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Daily Curmudgeon
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COLETTE'S LIST
Brief Reviews Writ Loud
by Colette Bancroft
Murder Under the Palms
Maybe that's one reason so many crime writers have set their mysteries in the Sunburn State. Or maybe it's Florida's buccaneering history (and we're not talking losing football teams). Starting with conquistadors and moving right along through pirates, smugglers, carpetbaggers, land scam operators, mobsters, drug dealers, corporate agriculture moguls and theme park developers, Florida boasts a roll call of greedheads, killers and assorted scumbags that makes it competitive even with California, the fatherland of hard-boiled mysteries.From the tough-guy classics of John D. MacDonald to the surreal dark rides of Carl Hiaasen, dozens of crime novels have turned Florida's dark underbelly toward the light. Here are some of the best, beginning with six by the current big dog of the state's crime novelists.Carl Hiaasen
Florida native Hiaasen has been a reporter and columnist at The Miami Herald since 1976. His half-dozen crime novels, all set in Miami and its environs, are savagely funny books, full of bizarre characters and twisted plots that strain credibility if you don't know South Florida and hence realize that Hiaasen is pretty much just drawing on his news experience. Crisply written, wickedly satirical and, beneath the breakneck surface, passionate about the rapidly-disappearing wild lands of Florida, Hiaasen's books are among the best about the state in any genre.
Tourist Season (1986): One of Hiaasen's trademarks is death by weird causes. In his first novel, he starts this tradition right away with the murder of Miami Chamber of Commerce president B.D. "Sparky" Harper, who chokes to death after being forced to swallow a toy rubber alligator. His corpse is found floating in Pines Canal, neatly folded into a red American Tourister suitcase.Responsibility for the murder -- and several more that follow -- is claimed by a mysterious terrorist group, Las Noches de Diciembre. But what do they have to do with missing Miami Sun columnist Skip Wiley, a passionate but obnoxious character who lately seems to be heading around the bend? Wiley's former colleague, reporter-turned-private eye Brian Keyes, goes looking for the answers and finds a whole lot more than he bargained for -- from a 17-foot American crocodile to an imperiled Orange Bowl Queen.Also on board here is Miami cop Al Garcia. He's not a series protagonist -- Hiaasen varies his main characters -- but Garcia, stubborn and cynical and smarter than he looks, shows up regularly, as do several other characters introduced in the next novel.Double Whammy (1987): What could be more wholesome, more innocent, more all-American than bass fishing? Think again. It's one of the most popular, fastest-growing sports in the country -- and a billion-dollar industry. Its flashiest manifestation is tournament fishing, where $75,000 prizes are handed out for big fish known as lunkers or hawgs. That's enough money to kill for.So R. J. Decker discovers when he's hired by Dennis Gault, a wealthy tournament fisherman who believes his bitter rival Dickie Lockhart is cheating. Lockhart is a bass-fishing superstar, with his own weekly show on the Outdoor Christian Network and endorsements galore. The first thing Decker discovers in Lockhart's hometown of Harney, a teeny Florida burg, is a dead bass fisherman, an apparent accident victim who was Lockhart's pal and the lover of Gault's sexy sister.Decker, another of Hiaasen's former news guys (in this case a photographer) turned private eye, discovers something else. That something would be Skink, a 6'6" hermit who at first glance seems like a head case -- he wears a shower cap and flourescent orange rain suit and dines regularly on roadkill. But he turns out to be perhaps Hiaasen's most original character. Skink is in fact Clinton Tyree, the former Governor of Florida, a man who was elected for his war-hero record and movie-star smile and then run out of office for being the one thing the state's power structure couldn't absorb: an honest man. One day, Tyree walked out of the governor's mansion and disappeared off the face of the earth. Only a few people know who Skink is, among them Jim Tile, one of a handful of black men on the Florida Highway Patrol and the voice of reason when Skink's passions and ideals carry him away, as they tend to do.As Decker dives deeper into the nastiness below the surface of tournament fishing, Christian broadcasting and land development, Skink and Jim Tile are his allies, along with Al Garcia.Hiaasen has a high old time with the rich redneck world of high-stakes bass fishing (one murder victim is buried in a casket made out of his Ranger bass boat). And the Reverend Charles Weeb, faith healer and developer, gets a memorable comeuppance.Skin Tight (1989): When Mick Stranahan retires from a turbulent career as an investigator with the Florida State Attorney's office and moves into an isolated stilt house in Biscayne Bay, he just wants to leave Miami behind. But after a stranger arrives to kill him, forcing Mick to dispatch him by impaling him on a stuffed marlin head, it's clear Stranahan's past won't go away.The long-unsolved disappearance of a young woman who had just had a nose job brings a TV crew to Mick's hideaway -- a crew for the "reality journalism" show "In Your Face," as well as its vain and half-witted star, Reynaldo Flemm ( a deliciously mean takeoff on Geraldo Rivera). As if that weren't enough, a 6' 9" hitman named Chemo has taken over the job of offing Mick. He's already easily recognizable due to his horrifically scarred face -- the result of minor plastic surgery gone awry -- but after Mick drops him in the bay and a barracuda bites his hand off, Chemo complements his look by strapping on a battery-powered weed whacker as a prosthesis.Then things really get weird. Hiaasen's main targets here are the vanity industries of plastic surgery and show biz, and he skewers both. Another Hiaasen trademark, bizarre but satisfying revenge on despicable characters, is evident in the fates of Flemm and incompetent, greedy plastic surgeon Rudy Graveline, who gets the nose job to end all nose jobs. And this book may just be where the Coen brothers got the idea for that corpse-in-the-mulcher scene in "Fargo."Native Tongue (1991): When Joe Winder quit newspapering and became a PR writer, he knew the job would entail some loss of dignity. But after he's fired from Disney World for having sex on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, he's hired by another theme park that's sleazy beyond his most cynical imaginings. The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a tourist-thronged blight on North Key Largo, is the brainchild of Francis X. Kingsbury, a profane, ill-tempered and profoundly tacky multimillionaire developer who also happens to be a Mob informant under the Witness Protection Program.Winder's job takes a bad turn after the park's pair of blue-tongued mango voles -- the last of their species and a PR bonanza for the tourist trap -- are "liberated" in a daring daylight raid. They're taken (and soon lost) by a pair of redneck career burglars, Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue, small-time crooks who are no match for the woman who hired them. Molly McNamara is the no-nonsense leader of the Mothers of Wilderness, a small and well-funded cell of environmental radicals. She's the stereotypical little old lady in tennis shoes, except for the pistol in her purse and her long friendship with Skink. Winder and Skink become allies as Kingsbury's dreadful development machinations are uncovered; Winder also deals with his ex-girlfriend's career in phone sex, a new romance with a woman in a raccoon suit, an escalating war of words with the park's head PR man and the attentions of park security chief Pedro Luz, a giant steroid mutant so far gone on synthetic testoterone he chews off his own foot when he's run down by a car and trapped -- and then keeps coming.The plot also features deaths by whale ingestion, dolphin sex and sharpshooting by a baboon, as well as something really unbelievable -- a non-academic writer gets her poems accepted by the New Yorker. After "Native Tongue," you'll never see the Magic Kingdom the same way again.Strip Tease (1993): Erin Grant has problems. Bogged down by legal bills while divorcing her creepy husband Darrell, she takes a job at the Eager Beaver, a nude dance club, because it pays better than secretarial work. The utterly unscrupulous Darrell uses her job to get custody of Erin's beloved daughter. But that's just the beginning. When drunken U.S. Congressman David Dilbeck jumps on stage one night to defend Erin's honor, she soon finds herself caught up in a particularly unlovely situation born of the corrupt marriage of Florida politics and Big Sugar. The ugly competition between strip clubs also complicates her life, though she can always turn to Shad, the Eager Beaver's monstrous-looking but kind-hearted bouncer. He's trying to get out of the business -- partly because he's so tired of looking at naked women -- by means of a scam involving dead insects planted in dairy products. Dilbeck's obsession with Erin makes her the target of sinister political fixer Malcolm "Moldy" Moldowsky, but with help from Shad and the redoubtable Al Garcia, she eventually dances out of danger. The sugar industry, despoiler of the Everglades, takes major hits, and Darrell's fate is particularly sweet revenge."Strip Tease" has been made into a movie, starring Demi Moore as Erin, but the less said about that the better.Stormy Weather (1995): The catalyst for this one was the devastation wreaked in 1992 by Hurricane Andrew, which flattened much of South Florida and left thousands homeless, jobless and more or less helpless. Of course, that situation drew hordes of bloodsuckers -- and we don't mean mosquitos. Hiaasen tears into them mercilessly here: crooked construction companies, bribe-grabbing insurance agents, career criminals overjoyed at the opportunities and just plain folks whose thin veneer of civilization was ripped away by the storm like a cheap shingle.Skink makes a memorable appearance and, mirabile dictu, even gets laid. Jim Tile shows up and has found romance, too. The other good guys include Augustine Herrera, a wealthy slacker who juggles human skulls and has inherited his uncle's ranch full of exotic animals just in time to see the hurricane turn them loose on Miami's suburbs, and Bonnie Lamb, a newlywed from New York whose Disney World honeymoon takes some truly strange turns after her husband Max decides to head south to videotape the storm's aftermath. Well-deserved grisly retributions include death by The Club, by impalement on a TV dish and by lion attack in a suburban backyard.Titles discussed in Colette's List
may be purchased at a discount from The Bookstall.
Colette's Archive
Colette's List 1: Murder Under The Palms
Colette's List 2: Hall, MacDonald & More Murder
Colette's List 3: Crews: The Artist As Scar Lover
Colette's List 4: Mosley: Easy In The City Of Angels
Colette's List 5: Chandler: Trouble Is My Business
Colette's List 6: Mango, Mortal Sin & Margaritaville
Colette's List 7: A Monstrous Regiment of Women
Colette's List 8: The Inferno: James Ellroy's L.A.
Colette's List 9: Spenser Is Parker, Only Taller
A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of
Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers.
