More than a few years ago my sister-in-law gave me her copy of The Horse Latitudes, Robert Ferrigno’s first novel. Knowing I wrote crime fiction, she thought the book would appeal to me.
The setup is on the surface straightforward. Former anthropology professor and former drug dealer Danny DiMedici returns to his apartment from a night swim, when he’s confronted by two detectives, whom he believes are from Narcotics. It turns out they are homicide detectives, who want to question him about his ex-wife’s blood-spattered beach house. There are no bodies at the scene, which convinces Danny that Lauren Kiel, his ex, is still alive.
The book is full of quirky characters:*
- Detective Holt—“She was the best dressed cop Danny had ever seen, and wore a tailored gray suit too clingy for Sunday mass and too conservative for a good table at Trumps. Her thick red hair was bound by an ornate antique gold clip. She looked like old money, the kind that got a Yale law degree but felt it was her civic duty to spend a few years with a good PD on the way to a federal judgeship” (p. 15).
- Detective Steiner—“His tie had a yellow ‘I Love Grandpa’ pattern on a black background” (p. 16).
- Dr. Reese—“More gristle than meat, Reese was a tough little bantam with a cropped bullet skull and a look of intense calculation.…Reese was a burnt-black and unforgiving as a Ubangi shaman or a Yaqui medicine man—the very people who had contributed so much to his success” (pp. 45–46).
- Boyd and Lloyd, twin nephews of Dr. Reese—“The twins were his greatest achievement and his most bitter failure. They were raw power, totally obedient, but their performance was erratic. Throw a stick into a boiling volcano, and they’d fetch it. As long as they remembered what it looked like.…What a waste of DNA. They didn’t even dream” (p. 78).
- Michael Kiel, Lauren’s brother: “Michael stood in the front yard wearing baggy madras Bermudas and a white letter sweater, a Pebble Beach Country Club golf cap rakishly tilted back on his head. His ancient jungle boots were spit-shined and laced halfway up. Even with his question-mark posture, he was huge: six feet six, with a wide, flat chest and spindly legs” (p. 88).
And that’s just for starters.
Despite how much I like the book, it took me a long time to understand that what made it stand out in my mind is how it undermines the tropes of the crime fiction hero. Why is Danny swimming to exhaustion every night? Because he’s still in love with his ex. Why did she leave him? Because after he witnessed the murder of friends of his, he lost his edge and got out of the drug business. Lauren’s response? “‘God hates a coward’” (p. 12).
Filled with nonlinear narrative and told from multiple points of view, it’s not a conventional crime novel and it doesn’t have a thriller’s pacing, but despite all that, or maybe because of all that, it’s one of my favorites.
Robert Ferrigno’s path to fiction writing reads like one of his novels:
I was born in Florida, growing up on the last paved street of a small town, spending my youth cutting secret passages through the palmetto thickets with a machete and occasionally burning down those palmettos for the simple pleasure of seeing the fire trucks arrive, sirens blaring.
After earning a college degree in Philosophy and a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I thought that I would be happy being a college professor, writing dense, literary novels which I would assign to my students. I found, however, that being a professor was mostly a matter of going to meetings, and instead went back to my first love, poker.
I spent the next five years gambling full-time and living in a high-crime area populated by starving artists, alcoholics and petty criminals. After a time, I got restless and used some of my winnings to start a punk rock magazine called “The Rocket.” The success of “The Rocket” got me a job as a feature writer for a daily newspaper in Southern California, where I took the adventure-and-new-money beat. Over the next seven years I flew with the Blue Angels, drove Ferraris and went for desert survival training with gun nuts. Great job but I wanted to write novels. I quit my day job and started work.†
When he was a journalist, Ferrigno got to interview Elmore Leonard, one of his literary heroes. Ferrigno had been writing fiction on the weekends but making little progress on his novel. Leonard gave him some life-changing advice:
You get up at five and you start work, said Mr. L., no messing around making coffee or buttering toast. You sit down and start writing. At 7 you stop, if you’re in the middle of a sentence, you stop, and then you make coffee, take a shower, have breakfast, whatever you normally do. You’re done working on the novel for the day. You do that every day and at the end of a year, you’ll have a novel. Then you send it out to an agent and you start on the next one.‡
Leonard later offered to blurb Ferrigno’s The Horse Latitudes, if he liked it. Which he did, much to Ferrigno’s and his publisher’s delight. Later, after the book had gone on to some success, Ferrigno let Leonard know that he hadn’t exactly followed his advice:
I told him I had lied to him when I said I would get up every day at five a.m. as he had suggested. Yeah? His voice on the line tense now. Yes sir, I told him, I got up at four a.m. every day for the last year and a half. You’re a better writer than I am, so I figured I needed the extra hour. It made him laugh, a dry cackle that kind of hung up at the back of his throat. A beautiful laugh.‡
I’ve read The Horse Latitudes many times, and even now, I’ll open it up at random and reread a few pages. How inspiring has Robert Ferrigno been to me? I gave Erin Ferrigno, my female PI, his last name. What books or stories inspire you? Let me know in the comments.
Finally, thanks to Stacy Woodson, Robert Lopresti, and Leigh Lundin for bringing me onboard SleuthSayers. I’m thrilled to be here.
Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared online and in several anthologies. His stories have been selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, was published May 2025 and is being republished this October by Open Road Integrated Media.
Notes:
* All page numbers for quotations from The Horse Latitudes are taken from the paperback edition, published in 1990 by William Morrow and Company.
† “About the Author,” Crime Pays, accessed August 12, 2026, https://web.archive.org/web/20060220135533/http://robertferrigno.com/bio.html.
‡ Robert Ferrigno, ”Thanks, Mr. L.,” National Review, August 24, 2013, https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/08/thanks-mr-l-robert-ferrigno/, accessed August 12, 2026.
