Death, Disney and the Miami man

11 April 2012

In Carl Hiaasen's darkly comic thrillers it is the animals who dunnit. They are natural-born killers, nature's own avengers or rubber versions of the same. In Tourist Season, his first novel, a toy alligator is rammed down the throat of the president of Miami's Chamber of Commerce. Sixteen years later, in his latest, a pop diva's bodyguard is blinded in one eye by a deep-frozen lizard and meets his death in an alligator swamp.

"I always like nature to get the revenge," Hiaasen says in his quaint hotel room in London where he sits neat and buttoned-down, his anchorman features reminding me a little of George W Bush and not at all of his favourite character, Skink, the former governor of Florida who, after a savage mental breakdown, lives wildly in the state's swamplands as an eco-terrorist - "my porky alter ego", as he calls him.

As millions of readers know, Hiaasen's imagination is not nearly as respectable as his appearance. He boasts to me of the fate one of his books deals a villainous political lobbyist whose hobby was shooting retired zoo animals in a fake game park. "Towards the end of Sick Puppy I send him back to the reserve. It was not going to be enough for him to be accidentally shot by one of his friends. The animals themselves had to get the revenge. So this time, the rhino gets him and he ends up on a rhinoceros horn, getting bounced around for all sorts of symbolic reasons. As he should."

Yet in his new novel, Basket Case, a slightly more soulful Hiaasen emerges. For the first time, there is a pressing sense that mortality is also gaining ground on the good guys. The book's hero, Jack Taggart, an obituarist on a south Florida daily newspaper, is 46 and, aware that Presley, JFK and Orwell never made it to 47, morbidly fears he won't, either. For every age, Jack can give you a celebrity death, and so, more or less, can Hiaasen. Yesterday he was 49, Douglas Adams's age when he died.

Is it the approach of 50 that has concentrated his mind? "It certainly has. Part of Jack's neurosis involves his own father, who he never really knew, who died in roughly this same time period. He's dogging his mother to tell him what happened in case there's some congenital thing that he's going to get. My own father died at 50. I know how he died but it's none the less one of those milestone moments you always remember if you lose a parent at a particularly young age, and I was 22."

Logic promises he will avoid a similarly premature death. Odel Hiaasen, a lawyer who hated his job, smoked and drank heavily and died from cancer of the oesophagus, a condition specific to drinkers and smokers. Carl does not smoke, hardly drinks - not even coffee - and, although he finds writing hard graft, enjoys his profession. His father's father, a "stubborn old Norwegian" also called Carl Hiaasen, died at 100. "So, I take comfort in the fact that, maybe, if I take care of myself, I'll land somewhere in between those two ages, but it's the sort of thing you can't help but think about when you get older."

In Basket Case, Jack's paper, the Union-Register, has its share of ageing journalists hungrier for retirement than their next byline. How does he keep keen?

"I just stay pissed-off most of the time. The few times my son [Scott, a successful journalist] will consent to do interviews about me, he'll always say I haven't mellowed a bit. I think that's the key. I look at life with my family probably a little differently, a little more thoughtfully, than I did, but, in terms of the sense of outrage and indignation about things that are happening in the world, I don't know how you could possibly mellow, at least in the States, and especially in Florida, which has so much inherent corruption and so much outrageous stuff going on, from Elian Gonzalez [the Cuban boy illegally held by relatives in Miami] to the elections of 2000 to the fact that 14 of the 19 hijackers from 11 September moved to Florida to learn how to fly."

As satirists tend to, he claims real life constantly exceeds his fictions. He is, for instance, convinced that the exit-polls were not wrong and that Al Gore won Florida. On a local level, corruption is getting worse. Part of the problem, addressed in Basket Case, is that newspapers have been so shrunk in the search for profit that there are simply not enough reporters to expose the rot as he and his colleagues managed in the early Eighties on the Miami Herald.

Televison is even more toothless. In the pugnacious twice-weekly column he still files for the Herald, he recently wrote in outrage about how Fox News had forgiven Geraldo Rivera, a TV personality disguised as a reporter, for faking a dispatch from Afghanistan. (Geraldo blamed "the fog of war".) Now ABC is seeking to ditch its equivalent of Newsnight to make way for David Letterman. I need hardly remind him that ABC is owned by his bête noir, Disney, the corporation that turned Florida into a concreted tourist trap and which in his 1994 polemic, Team Rodent, he came close to calling an evil empire.

"I think the line I used was that they're so good at what they do they manifest a certain kind of evil in the sense that their attitude is that there's a Disney culture and a Disney ethic and a Disney morality, which is a joke, of course. They don't treat their employees half as well as they would have you believe or as they preach. As a corporation, they're bloodthirsty and cut-throat, all the things the evil stepmother represents."

Hiaasen resents the fact that it is Disney and the imitator theme parks that bring 46 million tourists to Florida each year. Yet this annual invasion may explain why nine parochial novels about bribery and the local environment have been translated into 20 languages: everybody knows Florida. Hiaasen never expected anyone outside to be interested, either, but has an alternative theory.

"Wherever I am, people come to me and say, 'I wish we had Skink living here because we could use him.' What they're really telling me is that they've had this exact same experience where something precious from their childhood has been obliterated and wiped away and paved over in the name of greed, some space that was special to them that they wanted to show their kids, whether it was a meadow or a brook or a little beachside villa. I think it's that universal punch in the gut that connects people with the novels."

I agree that we have all had something precious desecrated, but that something is our childhoods. His, it seems to me, was destroyed not by his father's death, but by the suicide, when he was 17, of one of his best friends. Clyde Ingalls was even more fanatically opposed to what developers were doing to the Florida Everglades, where they both grew up, than Hiaasen, who believes his death may have been a desperate act of protest. On the other hand, he concedes that Clyde's death remains unfathomable, since there was no suicide note.

The thing about childhood, I say, is that, by growing up, you trash it yourself. "Exactly," he says. "Clyde certainly was upset by what was happening, but I think he was upset about other things, things I'm sure we didn't know about, we couldn't know about, or understand, at that age. We'd gone off and gotten girlfriends. We didn't spend as much time out in the woods with him as we had. You get the keys to the car. Your priorities change as a teenager."

Six months later, Hiaasen started college, got his high-school girlfriend Connie pregnant and married. His father, whose law practice represented the very business interests he and Clyde opposed, was supportive and set the couple up in a house. They were together for 22 years. Their son, Scott, has supplied Carl with twin grandchildren.

"Connie and I are still friends. She has had a partner for several years. There is still some pain and certainly guilt on my - on both - sides. But it could be much worse."

Carl, meanwhile, has married a divorced single mother, 13 years his junior, whom he met in 1998 when she was running a local restaurant. He, Fenia, her 11-year-old boy, Ryan, and their three-year-old son, Quinn, live in a white stilt house on the Florida Keys.

Despite all the romantically thwarted bachelors in his books, he thinks he was not cut out to be single.

"I wasn't comfortable. It would have been very easy to go and get lost in a place like the Keys. I was living by myself. I could write all day, fish in the afternoons and take my boat out. It would have been very easy to get insulated and isolated down there, but the great thing about starting over and having a family is that it keeps me engaged and interested in things that I should - as a writer - be interested in. Kids, schools, the culture. It would be too easy to go off and be a curmudgeon." So, what happens when Quinn asks to be taken to Disneyworld? "That's the question. I'll be back some day with little Quinn, but it'll be grudgingly, in the role of parent, and I'll probably write about it in some fashion."

He'll enjoy being surly and disgusted for, although he is now a grandfather, pondering his own death, a part of him, I'd say, remains permanently 16 years old. Back home, he drives like a madman and keeps reptiles for pets (although, since Quinn, he has released six of his eight snakes). When it comes to women, his novels remain hormonally challenged. In Basket Case, he squares the tart/Madonna riddle by having a sex-industry worker show the wisdom of Solomon. Strip Tease, which became a vehicle for Demi Moore's chest in a 1996 movie, is told sympathetically from the point of view of a stripper but sniggers like a schoolboy when a spectator dies "one hand fastened to his crotch like the claw of a lobster".

And what are we to make of his Death Wish-style revenges? Are they serious wish-fulfilment? Although he is a far from violent man himself - the only punch he threw in his life was in fourth grade, over a girl, and he broke his hand and lost the girl - he does support the death penalty.

"I covered an execution and everyone said, 'After you see the execution you'll never believe in the death penalty again.' It was a horrible thing. It was Gothic, the electric chair, a nightmare. The guy was crying and I certainly had my share of nightmares afterwards, but I also remembered what this gentleman did to get there. He had kidnapped a father of three kids, a clerk at a Holiday Inn, taken him out into the swamp and tortured him a while, stole the money and then, just for fun, started shooting him with a shotgun in various places."

He tells me more about this guy than I want to know. "Vengeance is a natural human impulse. It's an animal impulse, as well. In the animal world it's not without precedent. It's something you have to keep in control, but in novels it gives readers a chance, like myself, to have a vicarious sense of justice, whereas in the real world it often doesn't come about."

The danger is that it adds to a vigilante culture. "That's always the danger, but you hope the reader understands that it's vicarious."

If he didn't write his righteously bloody endings, might he be tempted to commit his own eco-terrorism? "It's likely. I know people who do. In my case, writing is what I do to stay out of trouble."

You can see what led Carl Hiaasen to make novel-writing his day job. Not only does the corruption he ploddingly reported as a newspaperman soar into comedy, not only do the bad guys always get punished, but you never get fired for telling it as you wish it was. As a journalist, Hiaasen will have published some retractions in his time. As a novelist, he has never once been told to withdraw those alligators unreservedly.

Basket Case is published by Macmillan at £10.

Review: Basket Case

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