For our March issue, we spoke with journalist and novelist Carl Hiaasen about writing, Florida’s ecosystems, and the dark underbelly of Miami that he explored as an investigative columnist for the Miami Herald. Hiaasen has also written for Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Esquire and Gourmet, as well as the novels Strip Tease and Hoot, which were adopted into films.
Here are a few more eclectic insights from Hiaasen about his favorite characters, buzzards, and the Everglades.
On some of his favorite characters
Skink is the obvious one. I like him a lot because I had such low expectations when I put him in this book called Double Whammy. That character was only supposed to be around for a couple of chapters. I just decided to give him this story of being a governor who went crazy by all the corruption in Tallahassee and he just went nuts and ripped off his clothes and ran screaming out of the governor’s mansion. I always liked that aspect of him. The more I wrote scenes with him, the more I liked him and decided to keep him around and now all these years later, he still is.
That is unusual because I don’t have connections with that many characters.
Nick Stranahan is another one who is in Skintight and Skinny Dip. He was a good character and I didn’t mind going back to him but by and large, I like to start with a clean slate. Even Skink in the books he’s in is on the periphery. He’s old and unreliable, in some regard now like the rest of us.
And I’m very fond of some of the female protagonists in the novels—I did a book called Lucky You, in which [protagonist] JoLayne gets her lottery ticket stolen from her. I like Angie a lot (Squeeze Me). I’ve been lucky in my life to have known strong women. They’re always two or three steps ahead of the guys. I don’t care what a guy will tell you; we don’t have a fricking clue. And that’s Angie. She’s looking farther ahead and she’s dealing with stuff too, like her past, and maybe a dream or two that didn’t come true the way she wanted it to. When she was on the page, it was fun as a writer.
You get surprised by the good characters. It’s fun to have smart unpredictable characters. But then you have to have loose enough reins that they can go in different directions and you kind of end up following them instead of leading them through the plot.
On kids and the environment
The kids coming in today haven’t seen the scope of what The Everglades once was but they do understand we have to have fresh water and can’t destroy it. They know how important and special it is, so what’s left of it is giving them strength and inspiration. At some point you have to sit back and say “We’ve got to see what they can do with this, because that’s the new generation of leaders as well. The rest of us gave it a shot, one way of another, and here’s where we are.”
On satire
I was just very fortunate—at first I thought you had to be a Floridian to dig this stuff but I found this wasn’t true. People like to laugh when they’re reading. And they like the satire because it has a target; it’s not slapstick, it’s not just funny dialogue. There’s a target in almost everything I was writing including the last book, Squeeze Me. That’s a big orange sloppy target right there.
On buzzards
I was down in the Keys fishing with a friend a few weeks ago in a small boat and this has never happened to me. Up on the flats out of nowhere from this island next to us a buzzard starts flying. It gets lower and lower and I said, “What’s that bird doing?” It’s obviously healthy—zooming and flying—and it came right at me. I push it away with my fly rod, and he pushes with his push pole and we finally moved the buzzard into the water. And then we have a buzzard staring up at us. Fine. Now it’s all wet and it can’t fly and we said, “Oh my god, we can’t leave it out here to die.”
Why would it attack us in the first place? It’s a protected species and we felt bad so we got it into the boat. We took it back over to the island and put it back on a tree so its wings could dry. It was glaring at us the whole time. And [my friend] had the best line. He said, “Man, it’s going all Hitchcock on us.”
Well, there you go. That’s just nature saying, “I’ve had enough.” The buzzard had just had enough. Damnedest thing I have ever seen. I said to Simon, “See? That’s what happens. My casting was just so bad he thought there was a dead guy in the boat…”
On the Everglades
Once it’s gone, it’s over.
This Web Extra was inspired by the March 2022 issue of Boca magazine. For more content like this, subscribe to the magazine.
