Carl A conversation with H ia ssen {Florida’s crazy native son}

I USED TO THINK CARL HIAASEN WROTE FICTION. Then I moved to Florida.

And when I’d read the news or catch a local

newscast, I’d often find myself thinking: Oh my

God! I’m living in a Carl Hiaasen novel! All those

bumbling crooks, clueless tourists, laughably

inept politicians — they’re all real and living in

the Sunshine State!

I They had different names, of course, and maybe slightly different circumstances. But I recognized them from the pages of “Tourist Season,” “Strip Tease,” “Lucky You” and “Sick Puppy.”

If you’re a writer — and especially if you’re a humor writer — living in Florida turns out to be the equivalent of winning the lottery. It’s a goldmine of quirkiness. Reading your local newspaper can sometimes feel akin to reading the Weekly World News.

Hiaasen

The Florida factor

“It’s hard to keep up, if you’re a novelist, and stay ahead of the curve,” Mr. Hiaasen, keynote speaker for the upcoming Sanibel Island Writers Conference, says. “If you’re trying, as novelists are supposed to do, to take it a degree beyond real life, it’s very hard to improve on the headlines, especially those of us who write satire.”

Why does Florida possess such an overabundance of weirdness and strangeness? Crooks and scammers come here for the same reason everyone else does: the weather.

“Might as well be crazy in the warm weather,” Mr. Hiaasen says. “If you had a choice between being a car thief in Toledo and a car thief on South Beach, where would you be?”

A lawless atmosphere exists throughout the state, he says.

“It’s a state where, if you’re not an honest person, you can easily get the perception that it’s easy to get away with stuff. And it is.

“Thieves and scoundrels have thrived here since the 1800s. It drew dreamers and people wanting a better life, but also all kinds of scammers and criminals, outlaws, who saw it as a refuge, and also as a place they could continue their predatory ways.

“And down to this day,” he adds, “we lead the country in mortgage fraud and Medicare fraud. There’s more public corruption prosecution in South Florida than anyplace else in the country, including Washington, D.C. — which is quite an achievement.”

For a writer, Mr. Hiaasen says, Florida is a great culture. “You have plenty of material.” It’s not great, he adds, “if you’re trying to have a sane, peaceful, affordable place to raise your family.

“But if you’re an opportunistic novelist or journalist, you can’t beat the material.”

Boca Raton used to be the boilerroom capitol of the country in terms of running money scams and rip-offs, he says. It thrived on the state’s large population of elderly people who had savings that could be pilfered and stolen.

Nowadays, more people are immigrating from the Caribbean and from Central America and South America.

“They become prey too, to some extent,” he says, “with the language barrier and education difference…You could double or triple the size of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami and still not have enough manpower to prosecute everyone who should be prosecuted, starting with the local government.”

A new chapter in publishing

A third-generation Floridian, Mr. Hiaasen will deliver a free lecture on Saturday, Nov. 7, in Schein Hall at BIG Arts on Sanibel. Open to the public, it takes place after Julianna Baggott’s reading, which begins at 6 p.m. The hall can hold approximately 400, and conference attendees will be seated first.

Mr. Hiaasen will talk about how he got started, how he works, and the modern challenges facing the publishing industry.

The book business is very different today than it was 25 years ago, when he was starting out, he says. Back then, there were more publishers, more options for writers; now, because of the consolidation of publishing houses, “There’s been a rather severe thinning out of the marketplace… publishers have gotten hit like everybody else by the economy.”

As a matter of fact, he says, book publishing was hit before most of the economy, because of 9/11.

After the terrorist attacks, fiction especially took a dive.

“In general, people were watching television more, they were wondering what’s going to happen… there was a general and understandable anxiety about the state of the universe at that point,” he says.

“People still read books to escape, and certainly there’s been a resurgence, but by and large, the market’s a tough market.”

Although it’s much tougher for writers today to break into the market than it was when he did, Mr. Hiaasen says he believes talented authors, “wherever they are… will eventually get published.”

Setting the plot

When Mr. Hiaasen was 6, his father gave him a red Royal manual typewriter. The desire to write stayed with him, and years later he graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in journalism. Two years after that,

he was working at the Miami Herald,

where he still writes a regular column (some of which have been compiled in two books: “Paradise Screwed” and “Kick Ass”).

When he was in college, he did some ghost writing, and that shored his confidence. If he could help someone else put together a manuscript and write a book, then surely he could do it on his own, he reasoned.

When his editor at the Miami Herald,

William Montalbano, suggested they write a novel together about the cocaine wars of the late ’70s, Mr. Hiaasen sought advice from his friend and New York columnist Pete Hamill (the

New York Post, the New York Daily

News, Newsday). Mr. Hamill told him to write five chapters and then send them to his agent. The agent gave the manuscript to her assistant, who turned around and sold the book within a couple weeks.

Mr. Hiaasen and Mr. Montalbano wrote three novels together: “Power Burn,” “Trap Line” and “Death in China.”

“They sold enough that the publisher kept wanting more,” Mr. Hiaasen says. “So that’s the trick, when you’re starting, to build on it. The point is, I was in the right place at the right time. I just had such good luck and such good people (around me),” he says modestly.

But he kept his day job. “Because of the fragile nature of the book-publishing industry, I couldn’t count on being a novelist,” he says. “I was a newspaper guy. That’s what I was.” At night, he went home and worked on his novels.

It’s thrilling. It’s humor. It’s both.

His first solo novel, “Tourist Season,” was about

a columnist for the Miami

Sun who leads a small terrorist cell. They believe tourists are causing Florida’s over-development, so in order to protect the land and slow the state’s rapid growth, they kidnap tourists and feed them to a giant crocodile. GQ magazine called it “one of the 10 destination reads of all time.”

More quirky, satirical novels followed: “Skin Tight,” “Native Tongue,” “Strip Tease, “Stormy Weather,” “Skinny Dip,” “Double Whammy,” “Lucky You,” “Sick Puppy” and “Basket Case.”

The books are unashamedly pro-nature and anti-overdevelopment, gleefully bizarre, with characters who often die in unusual ways. (A chamber of commerce president chokes to death on a 79-cent toy alligator. Someone else is crushed by a bulldozer. Another is “loved to death” by an overly amorous bottle-nose dolphin.)

Though sometimes placed in the mystery section of bookstores, his novels are humorous. Janet Maslin,

in a review in the New

York Times, compared Mr. Hiaasen to Preston Sturges, Woody Allen and S.J. Perelman.

In 2002, he published “Hoot,” a novel for young adults. He wanted to write something his stepson and his nieces and nephews could read, he explains. It’s classic Hiaasen — but without the sex, drugs and swearing.

“Hoot” was awarded a Newbery Honor and was also a New York Times bestseller. It was also the basis of a 2006 movie. Mr. Hiaasen followed it up with “Flush” and, most recently, with “Scat,” which is set in Southwest Florida. (All his young-adult novels have one-word titles, while his

adult novels all have two-word titles.) About the plight of the panther, “Scat” re-introduces the eccentric Twilly Spree, who appeared in “Sick Puppy.” “I thought that would be great for a kid’s book,” he says about the panther, “because they’ve become these sort of mythical creatures. There are so few of them. You hear about them if they get hit on the road, but very, very few Floridians have ever seen one, or will ever see one, aside from in an exhibit… I thought it would be neat to put the characters on the trail of a real Florida panther, or at least in the midst of where they live. And most of them are in Southwest Florida.”

The next Carl Hiaasen

Mr. Hiaasen has become so successful that now authors try to imitate his writing. Some write to his agent claiming to be “the next Carl Hiaasen,” and publicists often tout new Floridian writers with the same phrase. He says he finds it “flattering and also amusing.” While some of the books are fine, he says, some “are dreadful. I pick them up and say, ‘I hope this guy isn’t the next me, or the old me!’

“It’s just hype,” he says, adding readers are pretty sophisticated and can easily determine if someone’s trying to ride his coattails or if they have real talent.

“Every lawyer who writes a book, there’s going to be a blurb saying it’s the next John Grisham. Nobody goes for that anymore. It looks good, but the proof and the test are in the book itself. There aren’t a lot of John Grishams out there, but there are plenty of good novelists who happen to be lawyers.

“That’s just how the business works. It’s nothing you can take too seriously.” Meanwhile, Mr. Hiaasen continues to write.

He’s finishing another novel for grown-ups. He doesn’t have a title yet.

“I’ve got to get it done within a month or two,” he says. “I’m in that miserable crunch of trying to get the draft off to my editor. But it will be a title for large people,” he promises. And he doesn’t have to worry about being the next Carl Hiaasen.

He’s still the original. 