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Letter to the editor

Getting his licks in

Novelist Carl Hiaasen, the prickly protector of Florida, is never more happy - and successful - than when he skewers politicians and profiteers.

By BILL DURYEA
Published July 30, 2004

[Photos: Bill Cooke]

Carl Hiaasen smiles as he listens to introductions at his Coral Gables appearance. He has sold some 5-million books since his first, Tourist Season, in which ecoterrorists attempt to reverse the tide of overdevelopment by killing tourists.

	Author and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen
	Carl Hiaasen signs a copy of his latest book, Skinny Dip, for Meryl Gold-Levy and her daughter Kinnan at the Books & Books store in Coral Gables last week.
	Carl Hiaasen, right, is surprised by fellow Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry at the Coral Gables book signing.

CORAL GABLES - Every two years or so for the past 18 years, Carl Hiaasen has published a novel. This has gone on long enough, and the appetite for his brand of satire with a conscience has grown large enough, that for a brief period after publication Hiaasen becomes a media fixture, the hurricane on the weather map.

So, if you were wondering why Britain's Economist magazine, the sober international affairs weekly, would cite Hiaasen in a story on Florida's importance as a swing state in the upcoming presidential election, it's partly because Hiaasen's 11th novel, Skinny Dip, has just been released.

Besides, the reporter needed a quick way to explain this state's "absurd politics."

"Hiaasen's novels describe Florida as a place where people go when they are too mad to live in California," the article says. By the way, that's mad as in mad cow disease: sick and crazy, which sort of sums up the style of an author whose latest novel includes a hairy hit man named Tool who steals painkiller patches off the backs of nursing home patients.

Or perhaps you saw the profile of Hiaasen (pronounced HI-uh-sun) in Outside magazine this month. Bob Shacochis, the Tallahassee writer, came down to the Keys to write about the man "whose relentless muckraking scorn directed at South Florida's institutionalized axis of greed - politicians, developers, multinational carpetbaggers, agri-industrialists" once prompted the Miami City Commission to pass a resolution condemning him. The lead photo shows Hiaasen standing waist-deep in his new pool, wearing his clothes and a supremely downcast expression.

"It was the end of the photo shoot and I was thinking of different ways to kill myself," Hiaasen says.

This part of the creative process - the selling yourself part - doesn't particularly appeal to Hiaasen. He's no shut-in, but he's not a gregarious socialite by any stretch. Given his druthers, he'd prefer to hunker down with his family in the Florida Keys, write his weekly column for the Miami Herald, take a 1,000-word bite out of the next novel or spend a few hours casting for an elusive bonefish in the flats near his waterfront home.

Still, he's good at this self-promotion. He doesn't do readings so much as comic performances, not unlike the way Samuel Clemens used to pay the bills when royalties weren't enough. It's an exhausting existence, though, retelling the same stories about weird Florida, answering which of his novels is his favorite. But Hiaasen is loathe to complain. ("There are plenty of writers who would kill to have their publisher send them on tour.")

"Here's the kind of question I get (on the road): "Does marijuana really float?"' Hiaasen tells a crowd of 250 at Books & Books in Coral Gables on July 23. "I'm so glad to come back to where I don't have to explain all this stuff is real."

And then he spends the next 45 minutes, much to the delight of his audience, doing exactly that.

Such is the paradox that is Carl Hiaasen's life: No one has written more bitingly about the excesses of this state, keened as deeply the damage to the environment or argued as loudly for solutions. And yet no one is more dependent, nor more artistically indebted, to that same dysfunction with which his name has become a byword.

If it all went away tomorrow, what would he write about?

Friday night, Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books, introduced Hiaasen with a favorable comparison to a previous guest.

"Carl, just like the guy we had last night, has sort of taken the country by storm," he said. "The guy" he was referring to is a certain former president whose memoirs are just out. This former president also happens to be a longtime fan of Hiaasen's. (He was once photographed emerging from some presidential conveyance clutching a copy of Hiaasen's latest.)

Kaplan explained to the audience that when Bill Clinton heard that Hiaasen would be appearing the next evening, he inscribed a copy of My Life. "To Carl Hiaasen, with appreciation for your great books."

"I've been sending the guy books for 10 years and he's never acknowledged it, so this is nice," Hiaasen tells the audience. "And he's not making me pay for it."

It's a thank you, sort of, partly gracious, partly sarcastic. The audience laughs heartily, because the tone is familiar. Hiaasen always seems happiest, and funniest, when he's "getting a lick in," as he calls it.

The book-lined room is warm and people fan themselves with programs as Hiaasen turns to his right to acknowledge the presence of U.S. District Court Judge William Hoeveler.

"I'm very honored to see Judge Hoeveler, who's done more for the Everglades than I'll ever do in my lifetime." For 15 years, Hoeveler was responsible for overseeing the court-ordered cleanup of phosphorous pollution in the Everglades, but he was removed from the case last year when sugar companies claimed he was biased.

Skinny Dip's plot pivots on this environmental murder, as Hiaasen calls it. Chaz Perrone, a biologist who is bribed by an agri-tycoon to fake water-quality readings so he can avoid hefty fines, throws his wife overboard on their anniversary cruise because Perrone suspects, wrongly, that she has tumbled to his scheme.

Joey Perrone, his wife, survives by virtue of her experience as a collegiate swimmer and a bale of Jamaican marijuana that comes bobbing by (hence the question from Hiaasen's non-Floridian fans). Joey spends the rest of the book making her husband's life miserable with the help of Mick Stranahan, a retired cop and semirecluse who had pulled her from the water.

Hiaasen is plenty steamed about the abuse of the Everglades, and he is not optimistic that lawyers and lobbyists won't skim a third of the nearly $8-billion allotted for a massive replumbing of the fragile ecosytem. "I'm just trying to stay ahead of the curve on the coming scandal," he says.

Sympathetic though his audience is to the cause, Hiaasen doesn't dwell on the subject, either in the book or in his public appearances.

"You're dead in the water if you preach and proselytize," he says. "If you can get a lick in, fine, but if you can't get them turning the pages, it's all garbage."

He knows his fans expect him to be funny, which is why he goes right to the story about the former Tarzan, the escaped tiger and the pig in the Cadillac trunk.

"I've been on tour, but you're never far from Florida. I turn on CNN in my hotel room and there's a helicopter shot over Loxahatchee," Hiaasen says. "There's all these cops and wildlife officers. A B-movie Tarzan's full-grown tiger has escaped. Citizens are being warned to keep there children and small pets inside. "Oh, this is nice,' I said.

"I knew the poor tiger was doomed. But I'm dreaming, "Wouldn't it be great if this tiger somehow made it to South Beach?' He jumps the wall at J.Lo's house, then it's a story. This is why I have to write the way I do, because it never ends where you think it's going to end.

"Were you all watching when the lady with the pig shows up? She shows up with a pig in the trunk of her car. It's her pet pig, which she is willing to sacrifice for the sake of luring the tiger to safety. The officers tell her, "You can't drive around with a pig locked in your trunk. It's animal cruelty.' And her defense, I swear to God, was, "It's a Cadillac, the trunk is air-conditioned."'

The laughter continues well into his next anecdote, taken from the recent news pages, which for brevity's sake we'll call the "Man hits wife with alligator because there's no booze in the house" story. This is followed by a similar, but older story about a love triangle between a man and his two pet alligators.

You get the picture.

Needless to say this is not the Florida that Hiaasen's grandfather encountered in 1922 when he accepted an invitation from one of his law professors to abandon the bitter winters of Devils Lake, N.D., for a job in Fort Lauderdale.

"Fort Lauderdale was only a little more active than an Indian trading post, which is what it had been," Hiaasen says.

"He didn't have any fantasies of life on the beach. He was Norwegian," Hiaasen says. "It was warm and it was a job."

In 1953, when Carl was born, the westernmost edge of Broward County where his family lived was still rural, though beginning to feel the encroachment of development from the coast. As a boy, Hiaasen and his friends would make mischief on construction sites by "pulling up surveyor's stakes."

"We were kids. We didn't know what else to do," he said in the introduction to Kick Ass, a 1999 collection of his columns. "We were little and the bulldozers were big."

But the seeds of the state's metastasizing growth and all the attendant problems were sowed in that first land boom of the 1920s. The state's population "has quintupled in my lifetime," Hiaasen says.

Estimates vary, but most agree the state takes in 700 to 1,000 new people every day. "That's a city the size of Tampa every year," he says. "What country do you know that would tolerate an internal migration of 350,000 people a year?"

The gift of a typewriter from his father at age 6 and an accumulating rage at the unplanned, untrammeled growth he saw around him made Hiaasen into a respected and fearsome investigative journalist for the Miami Herald. He was midway through his first solo novel (he'd written three previously with colleague William Montalbano) when the Herald asked him to write a column for the Metro section.

The column made him an institution in South Florida, but the novels made him a national name. He has sold something like 5-million books since Tourist Season, in which ecoterrorists attempt to reverse the tide of overdevelopment by killing tourists.

It would seem that each of Hiaasen's readers has decided, against the author's express wishes, to move here anyway.

Part of the problem, Hiaasen acknowledges, is that even when he is photographed standing glumly in the pool of his waterfront house in the Keys, he is still standing in the pool of his waterfront house in the Keys. It's hard to see what's not to like.

"You could pose with a full-grown alligator with a human leg sticking out of its mouth and they'd still come down," Hiaasen says. "Why? It's a whole lot better than where they are now."

The bad guys "come here for the same reason as everyone else. If you were a car thief where would you rather work? Detroit or Miami Beach?"

Standing in line Friday night, waiting for Hiaasen to sign her copy of Skinny Dip, Carolyn North recalled that she first read Tourist Season at the recommendation of a bookstore owner in Iowa, where she was living. She loved it and passed it on to her sister Elizabeth Grace, then living in Washington, D.C.

"I thought it was ridiculously funny and highly fictionalized," Grace says. "Then I moved to Boca Raton 11 years ago. Then I got it."

North followed her sister to Boca Raton several years ago.

"I want to thank you,"' she said she planned to tell Hiaasen when she got to the front of the line. "I've been reading you since 1986. I was looking for the sun-and-fun lifestyle and I just had to move here."'

Some critics complain that Hiaasen's novels are glib, repetitive and sloppily plotted (though the New York Times' Janet Maslin gushed that Hiaasen has hit a new plateau with his latest), and others lament that he doesn't bite hard enough at serious subjects.

But his fans depend on the characters he reintroduces periodically: the ex-governor turned swamp man named Skink, for example, who lives on road kill and metes out his own brand of justice.

"It's like visiting old friends," North says.

Hiaasen has no intention of abandoning satire for another genre as did Les Standiford, the South Florida mystery writer turned historian.

"A man has to know his limitations," he says, quoting Dirty Harry. "There are some things I can't do. I'm never going to write any science fiction or the great Russian novel. I write about what's important to me. If I wrote something else, it would be contrived."

He is asked if he would trade his writing career for an overnight cure for the state's woes.

"In a heartbeat, but it's easy for me to say because the growth is never going to stop."

- Bill Duryea can be reached at 727 893-8457 or duryea@sptimes.com

Carl Hiaasen will be at the Blake High School auditorium, 1701 N Boulevard, Tampa, at 3 p.m. Saturday.

[Last modified July 29, 2004, 13:20:14]