Books

Under Florida's spell

Crime novelist James W. Hall finds magic in his adopted home state, which caught him as a young man and has never let him go. Treacherous but beautiful, it colors and feeds his fiction.

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published March 18, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Bob Croslin] It took Hurricane Andrew to dislodge writer James W. Hall from his beloved Key Largo. Now he and his wife have a 1940s “bunker” in Coral Gables.

MIAMI

James W. Hall loves Florida, even when it's trying to kill him.

The same is true of Thorn, the series character in eight of Hall's 14 novels - although Thorn is a lot more likely to be shot at, and shoot back.

The fictional character is a taciturn loner, a tough guy who is often drawn into violent situations by a relentless sense of justice. His creator is a longtime college creative writing professor, articulate and gregarious, often mentioned by other writers not only as a master of the mystery but a supportive friend.

On a postcard-perfect winter day, Hall talks about his fictional alter ego as he shows off his considerable skill at maneuvering in Miami's insane traffic on a tour of some of the novel's settings.

"Thorn is just this cranky, Henry David Thoreau I-want-to-look-at-my-pond-all-day kind of guy. He doesn't like anybody," Hall says.

Thorn's prickly relationship with the world and Hall's interest in Florida history converge to stunning effect in Hall's compelling new book, Magic City.

Fans may be surprised that Thorn, a fishing bum when he's not righting wrongs, leaves his natural habitat in Key Largo for a place guaranteed to go against his ornery grain: Miami.

The book opens with a prologue in 1964, the night of the famous Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight in Miami Beach. In Little Havana, a Cuban refugee, a well-known opponent of Fidel Castro, is assassinated by a masked gang. They also slaughter his wife, young daughter and bodyguards. One intruder is killed by the family's 12-year-old son, but the crime is never solved.

Four decades later, a photography professor exhibits his work in a Coral Gables gallery, including a shot from the Clay-Liston fight. Clearly visible in the audience is a group of five people.

A former Miami mayor and his femme fatale wife see the photo. The next day, the photographer is dead, and he's just the first. The sins of the past barrel into the present, and Thorn is caught in the eye of the mayhem.

Hall, 59, says that although the fight photo that puts the plot in motion is fictional, he got the idea for the story from the Florida work of photographer Michael Carlebach. "He didn't mind that I killed him off."

Hall, who has taught at Florida International University since 1973 and collects all kinds of Miami lore, knew he wanted to build a plot around the city's political and cultural transformation in the early 1960s. "Everybody was converging: the Cubans, the Mob, the CIA, the old Southern politicians."

It was a way to incorporate many tidbits of Miami history, like the story of Clay he had not yet changed his name to Muhammad Ali being repeatedly stopped by police during his training runs across MacArthur Causeway, between the Fifth Street Gym and his home in Overtown.

The novel was also a way to get Thorn out of Key Largo. "He's not a cop or a private detective, who have ways to enter into a situation. I have to virtually kill one of his friends to get him involved in a case. At this point I've killed off almost everyone he's come in contact with. It's time for him to make new friends."

Thorn ventures north for the love of Alexandra Collins, a police photographer he hooked up with a few books back. Hall moved to Miami from Key Largo himself for very different reasons.

In 1992, he and his wife, Evelyn, survived the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in their wooden house on Key Largo. Houses all around them were destroyed by the Category 5 storm. "Evelyn went out for ice and food afterward, and she got lost. All the landmarks were gone."

They moved to Coral Gables, to a charming coral-rose house snuggled into lush tropical landscaping on a quiet street. (The site of the crumbling Spanish mission-style mansion where Magic City's climactic scene occurs is a little way up the road.)

"This is our bunker. We wanted a '40s house with thick walls we could put high-impact windows in and lock the doors and walk away and know it would be here when we got back." They spend hurricane season at their second home in North Carolina.

Hall's office in the Florida house is a neat room warmed by such mementos as his Edgar award (a surprisingly goofy-looking bust of Edgar Allan Poe), his father's and grandfather's manual typewriters, and a set of miniatures of his book covers that his dad painted.

Just outside the office door is a framed photo of Ernest Hemingway at a desk covered with stacks of books, a cat picking its way across them. Beneath the iconic image is a portion of a letter from Hemingway to a friend. "I touch it every day as I go in to work, to get a little of that magic," Hall says.

Hall's sense of the magic of fiction goes far back. Growing up in Kentucky, he read widely. He majored in literature at Florida Presbyterian College, now Eckerd College, in St. Petersburg.

"Sweet town, St. Petersburg," he says, recalling that he lived in a garage apartment in the pink streets of Pinellas Point.

He earned graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins and the University of Utah, then skedaddled back to Florida.

"I was caught up in the idea of metafiction back then. I wrote a lot of it," he says, including one story in which the whole world was contained in the long-gone St. Petersburg landmark Webb's City. "You want to see Arizona? That's on the seventh floor."

But metafiction was tough to sell. Hall published his first crime novel, Under Cover of Daylight, in 1987, to glowing reviews.

Thorn was its main character. "I wasn't thinking of him as a series character particularly. But when I wrote my second novel, the publishers said, 'Where's Thorn?'

"I told them this book was about another guy. They said, 'Do you have find and replace on your computer?' "

Despite his success as a writer, he has continued to teach, enjoying the "intellectual habit of talking about books in a thorough way." Hall's creative writing students have included several successful authors, notably Dennis Lehane (Mystic River). "Dennis simply passed before me," Hall says. "My main contribution is not screwing them up."

Hall usually teaches one class, leaving him plenty of time to write. He's up early (he runs 30 miles a week), and when he's in the last stages of a book he may write 10 to 12 hours a day.

He's already finishing the next Thorn book. This one was born when he took a fishing trip with friends to try out a luxury shallow-draft houseboat that allows anglers to stay overnight along the Florida coast instead of traveling several hours back to a city.

"It was great. I spent the whole time thinking, 'What could go wrong out here? What bad things can happen?' Turns out there are lots of them," he says cheerfully.

Hall winds up his tour at Jimbo's, a bar and fish camp on Virginia Island that is the setting for a crucial scene in Magic City.

Chickens scratch in the dust; battle-scarred dogs dodge the bleary-eyed bocce ball players. Shacks painted in Caribbean colors straggle along a dirt road by the water. There are code violations everywhere you look.

"This is potentially some of the most valuable real estate in Miami," Hall says.

"People think it's the real Miami, so authentic, this old fish camp from before the city grew. But it's not at all. It's a movie set, built for a horror movie. Jimbo got them to let him keep it up instead of tearing it down.

"That's the metaphor for Miami."

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

THE BOOK

Magic City

By James W. Hall

St. Martin's Minotaur, 308 pages, $24.95

www.jameswhall.com

If you go

James Hall will be signing Magic City at 2 p.m. Saturday at Borders South Tampa, 909 N Dale Mabry Highway, and at 1 p.m. March 25 at Circle Books, 478 John Ringling Blvd., Sarasota.

[Last modified March 15, 2007, 10:28:54]