Was Edna Buchanan Armed and Dangerous?

Talk of Florida crime writers often starts with John D. MacDonald who sold 70 million books. His most famous series of 21 books, each with a color in the title, is narrated by ‘salvage consultant’ Travis McGee who finds lost items for a 50% fee. McGee spends half the year not working on a houseboat moored in Florida where he enjoys life and a series of affairs with women. Elmore Leonard set a number of his novels in Florida. Carl Hiaasen has 16 humorous Florida crime thrillers. Tim Dorsey wrote 26 novels, most of which feature a psychopathic anti-hero, Serge A. Storms, who travels around Florida carrying out vigilante justice. Of course a few women may be mentioned–Edna Buchanan, Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Vicki Hendricks–but everybody knows Florida noir leans male and hyper-violent.

During the 80s, crime in Miami went sky-high as Colombian traffickers eliminated the middlemen and the Mariel boatlift refugees flooded in. Miami Vice reflected this reality with episodes based on real Miami crimes, 114 of them from 1984 to 1990 dominating TV ratings until Dallas edged it out. The show was a style-setter in menswear, music, fancy cars, even firearms, including the first appearance of the Glock 17. Men across America imitated Don Johnson’s perpetual stubble and Armani jacket over tee shirt with linen pants, sockless loafers and Ray Ban Wayfarers leading to massive demand for similar products. An electric razor named the Stubble Device claimed to produce the Don Johnson unshaven look. 

What a surprise then to find out that newspaper reporter and crime novelist Edna Buchanan, who won a Pulitzer in 1986, owned two guns and faced off with murderers every day of the week. In one anecdote, Buchanan arrived at a robbery-homicide scene before the police. She entered a convenience store, spotted a guy cowering in the corner and ran over to get a quote. While peppering him with questions he wouldn’t answer, she noticed police outside the window waving guns at her and motioning her to go outside. But the guy hadn’t give her a spicy quote yet so she ignored them. When police finally broke in and swept her aside she found out the guy she’d been trying to interview was the killer. Another day in the life of Edna Buchanan.

She had two ways of opening a story with a jolt, the immediate punch and the punch at the end of the first paragraph. In one famous example of the first, a drunk ex-con entered a fried chicken take-out and cut to the front of the line. The young woman clerk persuaded him to take a place in line and wait his turn. By the time he arrived back at the front of the line, fried chicken had run out. When she offered him chicken nuggets instead, he punched her in the head. A security guard shot him dead. Buchanan’s lead: Gary Robinson died hungry.

The other type of lead starts with a couple long sentences, closing the intro paragraph with a karate chop phrase. One article on a murder victim starts out describing how he stowed his golf clubs in the trunk of his Cadillac. “Wednesday looked like an easy day. He figured he might pick up a game later with EA, the jockey. He didn’t.”

After a modest childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, daughter of a single mom, Buchanan stepped off the airplane in Miami for a vacation with her mom and experienced love at first sight. With a creative writing course taken at Montclair State College, she somehow landed a job at the Miami Beach Sun. Within a few years she was covering the police beat at the Miami Herald. She was an old-fashioned reporter, listening to the police scanner as she dressed and ate breakfast, stopping by police departments to check the night’s crime logs on her way to the office. She complained that the switch to computerized reports impeded her investigations.

Petite with a mane of blonde hair, she was fearless. She would rush from a murder scene to a phone to reach next of kin for a quote before police found the family. Some of those shocked family members would hang up. Edna’s response? Wait sixty seconds and call back saying, ‘I think we were disconnected.’ If the second call didn’t produce a newsworthy quote she wouldn’t make a third, admitting that would be harassment. Her persistence at crime scenes led some cops to try to repel her by showing her body parts of mutilated victims. But that would lead Edna to ask even more questions.

She kept one gun in her car and another in her house and loved to spend time at shooting ranges where she had the most fun shooting an Uzi. As the murder rates spiked, she lamented that murders had become so common each couldn’t be covered in a separate story. Instead she wrote roundups of the week’s murders without leaving out the shocking details. She said she hoped a person reading her article in the newspaper at breakfast would spit out his coffee.

Her first marriage ended when she opened the trunk of her car outside a supermarket and found her husband had stored a cache of machine guns there. Her second husband was a cop but that didn’t stop him from leaving Edna and marrying (fifth time around) the owner of a brothel and illegal gambling center. After that she took in strays and filled her house with ceramic figurines of animals. 

Buchanan wrote four non-fiction books about her reporting experiences, then turned to crime fiction with a standalone in 1990 and the first of the Britt Montero series in 1992. The second in the series, Miami It’s Murder offers another example of her punchy openers. 

He was the man every woman dreams about—in her nightmares… It was another crazy Miami summer. The B.O. Bandit, a bank robber with a distinctively bad body odor, was on a bank-a-day binge, apparently not even pausing long enough to shower. Police and frustrated FBI agents seemed unable to sniff him out. A city commissioner who solicited sex from an undercover policeman claimed to arresting officers that he was merely researching social problems. A ravenous forty-pound piranha was discovered circling expectantly in the pool of a beachfront hotel. Then snow fell from the sky (it plummets from airplanes in Miami)--half a ton of cocaine crashed through the roof of a Baptist church, jettisoned by the crew of a Cessna 310 under hot pursuit by US Customs aircraft. 

Another day in the life of police reporter and crime fiction writer Edna Buchanan, showing us Miami Noir in the hands of one bad-ass lady writer.