Carl Hiaasen doesn’t see what’s so funny. “You can ask my wife,” says the
novelist. “I do not laugh aloud often, especially at my own stuff.”
Millions of us do, though. Hiaasen’s gonzo romps through the corrupt, seedy
underbelly of his home state, Florida, are as uproarious as anything being
written in English today. But Hiaasen admits that, like most great
satirists, what really drives him is anger - what he calls his constant
“emotional distress”. He uses humour to rail against how everything good
gets screwed up by stupid, greedy, thoughtless, often criminal human beings.
Especially his beloved Florida, where he has lived his whole life.
“Florida has become a magnet for outlaws, scoundrels, lowlifes, deadbeats,
people on the run, and for predators, whether it’s crooked lawyers, crooked
doctors, crooked stockbrokers, or flimflam artists of any kind,” laments the
55-year-old, grey-haired but still boyish-looking and tanned from fishing –
one of the few ways he chills out. “In Florida we have more sleazeballs per
square mile than any other place I’ve been, and I’ve been a lot of places.”
He insists there’s no mystery why. “Let’s say, when you grow up, you want to
steal automobiles. Now, do you want to steal automobiles in Detroit,
Michigan, in the freezing cold? Or South Beach in the sunshine?”
In 11 novels, including Stormy Weather, Skinny Dip and Tourist Season, Hiaasen
has used magnificently fetid scoundrels and fabulously baroque plots, some
ripped straight from the pages of Florida newspapers. But his targets are
deadly serious: the despoilers of Florida’s unique but dying ecologies,
especially criminally greedy developers. The destruction of much of the
Everglades haunts Hiaasen and his writing as a lost Eden. He reserves his
most scathing contempt, though, for Florida’s perennially crooked
politicians, frequent targets of his weekly columns in The Miami Herald.
Hiaasen so infuriated Miami mayor Xavier Suarez in the late 1990s by calling
him “Mayor Loco” that Suarez sued. The mayor had turned up on the doorstep
of 68-year-old constituent Edna Benson at 10.30pm after she’d written him a
critical letter. In true Florida fashion, she saw him off with a revolver.
Even Hiaasen couldn’t have made it up. “Another chaotic week ends,” he wrote
in a column at the time, “leaving Miamians to wonder how long before the
white-suited men with butterfly nets come to take the mayor away.”
His crazed, scatter-shot fiction may pass for airport pulp, but critics hold
his work in high esteem. Joe Queenan compares his madcap satires to Eugène
Ionesco. The New York Times puts him in the company of “Preston Sturges,
Woody Allen and SJ Perelman” and has said “Hiaasen’s wasteland is as
retributive as Cormac McCarthy’s, but funnier”.
“For all the frenetic wildness in the novels, I hope there is always a moral
compass in one or two characters,” he agrees. “They may be living on the
edge of the law, but in their heart they know what’s right and what’s
wrong.” Hiaasen’s liberal politics disguise the real truth about him: he’s a
deeply conservative moralist. Thus his scoundrels meet appropriately
grotesque endings of almost biblical horror. The villain of his 1991 novel
Native Tongue, for instance, is sodomised to death by a bottlenose dolphin.
Hiaasen joined The Miami Herald in 1976, when he was just 23, and was soon
working as an investigative reporter, the job he says he loved the most. At
that time, cocaine was being moved into Miami by the planeload, and the
Colom-bian “Cocaine Cowboys” terrorised the city, turning the once sleepy
resort into America’s murder capital. His first solo novel, Tourist Season,
was published in 1986. (Before that, he wrote three conventional thrillers
about Miami and the cocaine wars with William Montalbano.) He has kept up an
intense pace ever since: 10 more adult novels, two children’s books and two
nonfiction titles – The Downhill Lie, about a return to golfing in his
fifties; and Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, a stinging diatribe
against the Walt Disney Company, which he called “an agent of pure
wickedness”. He has also written weekly columns for The Miami Herald since
1985, two collections of which have been published, Kick Ass (1999) and
Paradise Screwed (2001). Hiaasen would be nothing without newspapers. He
loves and believes in them and rails against hapless, shortsighted
publishers, including his own.
People who know Hiaasen well say his relentless drive is fuelled in part by
fears that he may not have time to say all he wants. He is shadowed by the
early deaths of his father, who died at 50, and one of his closest friends,
the musician Warren Zevon, whose best-known song was Werewolves of London,
and who died in 2003 at the age of 56. Hiaasen has two children, a son from
his first marriage who has followed in his footsteps and is now an
investigative reporter on The Miami Herald, and a young son from his second
marriage.
Surprisingly, his novels have not fared well in adaptation, although directors
such as Mike Nichols have tried to film them. The 1996 movie Striptease
(based on Hiaasen’s Strip Tease) became notorious more for the $12.5m Demi
Moore was paid to show off her newly enhanced breasts than for the quality
of the dialogue or plot. The ridicule that greeted Moore’s gyrating,
G-stringed performance all but destroyed her Hollywood career. More
upsetting, it has put the kibosh on adaptations of Hiaasen’s other adult
novels. “Practically every novel I’ve ever done has been optioned by
Hollywood,” says Hiaasen. “I have boxes of scripts. In most cases, it’s a
good thing the movie wasn’t made.” Still, he’s been happy to pocket the
large sums Hollywood has thrown his way. “Found money”, he calls it.
Hiaasen had high hopes for Striptease. “The first draft was very, very funny.
But things start to change when a major star like Demi is brought in. The
only thing you can do is watch from the sidelines and hope for the best.
They are not calling you, as the author, every five minutes for script
advice.” He insists Striptease hasn’t been quite the debacle of cinematic
lore. It’s become a sleeper hit on DVD, though not for the reasons he
originally hoped. “Apparently, there are a lot of men who like watching Demi
Moore dance.” Hiaasen isn’t surprised Hollywood has had trouble adapting his
books. “Much of the humour is in the narrative tone. On film, you can’t have
a voiceover narrator going off on the riffs I get off on in the books. And,
for better or worse, I don’t write them in a linear way. I don’t outline
them. I have a lot of subplots and I let the characters collide and just
sort of take off.” Hard to distil into a 90-page, three-act script.
As wary as Hiaasen has become of adaptations, he’s excited about what might
seem a far more unlikely medium: theatre. His 1997 novel Lucky You has been
adapted as a play, with music by Loudon Wainwright III. It will have its
international premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe, followed by a short run at
the Oxford Playhouse. “Somehow, they preserved the anarchy and madness of
the novel, but within a much more, frankly, sophisticated structure than I
had been working in.”
“Carl had initial concerns about an adaptation,” admits the producer Katharine
Doré. But she and fellow producer Jon Plowman, head of comedy at the BBC
until 2007, director and co-writer Matthew Francis, one-time artistic
director of the Greenwich Theatre, and co-writer Denis Calandra, a theatre
professor at the University of South Florida, pressed on for the very
reasons Hollywood has had problems with Hiaasen’s work. Doré says Lucky You
“offered a crazy plot played out by a bunch of outlandish characters with a
central theme of stupidity and greed, informed by Carl’s unique social
satire”. The story features two of Hiaasen’s most splendidly deranged,
bottom-feeding villains: Bodean “Bode” Gazzer, a lobster thief, and his
sidekick Chub, who makes a living forging handicapped-parking permits.
“It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond,” Hiaasen
writes, “sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes,
homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest
work.”
Bode and Chub steal a winning lottery ticket worth $14m with the intention of
setting up a heavily armed right-wing militia called the White Clarion
Aryans. Of course, they have not counted on their own monumental stupidity
or on JoLayne Lucks, the black woman they steal the ticket from.
Hiaasen based Bode and Chub on two real bank robbers he wrote about as a
reporter. They were killed during a shoot-out that also left two FBI agents
dead and five others seriously injured. “They had to shoot one of them 18
times before he went down because he was so juiced on something,” Hiaasen
recalls. When the FBI went to their house, “they found they were in complete
underground militia mode – an incredible amount of weapons, bullets, body
armour, you name it. It was all this paranoid ‘America’s about to be invaded
by the UN’ sort of stuff. Of course, they weren’t so patriotic it prevented
them from robbing banks.
“I was walking round the crime scene and I’m looking at this piece-of-shit car
they’re driving and I’m thinking, ‘How did these two rednecks come to this
point in their life, from a mundane, rural, unemployed auto-mechanic
existence to becoming fugitive outlaws and shoot-out artists? What put them
in the frame of mind that they loaded up the guns and really believed they
were some sort of American survivalists?’ I distilled that into Bode and
Chub, two complete drooling morons”.
As inflamed as he gets, Hiaasen knows that “when I feel something is wrong,
the best way to attack it is with humour. Satire can be an incredibly
effective and lacerating weapon”.
He admits, though, that the way he uses humour “is therapeutic. I don’t know
what I would do if I couldn’t. It lets me get my anger out of my system in a
legal, socially acceptable way. And hopefully people get a few laughs out of
it”.
If only he could himself.
Lucky You, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, July 31-Aug 25; Playhouse, Oxford,
Sept 1-6
