Edna Buchanan fell in love with the city and became its quintessential chronicler of crime in the ’80s
By Anne Hull
In the 1980s, if a body was found in a car trunk in Key Biscayne, Edna Buchanan was there. She had a colossal blond blow-out and a cast- iron stomach, and as the Miami Herald’s longtime police reporter, she knew everyone at the crime scene except for the guy in the trunk. In a few hours she’d know his hopes and dreams and whether he liked blue cheese or ranch.
Buchanan covered cops for the Herald from 1973 to 1988, an astonishing 15-year run that made her the most celebrated crime reporter in America. In 1986, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting and was the subject of an 8,000-word profile by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker.
Her 1987 memoir, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, became a bestseller, and she went on to write more than a dozen crime novels, including six featuring her fictional body double, Britt Montero.
Buchanan, who is now 86 and battling dementia in a South Florida assisted living facility, set—and still owns—the gold standard in police reporting. She was a relentless reporter, unwilling to drop the ragdoll from her mouth until she nailed the story. These were pre-internet and pre-cell phone days, when Buchanan had to go out and find people. She interviewed one gentleman in a porn theater as the film played in the background.
No story was too small for her—she hurled herself at six-paragraph crimes briefs that ran on 5-B.
She wrote in a singular prose style known as “Don’t Bore the Reader”:
“Tonia Fernandez wanted a divorce. She got a bullet instead.”
Or: “A fatal shooting Thursday at the For God’s Sake Slow Down and Live Inn and a rifle slaying hours later brought Miami-Dade’s homicide toll to seven for the first week of the month.”
Buchanan kept a gun in her car for dodgy neighborhoods. The police radio squawked in the background as she dressed for work in the morning. She married three times but had better luck with pets, adopting countless rescue cats and the occasional dog.
The love of her life was Miami. The city rescued her when she was 20 and working in a dreary factory back home in Paterson, N.J., wiring switchboards at the Western Electric plant, until a vacation to Miami Beach opened her eyes.
She loved it so much she stayed, with $200 and her clothes. Although she had zero journalism experience, the Miami Beach Sun hired her to cover church socials and snap photos of Frank Sinatra. After 5 years at The Sun, she joined the Herald as a local news reporter. When she took over the police beat in 1973, Buchanan became the primary chronicler of Miami’s shift from an elderly bocce ball haven to a drug smuggler’s paradise with cocaine everywhere and bodies floating in the river. Her name is as synonymous with Miami in the ’80s as Tony Montana, Gloria Estefan and Sonny Crockett.
“Everything is exaggerated in Miami,” Buchanan said. “The clouds, the colors that are too bright to be real, the heat and the violence. Ugly is far uglier in Miami but beautiful is breathtaking, it hooks you for life.”
Ugly was 1979 when five white police officers beat to death a Black man named Arthur McDuffie, then covered up the killing by falsifying police reports, a story Buchanan broke. When all five officers were acquitted by an all-white jury, Miami exploded in three days of protest and violence that left more than a dozen dead.
In the archives of Edna lore, one story that stands out is from her earliest days at the Sun, when she didn’t know squat about journalism. Trillin captured it in his New Yorker profile:
One morning her editor came into the office angry that someone had stolen his garbage cans. “Who would want to steal two garbage cans!” he said. “All of a sudden, I hear Edna say, in that breathless voice, ‘Were they empty or full?’’
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Florida native, Anne Hull began her career at the Tampa Bay Times and spent nearly two decades as a national reporter for The Washington Post. An excerpt from her first book, Through the Groves, appeared in our Spring 2024 issue.