Will I love The Corpse Had a Familiar Face?

Even though this is not fictional, it paints a gritty picture of real crime in Miami by a seasoned Miami Herald crime reporter who witnessed and, in many cases, met some of the people she actually wrote about. Firsthand accounts of the gritty side of crime are stranger than fiction.

I finished this book in a weekend because it was so compelling.

Edna Buchanan moved from New Jersey to Miami on a whim in 1965 and found her calling in the journalistic life.

Calvin Trillin would later write, “In Miami, a few figures are regularly discussed by first name among people they have never actually met. One of them is Fidel. Another is Edna.”

She had a nose for the bizarre and the macabre—as well as for a good lead: “A man wandering along a Miami Beach street in his undershorts and carrying a blood-stained knife Sunday morning led police to the scene of a murder.”

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In 1987, the year I first got serious about writing mystery fiction, Pulitizer prize-winning Miami Herald crime-reporter Edna Buchanan published this book on some of the 5,000 cases she’d covered. I’m a lawyer by training and knew the importance of getting the details right, and Edna’s book was my first training ground in real crime. Her wry humor made even tragic daily news readable and memorable—and she was a fierce lady who wrote not about cops or crime, but about people.