Fenia and Carl Hiaasen at home in Vero Beach. They began dating after he became a customer at her restaurant in the Keys. When he casually remarked that they should get together one evening, Fenia handed him her phone number, saying, “You won’t get very far unless you have this.”
"There’s nothing wrong with Florida that a force-five storm wouldn’t fix,” Carl Hiaasen once remarked during a television interview. Given the state’s recent battering by hurricanes, it was a comment that might have evoked outrage if spoken by someone else. Coming from the man once called “the blazing conscience of the Sunshine State,” there wasn’t even a murmur.
As many Floridians have come to realize, Hiaasen has done a pretty good job of trying to fix Florida himself in the 18 books he has published in the past 23 years. Rarely in the history of American fiction has an author focused with such intensity on the sins of his native state.
Consider his first novel, 1986’s Tourist Season, in which a crazed newspaper columnist feeds South Florida tourists to a crocodile and a local chamber of commerce president gags to death on a rubber alligator. What made it all the more intriguing was that Hiaasen himself has been a columnist for the Miami Herald for the past 24 years.
Most of his books since Tourist Season have been equally over-the-top. In Skin Tight, a hit man replaces an arm by having a Weed Whacker attached to the stump. In Native Tongue, a brutal security guard meets a watery fate after keeping a date with an overly affectionate dolphin.
Read the entire article in the February 2009 issue
True Tails is a series written by Amy Robinson for Vero Beach’s dog lovers. Ask Amy about your dog’s behavior by clicking below.
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