Novelist Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives. From an early age the overdevelopment of his state stirred anger and sadness in him, which helped fuel his opinion columns for the Miami Herald. He funnels the anger into savagely funny novels lampooning politicians, developers and the general absurdity of his state. Hiaasen will be at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival at 9 a.m. Saturday and he spoke to KUNM’s Megan Kamerick about how Florida provides fodder for his fiction.
CARL_HIAASEN: It's also for a native Floridian psychotherapeutic to do it. I mean, to be able to write that way. Good satire comes from a place of anger. Humor is a pretty good way to at least strike back and feel good about it. It doesn't mean it changes anything, but it strikes a note with readers. I think corruption is pretty much a ubiquitous condition of politics, no matter where you live,
KUNM: Your characters are quite incredible. I mean, a governor who realizes he can't break corruption in the state and becomes a swamp dweller, hapless journalists who become decent private investigators, inept politicians, strippers who take down corrupt politicians. How closely do you model these unreal people?
HIAASEN: I wouldn't say model individually, but I will say, for instance, “Striptease,” which was a book I wrote a long time ago, and it became a movie that Demi Moore was in Burt Reynolds was in it, but it was in 1978 I had just gotten back to town and working when they had a raid at a gentleman's club out by the airport, Fort Lauderdale Airport, and they arrested my congressman. His name was J. Herbert Burke, and he was in there all the time. He got ratted out, I think, by the dancers, because they said he was a terrible tipper. If he had just tipped them better, I think he would have escaped this. But in any case, it was a big scandal. He was inebriated, as he often was, and the sheriff that conducted the raid ran for Herb's seat at the next congressional election, and be on the basis of raiding this strip joint
KUNM: In your newest book, “Fever Beach,” there's a white supremacist in the mix, one who is even too stupid for the Proud Boys. How is the current moment delivering fodder for your novels.
HIAASEN: First of all, the Proud Boys were founded in Florida, of course, and no state contributed more participants in the January 6 riot than Florida did. One morning, I got up and I went out to get the newspaper or something, and there's a thing in my driveway. It's like a Ziploc bag. It's sealed up and been weighted down with beach sand or pebbles or something, and I open it up. Inside is this horrible anti-Semitic screed. And I looked up and down my street. Every single house had it. But all I could think about, I mean, aside from the revulsion, was what went into this, and who would do it? Because it would be a two-man operation. Somebody would have to hold the bag open, and then the other moron would have to be putting the pebbles in, and then they would drive around, and one guy's driving, one guy's throwing it out the window. So, you have to have at least two imbeciles involved in this. I just tried to get in their heads and think, “what is their day like? Who calls up the other guy? So you know what would be a great idea today, I'll go to the store and get some baggies, and you print up some of this horrible stuff, and we'll drive around one Sunday morning throwing it on people's lawns, and we'll change the world.” Imagine how much energy went into such a petty, hateful thing. And I wanted him to be starting his own white supremacist group, because you're right. In the novel, the main guy has been kicked out of the Proud Boys. He was up at the January 6 thing, and he defiled the wrong statue in the capital. He defiled the statue of a Confederate. He got it mixed up with Ulysses Grant. They both had a beard and but he was 86ed from the Proud Boys. So he's starting his own group.
KUNM: Before I let you go, may I ask about your brother Rob?
HIAASEN: Yeah, some days I do better than others talking about it.
KUNM: That's understandable. He was a journalist killed along with his colleagues in 2018 at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. You said he died doing what he loved. Have you found it more difficult to keep doing what you love since his death?
HIAASEN: No, because I think he would have been pissed off if I had stopped. It was the first time I didn't really write anything, and it lasted a couple months. I think you know you're paralyzed with grief at first, and then, you know, you have to work through it. And I wanted to work through it for myself as well as for his family, and I think he would have been giving me a really tough time if he had thought I would just -- that was the end of it, and I would quit. So, I ended up doing a column about him, and you know, that was probably one of the hardest things ever. You know, there isn't a day that goes by, obviously that I don't think about him. And what happened, what you learn is, sadly, is you join this huge and growing community of families of victims of mass shootings and the ripple effect of one person getting killed, much less multiple people, and the community keeps growing, and we're probably never going to do anything about it,
KUNM: Well, I'm glad you continued to do what you do because you bring a lot of joy to people and make them think
HIAASEN: Thank you,
