allowed to be published in Cain's era. In addition, my interest in the Florida environment and participation in adventure sports, such as scuba and skydiving, are prominent in the subject matter of my fiction.
I have just recently put up most of my books on Kindle in addition to DANGEROUS SEX: TWO STORIES, some potent erotica with a focus on the danger of women.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vile is a genre - maybe the only one, November 23, 1999

By 

William Barton (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Miami Purity: A Novel (Paperback)

I read Miami Purity when it first came out and have been waiting patiently for Hendricks' next book. I'm waiting for Iguana Love to arrive in my mailbox now.

Writers tell us lies about life because publishers pay them to do so. If you run a search on my name here, you'll see why I think that. Every once in a while, quite possibly by mistake, the filter fails and somebody honest slips through. We've got Vicki Hendricks among us now, and I hope she lasts a good long while and writes many more books like this one.

This is a book that lets you see into a woman's head the way some rare male writers occasionally let you see into the heads of men, without wallpapering the set with fairy tales. The woman in the story will scare you, and she should.

Ms. Hendricks, if you read this: Well done!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pure White Trash, April 19, 2006

By 

Elizabeth A. Crosby "Billy" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Miami Purity (Paperback)

This is the poet of my peeps.

Miami Purity begins with a white trash Sherri/Cherry sitting around with her boyfriend/husband Hank listening to country music and he smacks her. She smacks him back with the boom box. He dies. Then it gets good. Real good.

I kept thinking about when I was a kid, how we'd mark the good parts of the book. The whole novel is the good parts.

Seriously, Hendricks masters the voice and perspective of an unreliable narrator, a white trash girl moving into her middle years and trying desperately to change herself into something for which she has no role model--a middle class wife. Unfortunately, her quest to transform herself is doomed by associations that are more perverse and malicous than the bikers and dope addicts and horn dogs that populated her previous "dance career."

This is a great novel, a brilliant new perspective, on life and death as it actually happens all around us.

William Crosby
Cleveland

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, September 19, 2003

By 

Ez (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Miami Purity: A Novel (Paperback)

Wow. I found this author by reading her great short story ("Stormy, Mon Amour") in the Tart Noir collection, and I'm glad I did. Sherise Parlay is oversexed white trash with a tendency to show off her chest, among other things. Trying to clean up her life, she takes a job at a dry-cleaner's and plans to score the seemingly straight-laced manager's son. But Payne Mahoney is a very disturbing man, and Sherri's changing, too. Sure to stick in your head, this will change the way you think about dry-cleaning. (A+)