MIAMI MAYOR XAVIER Suarez once declared that author Carl Hiaasen owed an apology "to the entire human race." Suarez exploded after Hiaasen, who works as a columnist for the Miami Herald when he's not writing darkly satirical mystery novels set in south Florida, appeared on ABC's Good Morning, America while the show was broadcasting from the Florida Keys for a week in 1987.
In an interview, Hiaasen told GMA host Charles Gibson there was "nothing wrong with south Florida that a good Force Five hurricane couldn't fix."
There you have Carl Hiaasen--outspoken, irreverent, and sick to death of development, greed and corruption in his native state.
A hurricane kicks off Hiaasen's latest novel, Stormy Weather (Knopf, $24), a laugh-out-loud ride through Miami and the Everglades that features perhaps the most unusual use of the anti-auto-theft device The Club ever envisioned. Like his previous books (including Strip Tease, Skin Tight and Tourist Season), Hiaasen's latest work deftly twists the conventions of the mystery novel into a satirical indictment of avaricious but inept crooks who collide in a dizzying cascade of misadventures after a storm devastates south Florida.
Longtime Hiaasen readers will be happy to see the return of Skink,
a one-eyed former Florida governor who now roams the swamplands,
eating roadkill and crusading for his own unique sort of justice.
Among the crowd he crosses: Snapper, a chemically addled ex-con
with a badly deformed jaw, thanks to the butt of a game warden's
rifle; Edie Marsh, a scam artist who has come to south Florida
to cruise Au Bar in hopes of seducing and then suing a Kennedy;
and Avila, a former crooked building inspector who dabbles in
the Voodoo religion santeria. Hiaasen neatly explains how
Avila ran into trouble on the job:
"Avila's career as a county inspector was unremarkable except for the six months when he was the target of a police investigation. The cops had infiltrated the building department with an undercover man posing as a supervisor. The undercover man noted, among a multitude of irregularities, that Avila was inspecting new roofs at a superhuman rate of about sixty a day, without the benefit of a ladder. A surveillance team was put in place and observed that Avila never bothered to climb the roofs he was assigned to inspect. In fact, he seldom left his vehicle except for a regular two-hour buffet lunch at a nudie bar in Hialeah. It was noted that Avila drove past construction sites at such an impractical speed that contractors frequently had to jog after his truck in order to deliver their illicit gratuities. The transactions were captured with crystal clarity on videotape."
The novel, a complex mix of kidnappings, insurance scams, murders and other nefarious deeds, is full of similar shots at developers, bureaucrats, mobsters, advertising executives and all those other folks screwing up the planet for the rest of us.
"The purpose of any satire is to paint a bullseye on some institution," Hiaasen says. "But the novel doesn't expose any more than the hurricane did. When Andrew came through in '92, it sort of ripped things open for everybody to see what was going on behind the scenes. For 30 years we didn't have a big storm and the building codes were gutted systematically at the lobbying of the construction industry and developers, who just weakened and weakened the building codes. And South Florida has grown, of course, and they purposely have not expanded the building and zoning department, so you have a very small number of inspectors that are required to inspect many, many homes a day and you can't do a good job like that. So what happens when a hurricane comes is everybody's roof blows off and houses fall down and everyone scratches their heads and wonders what happened."
Hiaasen has a fierce love for his native Florida, where he's watched development steadily rape the wilderness he grew up in.
"It's been going on for the last 50 years and hasn't shown any signs of becoming more sane or reasonable," he says. "It's just about old-fashioned greed. It's not unique to Florida, by any means. It's just Florida, having a tropical image and being surrounded by water sort of makes the game a little more hectic."
It's a game Hiaasen saw first-hand in his years as an investigative reporter for the Herald. The newsroom environment still shapes a lot of his work.
"Miami is a fountain of inspiration for novels, particularly when you're as warped as I am," says Hiaasen, who's wanted to be a writer "ever since I can remember--kind of an odd aspiration for a kid, but mainly because I was a very avid reader when I was young and I appreciated a good book and it seemed like a great way to make a living. And I always loved newspapers. I loved the idea of going to work for a newspaper where you got paid for what could be exciting and interesting stories. As we all know, often they're not."
He still loves the newspaper work, writing two columns a week skewering politicians, developers, lobbyists and other assorted greedheads. But his growing success as a novelist may mean leaving the Herald behind.
"Realistically, I'm going to have to someday make a choice between the newspaper work and the books, because at some point one or both are going to start to suffer, and I hope I'm the one who notices before the reader does," he says. "I'd rather go out when the column is strong and let someone else take a crack at it before it disintegrates into me writing about my garden or taking my dog to the vet or that kind of stuff. Several of my friends have standing orders to come up behind me and put a bullet in my head if I start writing like that."
