All posts tagged Bahamas

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen (2013)

Sonny Summers looked up, blinking like a toad in a puddle of piss.
(Bad Monkey, page 186)

Hiaasen’s thirteenth novel opens with the usual daunting barrage of information about a challengingly large number of characters and their often complex and detailed backstories, all quickly introduced in the first 40 or 50 pages, before the usual, ever-escalating sequence of farcical, satirical and often very violent complications kicks in.

The setup

Andrew Yancy (backstory p.33) is a 6-foot-two, middle-aged cop, working for small time Monroe County which, when you look it up, is a small jurisdiction far out at the westernmost point of the Florida Keys and whose county seat is Key West.

Yancy used to work up in glamorous Miami but was forced to take retirement after he drunkenly exposed the crooked machinations of a corrupt fellow cop, Sergeant Johnny Mendez, who was running a scam whereby he backdated arrests for crimes for which rewards had been posted, in order to crookedly claim the rewards. Partly because of the way Yancy denounced him (in a drunk phone call from a bar), partly because of cop solidarity, Mendez was exonerated and it was Yancy who was forced to resign (p.16). So although he’s a cop, he’s also the victim of a miscarriage of justice, sort of.

Yancy is not a clean-cut hero, he is a dope-smoking hard case. His current girlfriend is Bonnie Witt, who’s still married to her husband of 14 years, Dr Clifford Witt. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that Yancy has recently seriously assaulted Clifford. Yancy was cleaning his car with one of those hand-held mini-hoovers, on a public street, when Clifford and Bonnie happened to walk by and Yancy clearly heard Clifford insulting and cussing Bonnie. Being a headstrong, impulsive guy, Yancy leapt out of his car and chased a screaming Clifford down the street, till he tackled him to the ground, tore down his trousers, and shoved the hoover attachment up his ass. Yes. It’s played for laughs, but quite violent laughs.

Clifford was Yancy’s dermatologist, that’s how he got to meet and seduce Bonnie. Now Clifford is threatening to take Yancy to court and Bonnie wants Yancy to cut one of those plea bargain deals which you always get in American cop TV shows and movies. The local state attorney is Billy Dickinson who wants to avoid a scandal. Yancy’s attorney at the public defender’s office is called Montenegro.

When a severed arm is hauled out the sea off Key West by two honeymooners from Wisconsin, James and Louisa Mayberry, who are on Captain Keith Fitzpatrick‘s hireboat, the arm is handed over to the local police force which is run by the sheriff of Monroe County, a none-too-bright good old boy named Sonny Summers.

Summers is in thrall to the Florida Keys tourist industry and the last thing he wants is publicity about severed arms, so Summers tells one of his detectives, Rogelio Burton, to ring up his old pal, Yancy, and instruct him to take the arm (in an icebox) up to Miami and use his old contacts to persuade the authorities there that the murder happened off their beaches and so falls within their jurisdiction. The Monroe County forensic examiner, Dr Lee Rawlings has done an initial post mortem, but the boys up in Miami will do a better one.

So, with the hope it will get him back in Monroe’s good books, Yancy reluctantly drives the 90 minutes up Interstate One to Miami where he gets an assistant medical examiner, Dr Rosa Campesino, to examine the arm. She finds a small shark tooth in it but resolutely refuses to accept responsibility or notify the Miami police. Yancy is stuck with the arm and will have to take it back to Monroe County.

Taking advantage of being back on his old home turf, Yancy parks his car outside Johnny Mendez’s home for a bit, toying with hanging the severed arm from the rear view mirror of the creep who got him fired, but then thinks better of it, reluctantly turns and motors back to the Keys.

Here he keeps the arm on ice while he has Bonnie over, cooks for her and goes to bed where she gives more details about the plea bargain she wants to arrange for his assault case. They have sex. Afterwards she springs the surprise that she, Bonnie, is herself a fugitive from justice, her real name is Plover Chase, she was a schoolteacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she was accused of extorting sex from a 15-year-old (boy) pupil, Cody, in exchange for giving him A grades. She fled to Florida before her trial,  saw that Clifford’s medical practice was advertising for a secretary, she got the job and seduced him into marriage. Huh. Yancy had no idea.

Yancy’s lawyer tells him that his boss, the prosecutor and the sheriff have arranged a deal so Yancy goes to see his boss, Sonny, to find out what it is. Sonny tells him Dr Witt has agreed to drop all charges  so long as Yancy quits the police force – but it’s OK, because he, Sonny, has found Yancy a new job as… a restaurant inspector! To replace the previous county food inspector, Randolph Nilsson, who died of… food poisoning!! He is given a food inspector instructor, Tommy Lombardo (p.75). Yancy is not happy at all.

It will become a running joke that the most unhygienic restaurant Yancy has to inspect in his new job is called Stoney’s Crab Palace and run by a shifty, apologetic man named Brennan. There are recurrent scenes where Yancy visits and keeps on finding cockroaches in the kitchen and a rat in the freezer. When anyone exasperates him, Yancy always tells them to go eat at Stoney’s Crab Palace, and a bit later we hear, regular as clockwork, that they’re in hospital with food poisoning, ha ha.

It’s also humorous that doing the food inspection job quickly gives Yancy a phobia about eating out, or eating anything prepared by others, and it is a running gag that he loses weight throughout the book as a result.

Pause for thought

All that information – the names and interlocking relationships of 16 or 17 characters, plus snippets of plot and event – is conveyed in just the first 33 densely-packed pages (though I’ve added a few snippets we pick up later on).

  1. It’s a lot to process, and the rest of the narrative continues at the same level of fact packedness.
  2. Reflecting on this made me realise that maybe facts are what Hiaasen has instead of psychology. Hiaasen’s characters are sketched out with quick decisive strokes, but they have no depth. We learn a lot of facts about them but the more we learn, the more the details of their backstories read like corporate dossiers or police files. For example, we keep on learning more and more about Bonnie but she never really gels, as a character.

More people, more events, more information

The severed arm turns out to belong to one Nick Stripling, in his 40s, who had a criminal record for car crash insurance fraud. When, after a week or so, his wife turns up making enquiries, claiming she’s been away in Paris, the DNA from the arm matches the missing man’s DNA, so it’s a positive ID.

Yancy’s boss sends this widow, Eve Stripling, out to Yancy’s house to collect her husband’s severed arm (which Yancy has been keeping in a deep freeze). He hands it over, reasonably professional and polite etc, but as he investigates further, Yancy learns this dead guy, Nick Stripling, had most recently been making money in a Medicare scooter scam, crookedly getting hold of old and vulnerable people’s Medicare accounts, then making fake claims on them, and extracting money from Medicare for the alleged purchase of all kinds of medication and equipment, without the actual patients ever knowing anything about it. Later we discover he’s made over $11 million through this scam.

(Hiaasen has form with disability scams. Compare Stripling’s with the scams run by Mick Stranahan’s creep brother-in-law, Kipper Garth, who was injured in a Skin Tight but not as much as he pretends, and now makes a living sitting in a wheelchair doing TV ads wheedling money out of people disabled in crashes and accidents. Soon as the cameras are off, he stands up and walks round right as rain.)

Yancy attends Nick’s funeral and meets his estranged, sweary daughter Caitlin Cox (and husband Simon, ramrod straight ex-military). Caitlins doesn’t mince her words, furiously claiming her mother is a ‘cunt’ and killed her father. Well, that opens a whole new perspective on the case.

Neville, the Dragon Queen and Andros island

In a separate storyline, we meet Neville Stafford who is a poor old black dude, aged 64 (p.214) who lives on the island of Andros in the Bahamas. Neville has lived all his life in the family home on the beach, Green Beach, but now his estranged half-sister, who lives in faraway Canada, is selling it to some white guy named simply Christopher, who plans to build the usual complex of condominiums and leisure facilities, which he is going to name ‘The Curly Tail Lane Resort’.

Neville goes to visit the Dragon Queen, an impressively scrawny, dirty, smelly, scary drunk woman, to ask her to put a voodoo spell on this ‘Christopher’.

Neville has a pet capuchin monkey which he won at a dominoes game from a man who claims he appeared in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Neville has renamed the monkey Driggs and has overfed him on fried food, a bad diet for any animal, making the monkey sick so all its hair has fallen out. It chatters and bites and poops freely. It is the bad monkey of the title. Later on, in a comic touch, it is given a full backstory, as full as any of the human characters gets, with a jokily thorough account of his showbiz forebears, his own biography and character (chapter 23).

Yancy starts an affair with Rosa

Back with Yancy and the main storyline, Bonnie announces that she is moving away because hubby Clifford wants to move north (he still has no idea his wife is having an affair with Yancy). She says goodbye to Yancy and disappears from his life. Weeks go by and Yancy misses her. He phones her a couple of times, and on one phone call she explains that her husband, Dr Cliff, has taken to masturbating while part hanging himself by his belt or with a plastic bag over his head, the latest sex fashion for autoerotic asphyxiation (p.170). Cliff doesn’t invite her to take part, so she’s feeling horny and unsatisfied. But she is hundreds of miles away.

Yancy rings up the dishy Miami pathologist, Dr Rosa Campasino, they meet for lunch and start an affair. On the second or third date they swap details of their ex-spouses, as much-divorced Americans do. Yancy was married to Celia who, after three years or so of marriage, wanted to move north but he didn’t want to leave Florida where he was born and raised, so that was the end of that. Dr Rosa was married to a guy called Daniel till she bought him surfing lessons which led to him having an illicit affair with a lissom 29-year-old paddleboard instructor and, she then discovers, several other women, too (p.130). American Marriage, an institution respected around the world.

The first mate is hit

One evening Yancy meets at a bar with Captain Fitzpatrick, the hireboat captain, to ask him questions about the fishing trip when the arm was hooked. In the same bar is a young drunk dude shouting and bragging with a bottle blonde on his arm. The captain tells Yancy it’s Charlie Phinney, until recently his first mate who, after the arm trip, abruptly quit his job, having come into some money. Suspicious.

No sooner have Charlie and his babe left the bar than shots ring out. Yancy runs outside to discover Charlie shot dead on the pavement, his blonde girlfriend in hysterics, and a scooter zooming off down the road. Upon questioning the girlfriend reveals she is called Madeline and works in a shop that sells very rude t-shirts, owned, she claims, by the Russian mafia, managed by a shifty dud named Prestov.

Over the next hundred pages Yancy becomes convinced that Eve Stripling is having an affair with another man, with the very same ‘Christopher’ who is building the new development on the beach on Andros, that she and her lover killed her husband, hacked off his arm, then paid Charlie to hook it to the fishing line of the honeymoon couple from the north. The whole thing was a scam to make the authorities think Nick died in a boat accident and was eaten up by sharks, so they’ll sign off on his death, forget about it, and his widow can cash her dead husband’s $2 million life insurance.

Long-running feud with a property developer

There’s another running gag, that a short irritable guy from New York, Evan Shook, has invested heavily in buying the plot of land next to Yancy’s house (in the little settlement of Big Pine) and is building a monster mansion there with a view to selling it to out-of-towners. The new mansion is way too large for the area (Shook has clearly bribed the authorities), blocks Yancy’s view of the sunset, and has obliterated stands of trees where sometimes, in the fresh dawn, Yancy used to see the distinctive Keys deer come shyly, nibbling trees or grass. Now the area has been de-natured, levelled and is a building site. Yancy loathes and hates the development and Shook.

It becomes a running gag that each time Shook arranges for a prospective buyer to come and look over the half-built property, Yancy arranges something gruesome to meet them.

  • First it’s the body of a big, fat, dead raccoon which he found dead on the highway and carefully places in the half-built living room. Yuk.
  • Then he pays the local pest guy, Miguel, to install a huge bee hive in one of the bedrooms, which the hapless developer upsets with the result that a cloud of furious bees chase him and the prospective buyers off the property.
  • Then it’s Yancy himself who holes up in one of the empty closets after being attacked, beaten and thrown into the nearby canal by a mystery attacker, an assault from which he only barely escapes with his life. When Shook and the latest potential buyers find him, dripping wet and half naked hiding in one of the closets the next morning, Yancy explains his sorry appearance by claiming to have been attacked by one of the packs of savage feral dogs which prowl the neighbourhood which, understandably, puts the buyers off.
  • A few days later and fully recovered, Yancy late one night rigs up a voodoo / Santería shrine in the half-built house, complete with bones and feathers and blood daubings (p.172). This successfully prevents most of the labourers, who are illegal migrants from the Caribbean, from entering the site the next morning.
  • Next Yancy tells Bonnie and her tubby lover Cody (when they turn up half way through the story) that they can camp out in the half-built house, to Shook’s predictable outrage when he discovers them squatting in his property (p.205). It becomes a very funny running feud and Shook’s ever-increasing outrage, anger and frustration with Yancy is very amusing.

By halfway through the book it’s pretty obvious that Eve Stripling did indeed conspire with the little-seen man named Christopher Grunion (we discover his full name on page 166) to murder her husband, and chop off the body to try and prove it was a sailing accident, and then paid hapless young Christopher to hook up the severed arm.

Dr O’Peele is whacked

‘They’ also bump off the drunkard doctor, Dr Gomez O’Peele, who had been connected with Stripling. O’Peele is found dead with a single bullet to the head with the gun in his hand and the cops categorise the latter as suicide, but Yancy had interviewed him just the day before and forced O’Peele to admit that he knew about Stripling’s Medicare fraud. At this point, Yancy thinks Christopher Grunion and Eve Stripling must have learned that Yancy had interviewed O’Peele and suspected that he’d given too much away, maybe even the fact that they’d had Stripling murdered: and that’s why he was bumped off, so he couldn’t be arrested, questioned by the police and so on. Yancy feels partly responsible.

Yancy is attacked

He’s got this far in his investigation, in between his day job of inspecting restaurants, and in between sexy encounters with new lover Dr Campasino, when someone attacks Yancy as he is innocently putting his bin out: whacks him with something heavy upside his head, drags him unconscious to the nearby canal and chucks him in. The cold water wakes Yancy who is savvy enough to pretend to sink to the bottom and then to swim, his lungs bursting, across to the mangroves on the other side of the canal and very carefully surface and not move. The killer surveys the dark water for a while, goes to search Yancy’s house, then departs. It’s after this incident that Yancy decides not to return to his house that night in case the attacker returns and instead holes up in Shook’s half-built mansion next door… where he is found next morning by Shook and his latest set of prospective buyers.

Bonnie returns, with boy friend

Yancy tries to persuade sheriff Summers to let him rejoin the police department as a detective and follow up the case. Summers refuses. Out of the blue Bonnie reappears. Bored of her autoasphyxiating husband she set out on a mission to find the teenage boy who she seduced at school, found him and even though he has matured from a handsome 15 year-old to a balding, stupid fatso, she hooks up with him and the pair have driven down to the Keys and expect Yancy to put them up! As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate already!

The Oklahoma detective

In fact Bonnie comes trailing trouble because a detective from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation turns up, one John Wesley Weiderman, a comically strict, literal, unimaginative and dutiful copper, who is on the trail of the errant Plover Chase aka Bonnie due to her jumping bail all those years ago. Much fun is had with him, starting with Yancy jokingly recommending he have dinner at Stoney’s Crab Palace after which, predictably, he comes down with bad food poisoning, and for the rest of the novel he turns up like a bad penny, at inopportune moments.

Claspers and Egg

Back in the Bahamas we meet a new character, K.J. Claspers (p.202). He used to fly planes smuggling cocaine in from South America. Nowadays, he’s middle aged and flies charter planes around Florida and the Bahamas. At the moment he’s on a retainer from this Christopher Grunion and Eve Stripling, and their goon, the big black hired muscle christened Carter Ecclestone (p.320) but universally referred to as Egg (p.203). When, late one night, Neville climbs over the chain link fence protecting the building site where his family home used to be, Egg appears out of nowhere and badly beats him up.

In fact, to his amazement, Neville discovers that this big chunky bouncer is now shagging the scrawny scarey Dragon Queen. She has a mysterious ability to seduce men, even Egg doesn’t know why he’s with her, specially when she takes to riding around in an electric wheelchair, followed by a small cohort of moaning, swaying devotees. And then she successfully takes Neville’s monkey, the bad monkey of the title, away from him.

Pause for thought 2

This summary has only taken us up to about half way through the plot. In other words, about the same amount of event and character occurs in the second half as I’ve summarised so far, including the one Big Revelation which is central to the plot.

It’s far too much for me to attempt to summarise, but the comic strands – increasing mayhem caused by the increasingly unhinged Bonnie, the comic thread of poor Evan Shook’s half-built house being subjected to endless humiliations by Yancy, Neville’s terror at the Dragon Queen’s increasingly outlandish antics – are brilliantly juxtaposed with the Yancy’s serious investigation into Stripling’s murder, and the other murders which seem to have followed from it. Dr Campasino becomes an increasingly willing assistant and the novel climaxes when they both take a few days off work and fly to Andros to track down for themselves the mysterious ‘Christopher’ figure who seems to be at the centre of all the different plot strands.

It is then that the novel turns quite a lot darker, with the kind of savage and macabre violence which is Hiaasen’s trademark. In a nutshell, the bad guys kidnap Rosa who is being threatened with rape just before the good guys manage to track her down and rescue her. Meanwhile Yancy finds himself staring down the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun and being told he knows far too much to be allowed to live.

And the book reaches its climax just as a tropical hurricane hits the island where all the characters have assembled (although it must be said, the storm is a bit of a disappointment, it blows a few roofs off, knocks over electricity poles and scatters debris round the streets, but isn’t the devastating apocalypse which the reader was secretly hoping for).

For once I won’t summarise the sequence of events leading up to the Big Revelation, nor what the revelation reveals. I’ve given you enough information to guess, or you could read it for yourself.

Are these books thrillers?

Somewhere I’ve read that Hiaasen’s novels are categorised as thrillers, albeit comedy thrillers. I suppose that’s the least bad categorisation, but I think the reader rarely feels much sense of suspense or danger. There’s certainly little or no suspense concerning ‘whodunnit’. Both the ‘good’ guy and the ‘bad’ guys are identified very early on and we can be 100% sure that the good guy will survive and triumph (albeit after navigating some perils and getting beaten up or even shot) and that the bad guys will come to a gruesome and grotesque end.

I suppose Hiaasen’s novels have thriller elements (a crime and a detective and a few violent murders) but these seem secondary compared to the comic incidents, farcically complicated plots and continual stream of ironic reversals, pratfalls, twists and turns and misadventures. The reader reads on not so much to find out the nature of the crime – more often than not we watch the crimes taking place in real time and know exactly who did them – we read on to discover what wickedly grotesque turn of events Hiaasen can dish up next.

Explicit sex

I suppose the sex been there from the start of his career, but in the novels from the Noughties, it feels like the sex in Hiaasen books has become more prominent and more crudely explicit. In Star Island out-of-control pop star Cherry Bunterman sits on Abbott’s thigh and presses her hot pudenda down against him so that he feels her hot ‘wedge’ pushing against his leg. That struck me as unusually explicit and porny.

On page 27 of this book, Yancy is described with his head between Bonnie’s legs, but it isn’t left at that. Bonnie has recently shaved her pubes and so Yancy finds himself rubbing ‘his chin back and forth across her pale stubble’ (p.27).

Later, Yancy and Dr Rosa have sex in the morgue where she works, on one of the stainless steel dissection tables. As so often in Hiaasen, the woman takes the dominant position, hitching up her coat (she’s wearing nothing underneath) straddling and riding him (p.164). Later on, Neville will eavesdrop on the thug Egg being straddled and ridden by the bony drunken voodoo queen (p.236). Near the end of the book Dr Rosa and Yancy have a bath and, again, she straddles and rides him (p.387). The woman riding cowgirl position is definitely Hiaasen’s sexual position of choice (in his fictions). Later, after they’ve flown to Andros, in the hotel, Yancy goes down on Dr Rosa (p.238) while humming Yellow Submarine. I’m sure there is more sex and more explicitly described, than in the first novels from the 1980s. When it’s between characters we are meant to be rooting for (Yancy and Dr Rosa) it is described in reasonably sensitive and sort of loving terms. But elsewhere, sex is portrayed (as I commented in my last review) as having become equivalent to a commercial transaction.

It so happened that one of the most feared divorce lawyers in the tri-state region would be attending that night’s fund-raiser, and Evan Shook’s wife said she planned to fuck him and then hire him. (p.346)

Just hiring him wouldn’t be enough. I understand that Hiaasen’s novels are documentaries or sociological surveys, they are savage farces in which everything is meant to be cranked up and exaggerated. I also understand that sex has always played a central role in the genre of farce because sex is humanity’s weakest point, the fact that human beings have sex lives completely undermines all attempts to portray ourselves as sensible, mature and rational beings.

But all that understood, there is still something particularly rotten and corrupt about the way so many secondary characters in Hiaasen use sex purely as a transaction, our of boredom, to get their way, and have stripped it of any psychological significance whatever.

The American opioid epidemic

Once upon a time, back in the golden 1960s, there was a brief moment when ‘drugs’ were portrayed as an escape from humdrum, boring, bourgeois lifestyles. But 50 years later, they are universally available, widely taken, and the new wave of highly addictive painkillers has made junkies of large numbers of otherwise traditional and respectable people in the Great American Opioid Epidemic.

Hiaasen knows all about this and makes Bonnie’s offensively self-righteous husband an immoral quack who is adding his halfpennyworth to the misery of millions.

Dr Clifford Witt had recently retired from the practice of medicine, having invested in a chain of lucrative storefront pain clinics that dispensed Percocets and Vicodins by the bucket to a new wave of American redneck junkies. (p.20)

Americanisms

In another review I’ve pointed out how, across the 35 years of Hiaasen’s publishing career, you can watch the American language mutate and evolve. One aspect of this is the words which have been shortened, like carry bag where we’d say carri-er bag, swim trunks where we’d say swim-ming trunks, high strung where we’d say high-ly strung. Maybe making words shorter is the lexical equivalent of fast food.

In other places, I enjoyed collecting instances of new words or new uses for existing words:

  • a bounce house = bouncey castle
  • a bumblefuck = idiot
  • frosted = to be angry
  • a fuckstick = idiot
  • a goober = a peanut, a fool (p.221)
  • jazzed = pleased (p.400)
  • a mook = a stupid or incompetent person
  • a mope = noun meaning ‘A person of lower socio-economic status that leeches off the greater good of society, is lazy and is normally involved in some sort of criminal activity’.
  • to be stoked = interested (p.333)
  • ‘The sheriff’s wigging’ = very concerned, going spare (p.190)
  • ‘Sheriff Summers was a chronic stickler and worrywart’

Which,

Talking of Hiaasen’s use of English, this book contains a grammatical form I’ve never seen before, the novel use of ‘which’. ‘Which’ can be used several ways (as an interrogative starting a question) but the relevant usage here is when it is used to introduce a relative clause, as in, ‘The dog which bit me’, where which obviously refers back to the noun ‘dog’ in order to enable the description of what it did.

This use of ‘which’ takes its traditional function and then kind of supercharges and elides it. It’s associated with the Christopher Grunion character who uses it as a speedy shorthand to just pick up conversations. I assume it’s a verbal tic Hiaasen has noticed and transcribed, it’s an odd but powerful usage.

There followed an animated discussion that ricocheted between the subjects of urgent medical care and Eve’s gross culpability for Stripling being ambushed. Which, the guy who attacked him? Nick had no goddam idea who it was. (p.319)

Where ‘which’ means something like ‘Who was he, was the guy who attacked him?’ but is quicker.

He couldn’t stop railing about what had happened. Which, what are the odds of getting randomly stabbed in your own back yard during a hurricane? (p.320)

Where ‘which’ isn’t really needed at all, it’s a verbal tic.

Or he could pack up and run. Purchase a new identity, find another place to hide and start over as an international fugitive. Which, talk about exhausting. (p.322)

See what I mean? It’s difficult to concoct a direct translation into standard English, but you can see what he’s doing – using ‘which’ as an all-purpose way of connecting one thought to another,

But all he could talk about was hunting down Yancy before he could escape. Which, no way was that shithead going to sneak out of Andros today. (p.324)

Say the world ‘outlaw’ and everyone thinks bank robber, but did Dillinger cut off a limb to trick the FBI into thinking he was dead? No, sir, he went to the movies and got shot full of lead. Which, these days any fuckwit with a ballpoint pen and a Halloween mask could rob a bank.

I suppose the standard usage would be to replace ‘which’ in this example with ‘whereas’, but Grunion is clearly not a chap who fusses about his parts of speech. He uses ‘which’ indiscriminately to yank together bits of thought process.

Stripling wondered aloud if the stealth urinator was the same man he’d caught snooping outside the house, the old black guy he’d run off with the shotgun. Which, who’d be crazy enough to come back after somebody fired a twelve-gauge over their head? (p.352)

‘Quit being an asshole, Nicky. You weren’t in the medical care business, you were in the stealing business.’ Which, he would have run over her ungrateful ass with the Rollie except the motor didn’t work because Egg had removed the battery to lighten the vehicle for pushing. (p.354)

Yes, in these last two examples the use of ‘which’ is not grammatically necessary, and when it’s used it’s generally incorrectly, in the wrong grammatical way – but it does have the effect of picking up the thought and jumping to the next one, regardless. In many ways I enjoyed this unusual but effective usage more than a lot of the plot.

Credit

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013. All references are to the 2014 Sphere paperback edition.

Related links

Carl Hiaasen reviews

  1. Tourist Season (1986)
  2. Double Whammy (1987)
  3. Skin Tight (1989)
  4. Native Tongue (1991)
  5. Strip Tease (1993)
  6. Stormy Weather (1995)
  7. Lucky You (1997)
  8. Sick Puppy (2000)
  9. Basket Case (2002)
  10. Skinny Dip (2004)
  11. Nature Girl (2006)
  12. Star Island (2010)
  13. Bad Monkey (2013)
  14. Razor Girl (2016)
  15. Squeeze Me (2020)
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by Simon on June 14, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 14, 2021

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Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen (1997)

‘He’s a whole different person,’ Trish whispered.
‘Good,’ Krome said. ‘He needed to be.’
(Lucky You, page 446)

Carl Hiaasen’s campaign to make you loathe and despise Americans for their stupidity, greed and violence continues in this, his seventh solo novel, set among the slimy lowlifes, retards, rednecks and religious nutcases of South Florida.

Each Hiaasen novel has a central theme from which a complex matrix of crazy events and related sub-themes unfurl. This one is the Florida state lottery. On the week in question there are two winners of the lottery who have to share the prize money of $28 million and this is enough to trigger a 480-page firestorm of greed, crime and corruption.

JoLayne Lucks

One of the winners is JoLayne Lucks, 35, a physically fit black woman who lives in a trailer park (Hiaasen’s favourite location for his collections of lowlifes and criminals). JoLayne’s hobby is breeding turtles. She has 46, all different species, in an aquarium outside her trailer (so they’re pretty small, 3 or 4 inches long with heads ‘the size of grapes’, p.379).

Bode and Chub

But what spices things up and drives the plot is that the other winners are a pair of educationally sub-normal rednecks: Bodean James Gazzer, 31, five foot six, who’s made a career of blaming everyone else for everything that’s gone wrong in his short shitty life, who’s recently gotten interested in anti-government militias of the Waco Siege and Oklahoma City bombing variety (backstory pages 18 to 22), and so who’s drifted into the white supremacist ‘culture of hate and hardcore bigotry’ (p.20). Bode makes a living creating forged documents.

A couple of months before the start of the narrative, Bode had hooked up with Chub, a beer-gutted six-foot-two, ponytailed, unshaven, unwashed, smelly slob (full name: Onus Dean Gillespie, backstory page 96). The two bond over a shared contempt for:

government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work. (p.3)

In fact, as the story opens Bode has just decided to set up a militia named The White Rebel Brotherhood (p.36). For the rest of the novel Hiaasen has a lot of fun attributing every prejudice and bigotry going to the short, angry, venomous Bode, and his dumb, grunting sidekick, Chub. It is the couple’s ignorant but venomous race-hatred and bigotry which is the real subject of this novel.

Having read half a dozen Hiaasen novels I fully expected that Bode would end up committing a string of heinous crimes and then being grotesquely killed in the end and, having just completed it, I can tell you that’s exactly what happens.

Tom Krome the journalist

Hiaasen was and is a rather renegade, award-winning journalist and his first novels feature some very renegade journalists who, you imagine, are like fictional versions of himself let completely off the leash. The series starts with the protagonist of his first solo novel, Tourist Season, the award-winning journalist Skip Wiley, who goes beyond the bounds of ordinary journalism by setting up an eco-terrorist group.

Here in Lucky You there’s another of these journalist incarnations, this one named Tom Krome. Krome emerges as the decent bloke hero of the story. He also allows Hiaasen to share his thoughts on what’s happened to the newspaper business in the 20 or so years since he joined it back in the 1970s. This is that the newspaper industry has been eviscerated by accountants, keen to dispense with almost all the editorial content and to sack seasoned journalists, in order to turn newspapers large and small into efficient, advertising-revenue-generating machines with the result, as his managing editor comments, that the news gets softer and softer, contains less and less real journalism, more and more fluff about pageants and fetes, until nobody bothers reading it any more (p.321).

Interesting to read laments about the death of journalism and newspapers from 25 years ago. Newspapers are, nowadays, of course, in an even more parlous condition.

Anyway, Tom Krome is depicted as a good journalist, with old-school instincts for following a story. with the result that he’s found himself fired from a number of papers till he’s ended up at the minor league Register, where he has to answer to an idiot named Sinclair, Assistant Managing Editor of Features and Style, and stuck covering weddings and divorces. It rankles – a lot!

Grange, town of religious visions

Now JoLayne Lucks lives in an area called Grange, which is notorious for its religious sightings and miracles.

Grange’s meagre economy had come to rely on the seasonal Christian tourist trade. (p.420)

We know this from a number of storylines and events:

  1. Tom Krome’s new girlfriend, Katie (who is cheating on her husband, Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr.) is a True Believer in miracles and healing.
  2. One of JoLayne’s neighbours in the Grange trailer park, Demencio, operates a religious fraud: he owns and displays a four-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary with a reservoir of scented water inside, which is operated by a footpump so that the waiting queue of the faithful each get to kiss the statue and see miracle-working tears trickle from its yes. That’s before or after they’ve bought some of Demencio’s over-priced mementos and merchandising, which is where he makes his money.
  3. But Demencio isn’t the only one. There are various other religious fradusters around who capitalise on the town’s reputation, not least a failed carpenter by the name of Dominick Armado who, one drunk night, at a very low ebb in his private life, drilled perfect half centimetre holes in both his hands and now touts them as miraculous stigmata, charging a few dollars a time to allow credulous pilgrims to touch them, pray to them or have their photo taken with God’s Chosen One (p.378).

As a character wonders, late in the novel, having encountered all this religious nuttery, and after Armado has insisted on showing her the new holes he’s drilled in his feet, surely there must be something which explains all the freakery:

Surely this could be explained – a radiation leak in the maternity ward; a toxin in the town’s water supply. (p.460)

Early plot

The plot gets going when Tom Kromer is reluctantly sent out out to Grange to interview some blah blah lottery winner on what he thinks will be the epitome of boring small-time journalism. But Krome is won over by JoLayne’s style and balls. He arrives to find her front door is open and, on knocking and entering, discovers her in her bath, butt-naked, covered in bubbles and holding a shotgun pointing at his groin. So: quite ballsy, then. JoLayne listens to what Krome’s got to say, then politely refuses to be interviewed or to feature in any news reports. He goes back to his motel to ponder his next move.

What drives the novel is that the two thick racists, Bode and Chub, are not content with getting half the week’s winnings. They want it all. So Bode insists that they, also, drive out to Grange, They quickly establish that there’s only one lottery ticket outlet in the little town, at a branch of the Grab’N’Go chain, and they work out that JoLayne is the likely winner by cross-questioning the shops’ dim assistant named ‘Shiner’, the useless son of a born-again Christian mother.

Bode and Chub drive to JoLayne’s trailer and beat the crap out of her in a bid to get her ticket. Their plan is that Bode will present to the lottery authorities with one ticket and claims half the $28 million, and Chubb will present with JoLayne’s and claim the other half. The lottery tickets are sold anonymously, there are no names attached, so whoever is holding it is the owner.

Bode and Chub savagely beat JoLayne, introducing a sickening note of violence into the book at an early stage. They punch her in the breasts and groin and push the barrel of their revolver into her mouth, demanding to know where the ticket is. But not before JoLayne uses her long fingernails to give them cuts on the face, to rip out half of Bode’s eyelid and half of Chub’s eyebrow. She’s feisty.

It’s a stalemate until the rednecks have a brainwave: they shoot one of her precious baby turtles and threaten to shoot all the rest, at which point JoLayne gives in and hands over the ticket. They beat her up a bit more and leave. On the way out of town they revisit the Grab N’Go where they recruit the idiot Shiner to their fledgling White Rebel Brotherhood, explaining to him that all his failure in life is due to a conspiracy of fags and blacks in Washington DC, and (the reason for making a fuss of him) persuading him to lie about serving JoLayne the winning ticket.

Tom Kromer is woken up in the dark of his Grange motel bedroom. It takes him a while to realise it’s JoLayne who’s snuck into his room. When she won’t let him switch on the light and he puts his hands up to her face, he realises she’s been really badly beaten.

She takes him back to her trailer which is wrecked, with blood everywhere. Tom begs JoLayne to go to the cops but she refuses. Tom eventually realises it’s because she thinks if the cops start searching for them, the two hoodlums will destroy the ticket and she needs that ticket. Why?

And here enters the environmental angle, which is such an important element in Hiaasen’s fiction and which had been missing from the narrative up to this point. Turns out JoLayne works as an assistant to Dr Cecil Crawford, Grange’s vet (p.51) and has a natural feel for animals. In her time off she likes to sneak into Simmons Wood, a lovely piece of unspoilt wilderness and observe the wild animals (backstory p.137).

The point is that one day JoLayne is horrified to see a notice up warning that Simmons Wood is going to be demolished and turned into a shopping mall. She wants the lottery winnings not for herself but in order to buy Simmons Wood and preserve it for future generations. So that’s why she doesn’t want to call the cops or have her story written up in the papers; because that might force the thieves to destroy the ticket and she needs that money.

(The wood is owned by an old man, Lighthorse Simmons, who used to love to hunt there. He’s gotten old now and on his last trip was accidentally shot by another hunter. Now it’s his two greedy children, Leander Simmons and Janine Simmons Robinson, who are selling the land off and greedily hoping to make the maximum profit.)

Mary Andrea Finlay Krome

Tom has a wife, Mary Andrea Finlay, who he’s been trying to divorce for four years. She fancies herself a leading actress, although she only appears in provincial theatres. Tom’s attorney, Dick Turnquist, has been trying to serve papers for divorce on her for years, but it’s one of the running gags of the story that Mary is constantly on the move, one step ahead of the lawyer and his endless quest. The narrative is punctuated by the lawyer periodically phoning up Tom for another bulletin on how he just failed to nab her yet again.

Katie and the judge

Then there’s Katie, wife of Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. Tom has been having an affair with Katie for precisely 14 days, a whirlwind of sex and guilt, because Katie, in between blowjobs, is also a devout Christian, who has championship sex and then days of chronic guilt.

Because Kromer doesn’t ring her that night, from the motel in Grange where he’s staying, Katie has a fit of religious conscience and decides to admit to her husband she’s having an affair. More than that, in a fit of compulsive honesty she lists to the judge every sexual encounter she’s had with Krome, starting with the first blowjob she gave him in his car. American Christians are such fun! She’s also motivated by the knowledge that her 40-something husband is screwing both his legal secretaries, Willow and Vine. Katie hopes that if she confesses to her adulteries, he will too. Of course he doesn’t. But he is furious and instantly decides to take revenge.

Which is why, when Krome gets back to Miami from his brief trip to Grange, he discovers all the windows in his house shot out. Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. had gotten his legal assistant, Champ Powell, to do it.

When Tom phones her, Katie drives right round, explains what has happened, apologises, says she thinks it’s best, under the circumstances, to call off their affair and, as an afterthought, mentions that she thinks her husband, in his psychopathic jealousy, is going to have Krome killed. Great. Just great. A few blowjobs and fancy fucks and now his life is in danger, thinks Tom.

When Krome checks back into the office of the Register his numbskull editor, Sinclair, declares the lottery story dead and assigns him something else. Krome refuses to take it. He wants to track down whoever beat up JoLayne, he wants to turn it into a real journalistic investigation. Sinclair refuses to budge. So Krome quits and walks out. He calls JoLayne and tells her he wants to help her get her ticket back and save Simmons Wood.

The mob

Then there’s the mafia connection. Hiaasen goes into some detail to explain that the people who want to buy Simmons Wood – who Leander Simmons and Janine Simmons Robinson are so keen to sell to – are actually organised crime.

Richard ‘The Icepick’ Tarbone is a major player in organised crime in Chicago. He regularly creams off large amounts from the accounts of a big union called the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. One of the ways this is done is for the union to buy up land and make a big show of investing millions in some project, only to encounter a string of problems, such as lack of labour, strikes, shortage of materials, failure to secure the right permits and so on, which eventually let the project plough into the sand. No-one looks too closely at the accounts to see that the actual losses are over and above the ones posted – and that is the amount creamed off by the union (the process is explained in detail on page 139 and is, according to Hiaasen, common practice in Florida real estate deals: ‘Gangsters bought and sold real estate in Florida every day’, p.440).

Trouble is the realtor in charge of the sale, is Clara Markham, has now received a new bid for the land. It’s from JoLayne who, as soon as she realised she’d won the lottery, got in touch and said she’s outbid all other bidders to buy the wood.

The union’s lawyer aka the Icepick’s fixer, is Bernard Squires. When news comes in that there’s a rival bid the Icepick tells Squires to get his ass down to Florida and sew up the deal in person. Trouble is the realtor in question, Clara Markham, happens to be a good friend of JoLayne’s, not least because of JoLayne’s expert veterinary treatment of Clara’s Persian Cat, Kenny (named after Kenny Rogers, the country singer) and so when JoLayne begs her for a week’s grace (to give her and Tom Krome time to track down the rednecks who stole her lottery ticket), Clara is happy to play along, to Bernard Squires’ mounting frustration.

Moffit

Oh I nearly forgot to mention Moffit. He is a big, imposing, immaculately dressed Afro-American who is an old, old friend of JoLayne’s, they go back to high school and he’s always had a deep and enduring flame for her. And he happens to work for the US Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency.

There’s often a figure like this in Hiaasen’s plots, an old buddy who just happens to have access to government or police computers, a figure who can, therefore, conveniently join the dots and fill in plot holes. Compare with the FBI agent who helps Erin out in Strip Tease.

The quest

Thus it is that by page 100 the narrative has established two damaged people, JoLayne (veteran of six relationships with six loser men and now recovering from a bad beating) and Tom Krome (trying to juggle the demands of his psycho wife, possibly being chased by hitmen set on him by a judge, and now unemployed) decide to track down Bode and Chub (who, being morons, are continuing to use the credit card they stole from JoLayne, and so are leaving a fairly easy trail to follow) and get her lottery ticket back.

And this ‘quest’ is the motor for the next 300 pages of fast-moving, savagely satirical and often very violent narrative. If you are sensitive about racist language, psychology and scenes, this most definitely is not the book for you. The novel takes the reader deep into the damaged psyches of two violent and repellent white supremacists.

Highlights from the rest of the plot

Bode and Chub eat several successive evenings in Hooters restaurant where filthy, slob, face-scratched Chub falls in love with a leggy blonde waitress named Amber who smiles in order to get her tips but finds the pair disgusting.

Once Moffit has learned about JoLayne’s being beaten up and robbed he is very angry and uses computers and cop contacts to identify Chub and visit his apartment. He trashes it, searching thoroughly for the lost lottery ticket, discovering no end of white supremacist posters, guns and porn, before deciding to freak out the racist idiot by writing in three-foot-high red letters on the wall ‘FEAR THE BLACK TIDE’.

When they return to the trashed apartment, this message freaks Bode and Chub out so badly that they pack all their worldly goods and drive south, planning to steal a boat (the ironically named Real Luv) and hide out in the Everglades until they can claim their lottery money and organise their white brotherhood. (In case I haven’t mentioned it, that’s Bode’s plan; to use his winnings to set up a nationwide white Aryan militia.)

Shiner turns up to join them. He’s quit his job at the Grab’N’Go and, in an access of idiotic enthusiasm, has had the initials of the movement tattooed on his bicep. They agree with him to drive south and rendezvous on the coast where they can steal a boat. What the other two don’t expect is that, to please them, Shiner kidnaps Amber from the car park outside Hooters at the end of her shift.

Meanwhile, Tom and JoLayne track down the bad guys by calling her credit card company and finding out where money is being spent. They establish the pair keep eating out at a local Hooters, but spend a long time debating where and how to take the crooks. They have staked out Chub’s apartment so are able to trail them south to a marina where they watch Chub steal a speedboat. Tom and JoLayne  themselves hire a boat for a day.

Thus the main setting of the book shifts, rather surprisingly, from an urban setting to an uninhabited island off the coast of Florida, where Bode and Chub and wimpy fat skinhead Shiner and surprisingly tough waitress Amber rig up a miserable camp. A rainstorm hits. Jolayne and Tom have followed at a distance (not least because, like all Hiaasen heroes, Tom is expert on the water, has binoculars to follow the bad guys’ boat at a distance etc). Now they moor their boat on the other side of the island, and stalk and watch developments among the baddies.

The grotesque highlight

Each Hiaasen novel has a grotesque highlight, a memorably gruesome image which stays with you. In Double Whammy it’s the redneck killer with a dead pitbull’s head attached to his wrist. In Stormy Weather it’s the crooked property salesman crucified to an outsized satellite TV dish by a disgruntled customer. In this novel, it involves the drooling idiot Chub.

Chub, among his countless other vices, snorts glue or aerosols. At various points in the narrative he manages to make himself insensible on whatever sniffable substance he can lay his hands on. On the boat trip out to the island Chub makes himself so blotto on a tube of boat glue he finds, that he passes out with his hand trailing in the water only to wake and find half of it eaten off by a giant crab.

This section on the island drags on a bit, with various arguments and shifts in psychological dynamic between the three white supremacists and their waitress hostage described at what begins to feel like inordinate length.

Tom and JoLayne rescue Amber, Bode dies

Eventually, in a fury of frustration, Chub finally tries to rape Amber and she is fighting him off when there’s a gunshot. Chub is thrown off Amber’s naked body because Tom has just shot half his shoulder away, swiftly followed by a shotgun butt to the head which knocks Bode unconscious.

Tom and JoLayne patch up Chub to stop him bleeding to death, then put Shiner and Amber into the stolen boat, with a map and instructions to go back to civilisation, which they do without mishap.

But, as so often happens (as happened in the very similar situation in Stormy Weather), although they’ve tied up the bad guys, one of them – Bode – manages to get loose and makes a run for it through the mangrove groves to the other end of the island where Tom and JoLayne’s boat is moored.

Except Tom chases him and tackles him in the shallows, they both thrash around kicking and punching. Unfortunately, Bode kicks a stingray which was having a quiet nap on the mud floor and responds by embedding its big sting deep in his thigh. Bode lets go of Tom who staggers upright, himself half-drowned in the epic struggle, then pulls Bode in from the shallows onto the sand. And here he bleeds to death (p.397). Yes, I thought he’d meet a sticky end, Hiaasen’s baddies always do.

The judge, his assistant and the exploding house

This main central plank of the narrative is interspersed with two other plot developments:

Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. gets cold feet. Having had all Tom’s windows shot out he becomes paranoid that Tom will track him down and do something bad to him and/or write about him in his newspaper. So the judge decides that he must not only scare Tom Krome, but kill him! So he gets his legal secretary, Champ Powell, to blow up his house. Champ is a whizz at the law but less so at arson and pours out so much gasoline round Tom’s empty house that he passes out, falling against the cooker as he does so, and blowing the house to kingdom come, killing himself. His body is charred beyond recognition in the ensuing fire. The point is – everyone now thinks the corpse in the house was Tom: everyone thinks Tom is dead, from his managing editor at the newspaper (who didn’t even know he’d quit), to his lawyer, his wife he’s trying to divorce, Katie his lover (who’d admitted everything to the judge) and so on. This sparks a complicated trail of interactions and consequences, while Tom is happily oblivious to it all, far away in the outback trailing the racists.

Sinclair becomes Turtle Boy

Quite a lot earlier in the plot, the editor of the Register had told Sinclair to get his ass up to Grange and find out what Tom Krome was up to and why he wasn’t reporting in to the office (we know it’s because he’s followed the bad guys out to the island but nobody else knows that).

Sinclair does so, and tracks down the house of JoLayne and her neighbours, Demencio and Trisha, but here something weird happens: he has a spiritual awakening.

When JoLayne left with Tom, she asked her neighbours Femencio and Trisha to look after JoLayne’s 46 little turtles and, business with the Weeping Virgin falling a bit slack, Demencio has a brainwave. Why not paint the faces of the 12 apostles onto the shells of 12 of the turtles and claim they appeared overnight? The scam is a runaway success, drawing in thousands of paying believers to the aquarium the pair set up specially for the ‘Holy Turtles’.

Now when Sinclair, poking around to find Tom Krome, is introduced to Demencio and Trisha, when they give him one of the lickle baby turtles to hold, Sinclar has a profound spiritual experience, is converted on the spot. He takes to wearing a white gown and immersing himself in the lined trench Demencio builds for the apostle turtles and letting them crawl all over him. He forgets about his job, he forgets about Tom Krome, he experiences otherworldly bliss and speaks in tongues.

Soon rumour gets round of the freak Demencio nicknames ‘Turtle Boy’, and Sinclair finds himself becoming a major religious attraction in his own right.

There’s quite a lot more plot complexity and detail, because one of the central aspects of the genre of farce is that it has a preposterously convoluted plot.

The bad judge is arrested

By the time Tom and JoLayne return safely to civilisation the threat against him has been lifted. The police have by this stage realised the corpse in Tom’s house was not him but the judge’s legal assistant, and the judge’s wife, Katie, has told the police all about the judge’s arsonical felonies, so that the judge has forgotten about Tom and is packing to escape to the Bahamas. Only to walk out his front door and be arrested by the FBI (p.430). So that storyline, which had taken up a lot of space and complexity, is happily resolved.

Thoughts and reflections

1. White supremacy and race anxiety

Religion is the most obvious and flagrant subject of the satire, what with Demencio’s weeping Madonna and the apostle turtle scams (not to mention Shiner’s born-again mother who I haven’t mentioned so far but insists she can see the face of Jesus printed on the local highway and eventually goes into a kind of religious partnership with Turtle Boy.

But the religious satire is overshadowed by the novel’s larger, more serious theme, which is race, or race relations in America. It is the central theme in Bode and Chub’s lives that they plan to set up a militia named The White Rebel Brotherhood dedicated to the salvation of the white race, against the great tide of blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians and liberals and Jews who they see as taking over their country. Their paranoia is satirised in Bode’s incoherent notion that a vast UN or NATO force is waiting on the Bahamas and, at any moment, will invade mainland America and suppress the white race in the name of the international conspiracy of thingummy, something – whenever he gets to this point, in his explanations to Chub or Shiner, Bode gets confused and angry, realising his paranoid delusions don’t actually make sense (pp.351).

The pair’s stupidity is satirised by the way Bode doesn’t realise the White Rebel Brotherhood is the name of a popular rap band. When he learns this it infuriates him, so that Bode changes the name of his little gang to the White Clarion Aryans, who:

‘We believe in the purity and supremacy of the Euro-Caucasian people.’ (p.299)

So far, so dumb, so satirical and so fairly funny. But it isn’t funny when they beat the crap out of JoLayne and grab her breasts and punch her in the groin calling her the n word. A ‘bad’ word here or there is piss in the wind compared to the force of their deep, raging, unrelenting, racist bigotry.

Hiaasen goes some way to investigating the roots of the problem, with periodic explanations that the roots of their hatred lie in the endless frustrations of lazy, stupid, badly educated, dropout, unemployed, lowlife, small-time criminals.

But towards the end of the book there’s a powerful scene where JoLayne cradles the badly wounded Chub in her lap, tending to the wound Tom has just shot in his shoulder (to stop him raping Amber) because she can’t bear to see anything die. JoLayne asks him directly the reason for his unrelenting rage. But all she gets back is cuss words (p.391). Nothing can be explained. These people are too damaged to change and too mentally limited to reflect on their own lives and beliefs.

Same when Bode is dying. JoLayne pitifully asks him:

‘Please. I’m trying to understand the nature of your hatefulness…What did I ever do to you?’ She demanded. ‘What did any black person ever do to you?’ (p.398)

To which Bode can only reply with a thin list of petty offences, none of which get at the real psychological root of such monstrous anger and hate.

On a different plane, the issue of race recurs in the ‘mixed race’ relationship between white Tom and black JoLayne. This mainly takes the shape of her teasing him about his white liberal guilt (p.346) and his honky ass. There’s the moment in the car driving south when she takes the mickey out of the way he only likes ‘white-boy rock’, triggering a spluttering defence on his part, which makes her crack up with laughter (p.244).

This is meant to be fairly light-hearted joshing but to me, at any rate, indicated yet another way in which racial differences seem to be so difficult to normalise. All I mean is that JoLayne and Tom are as liberal individuals as it is possible to imagine, and yet even for them, the difference in skin or race or ethnicity or whatever you want to call it, still creates nervousness and imbalances of power. Can it ever be completely neutral, a relationship between a black person and a white person, completely without an awareness of race? Not if this novel is to be believed.

Anyway, back to Bode and Chub and their pathetic white supremacy, Hiaasen gives it a thorough and extended hammering, but satire doesn’t change anything in the real world. Hiaasen was mocking white supremacy and ignorant bigotry back in 1997 yet Donald Trump came to power on the back of a huge sea of it 20 years later, and his presidency climaxed in the amazing scenes of the Proud Boys storming the Capitol and waving the Confederate flag.

The problem doesn’t seem to have gotten any better in the 24-odd years since 1997, does it? Writing savagely satirical novels isn’t enough. Nowhere near.

2. America, criminal state

Last time I went to New York I hated it. I watched American TV, listened to American radio, saw American hoardings, browsed in American shops, and felt suffocated by it, by the unrelenting commercialisation of everything. There seems to be little or no natural interaction between human beings behaving innocently, politely and candidly. Absolutely everything is monetised, is a deal, every service in a shop or hotel or taxi requires a tip. Money is front of everyone’s mind.

And that’s what comes over in Hiaasen’s books. There’s no character that doesn’t have an angle. They are all after something, and they all spend all their time calculating the odds, the profits and losses, of every deal and every venture. Demencio’s religious frauds are obvious butts for satire, but there isn’t much essential difference between that and the various crooked lawsuits we learn Circuit Judge Arthur Battenkill Jr. has been involved in. Everyone is faking and lying for money.

Hiaasen gives a particularly detailed explanation of how the judge swings one last crooked judgement before he realises he has to flee the Feds. He finds in favour of a well-known insurance fraudster, 70-year-old Emil LaGort who makes a living out of tripping or falling at supermarkets then suing them for negligence (p.374). Generally, LaGort’s claims are thrown out or he settles for small fees, but the judge rings up LaGort’s attorney and advises him to go hard on the next case. The lawyer is puzzled. The judge explains that, if the lawyer sues LaGort’s latest corporate target for $500,000, he (the judge) will find in his favour – on the understanding that LaGort’s attorney will then give him half that amount. Why? To pay for his hurried flight to the Bahamas.

In other words: the American legal system is not just a bit crooked, it is one enormous scam, from top to bottom, a vast system of interlocking scams and deals at every level, greased by money and bribery.

These aren’t generalised slurs. Hiaasen gives detailed descriptions of hos America’s countless scams and cons work in practice. He explains in great detail the mafia scheme for creaming money off failed building projects, described above. The mafia makes money by commissioning large-scale property developments which are then left deliberately incomplete and declared write-offs, so the mob can launder money through them. The result is to leave Florida covered with abandoned works, whose sole material impact is to devastate the landscape. And this is happening all the time, has been going on for decades.

Hiaasen’s America is all like that, at every level. You can visualise a hierarchy, like a medieval diagram of the ‘estates’, with scumbags like Bode and Chub at the bottom, organised criminals like The Icepick and his fixer Bernard Squires at a higher level, doing deals with bribeable cops, supervised by crooked judges like Battenkill, and then the crooked local politicians Hiaasen has lambasted in other novels sitting at the top, easy to buy and influence with big dollar campaign contributions, the whole thing covered by a TV and print media which are themselves only interesting in keeping the gravy train of corruption and payola spinning forwards in order to bring in those advertising dollars. Money money money. An unending panorama of greed and corruption in every direction.

And then, in a stroke of genius, you give all these crooks and retards and mobsters and hitmen high-powered guns and automatic weapons and let them loose on each other.

Everyone who lived in Dade County knew the sound of a semiautomatic.’ (p.311)

It’s a modern vision of the Inferno. It is contemporary America. In the week since I finished reading the book I think there have been three mass shootings in America, one just yesterday in Hiaasen’s own Miami. What a great country.

3. Americans have a word for it

As part of their can-do, get a move on, hurry hurry culture, Americans just seem to have snappy nouns and catchy phrases to describe things and actions that the English bumble over. A few examples being:

  • to cinch = verb, when you’re wearing a hat with a loop of string under the chin and a toggle which you can move up the two bits of string to tighten them up, you ‘cinch’ it tight; women cinch a scrunchie on their hair
  • a domelight = the overhead light in a car (p.249)
  • to fishtail = verb, to have the rear end of a car slide from side to side. ‘Recklessly he gunned the truck across Highway One and fishtailed into the northbound lane.’ (p.265)
  • a hummer = a blowjob (p.325)
  • a ride-along = someone who comes along for a ride in a car (p.400)
  • walk-ons = when you run a boat hire company in a marina and you get customers who haven’t booked ahead but just walk up and ask if they can hire

Credit

Lucky You by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1997. All references are to the 1998 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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by Simon on May 31, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 31, 2021

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Thunderball by Ian Fleming (1961)

Bond laughed, partly in admiration. ‘You’ve been taking mescalin or something. It’s a damned good sequence for a comic strip, but these things don’t happen in real life.’ (p.168)

Shrublands

The tremendous battering Fleming has submitted Bond to over the previous seven novels begins to show, as M – a recent convert to healthy living and wholefood diets – insists he takes a rest cure at a sanatorium in Sussex named ‘Shrublands’. Fleming’s description is amusingly sardonic throughout, from the brylcreemed youth who drives him in a taxi to the spa, through the old health food ‘doctor’ who prescribes his rest cure treatments, to the repellent, fat, old men and women who populate the place.

Bond submits with bad grace to the round of massages, hot baths, and the starvation diet of nut cutlets and dandelion tea, though there are several highlights: 1. He flirts with the unusually pretty, firm-bodied and ‘strict’ health therapist Patricia Fearing until, with dumb inevitability, while she’s massaging him he reaches up and kisses her. For all her flurried objections, Bond knows it is a done deal, and (rather callously) describes bonking her in her little bubble car up on the Sussex Downs.

2. More importantly, someone tries to kill him. He notices a tiny tattoo on the wrist of another ‘guest’, the handsome six-foot Count Lippe, then makes a bad mistake by phoning the Cipher Section of the Service to ask about the tattoo, from a public payphone in the sanatorium’s corridor. Turns out the tattoo is the sign of the Tongs, a secret society based in Macau.

Later the delectable Ms Fearing straps Bond into a complicated spine-stretching apparatus as part of his treatment and leaves the room – only for Lippe to sneak in and turn the machine way up past the danger zone, so that Bond’s body is literally being torn apart. It is only the accidental return of Ms Fearing a bit earlier than scheduled that saves his life. Bond laughs it off as a mishap but plans his revenge and, on the last day of his stay, ambushes Lippe who is sitting in a ‘sweat box’. Bond turns its thermostat up to a scalding 180 degrees.

Bond leaves Shrublands feeling lighter, toned up, fitter and more focused than for years, having bonked a pretty nurse and scored a petty act of revenge.

What he doesn’t realise is that he has impinged on a conspiracy to shake the governments of the world! Chapter five introduces us to Ernst Stavro Blofeld – the most notorious Bond baddie – giving his full backstory as a gifted Polish engineer who set up a bogus spy ring in pre-war Poland and screwed money out of various buyers, before setting up another ring in Turkey during the war itself, then clearing out to South America. Now he is back and he has invented SPECTRE, SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, as a clearing house for all kinds of criminal activities.

Meeting of SPECTRE

In the next scene we are introduced to a meeting of the top men in SPECTRE at a non-descript house in Paris. They are all allotted numbers, and comprise cells of men recruited from the French and Italian Mafia, SMERSH, American underworld gangs etc. Their undisputed leader is Blofeld. Blofeld reads out the monthly summary of profits from their various criminal activities – then melodramatically moves on to punish one of the members seated round the big table. This man is accused of violating a young girl who had been kidnapped, and SPECTRE had promised to return unharmed. Blofeld announces that SPECTRE returned half the kidnap ransom and now the guilty man is punished by the activation of electric pads in his chair which electrocute and virtually cook him. His smoking body slumps onto the table. The other members take this as due justice. This is SPECTRE. Blofeld’s word is law. They then proceed to discuss ‘the Omega Plan’.

This scene feels every bit as overblown and teenage as the movies.

The letter

Next thing Bond knows he’s called in by M who gives him a letter claiming SPECTRE has hijacked an RAF bomber (the fictional Vindicator) carrying two atomic bombs. The governments of the West have one week to hand over £100,000,000 or they’ll explode one of the bombs at a site worth exactly that amount. Then, a day later, if no money is delivered, they’ll explode the other bomb at a major world city.

Frankly, this threat made me nervous and edgy in light of our current geopolitical situation, and I didn’t enjoy thinking about it. Bond is told that the intelligence forces of the Western world have gone into overdrive, everyone and everything is being thrown at the problem. But M has a hunch: before it disappeared off the radar the hijacked Vindicator descended into the main East-West Atlantic traffic (to conceal itself). A few hours later the American DEW radar system detected a plane making a sharp turn south, just off the US coast. M has a hunch it was the baddy plane, and goes to investigate maps of the region. As a result, M thinks the Bahamas might be a perfect hiding place for the crooks, out of the way but not far from the US mainland, no real military or radar presence – good place to ditch a plane. So he is dispatching Bond to the Bahamas to see what he can see. Bond is disgruntled because he thinks he’s being sent on a wild goose chase.

Capturing the plane

There is then a long sequence which describes, in retrospect, how the Italian ‘observer’ on the hijacked plane, Giuseppe Petacchi a) poisoned the five man crew by opening a cyanide capsule in the cockpit, then b) pulled the bodies out of the way and flew the plane single-handedly down into the busy East-West Atlantic commercial plane traffic, then veered south towards the Caribbean, exactly as M hypothesised. Here, overcoming nerves, he locks onto the radio signal then onto the landing lights put out by SPECTRE and skillfully crash lands the plane on the surface of the sea. Proud and happy he walks along the wing of the slowly settling plane towards the motorboat of SPECTRE men who have come to meet him and the first one aboard casually slips a stiletto up under his jaw and into his brain which kills him immediately. Not very nice people.

We are introduced to Number 1 (SPECTRE numbers rotate on a monthly basis) Emilio Largo, a superbly fit figure of a man, Olympic swimmer, fencer etc (p.126), scion of a noble Roman family, with a hooked nose, the mouth of a satyr and enormous hands. He supervises the concealment of the sunken plane and the retrieval of the two atom bombs – using the facilities of his superb, purpose-built, luxury catamaran, the Disco Volante (Italian for ‘flying saucer’, p.134).

There is a tame nuclear physicist on board the ship and on the payroll, Kotze, who is given a speech explaining how you defuse an atomic bomb, then arm it with a timed fuse so you can drop it somewhere and make your getaway. As he explains all this to Largo (and the reader), Largo is wondering when the moment will be right to ‘eliminate’ him. Not very nice people. The bombs are stashed in a remote coral island, and this phase of the mission is complete.

Bond in the Bahamas

Once again Bond is in the sunny Caribbean – in this, as in many other respects, Thunderball feels like a rehash of themes and settings. Bond has quickly latched onto Largo’s mistress, Dominetta ‘Domino’ Vitali, an independent-spirited, beautiful young woman. (The way she is named after a game is reminiscent of Solitaire.) He accidentally on purpose bumps into her in a general store in Nassau and invites himself for a drive in her sporty MG then a drink and get-to-know-you. (We see Bond through her eyes, six foot, black hair, scar on right jaw, cruel smile, confident, p.145).

There is then another flashback, taking us how through Bond got to this point (exactly as the letter from the terrorists was followed by the account of the hijack of the plane which preceded it).

So we learn that Bond arrived in Nassau and went straight to a High Priority meeting with the Governor, Police Commissioner etc. He said he’s looking for a group of 10 or 20 or 30 men, decent and respectable, engaged on a completely innocent purpose, who probably arrived in the fairly recent past. The Police Commissioner mentions the annual Treasure Hunt crew: every year a yacht goes looking for legendary sunken treasure. This year it’s the Disco Volante owned by Emilio Largo, who has been joined by about twenty shareholders in the venture. Bingo!

—This is a really glaring example of the general rule that there is no detection in James Bond. Mr Big, Hugo Drax, Goldfinger, they are all identified very early on as the bad guys – the narrative interest comes not from slowly unveiling the truth, but from the elaborate skirting round each other, which leads to the torture scenes and then the final showdown. a) M had a hunch the hijacked plane flew to the Bahamas and, guess what, he’s dead right b) the police suggest the Largo’s treasure hunters are the only group that fit Bond’s bill and, guess what, they’re dead right.

Bond has identified the baddies by page 180 of this 350-page novel, though admittedly he isn’t absolutely certain they are the ones and, as his snooping makes him more and more certain, he still doesn’t know where the bombs are hidden. 170 pages remain of, well, snooping round, getting caught, getting beaten up, chatting up the girl, escaping, probably a climactic shoot-out of some kind…

Felix Leiter

Bond had asked for help from the CIA and goes to the airport to meet the agent who’s flying in with a state-of-the-art Geiger counter. It is – with heavy inevitability – Felix Leiter, his old bosom buddy with the metal hook instead of a hand (the result of being half-eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die). Leiter allows Fleming to really let his hair down and write loads of American pulp dialogue, with Bond joining in; their buddy conversations are always fun to read. But this is all very familiar territory.

Bond tells Leiter everything and invites him to go with him out to the Disco Volante, Bond posing as a rich Londoner who wants to buy the house Largo is currently renting. Largo is hospitality itself and shows them all over the impressive catamaran and promises to get his ‘niece’ (Domino) to show him the beach-front house. Leiter and Bond depart in their rented motorboat debating whether Mr Largo is really as squeaky clean as he seems – he didn’t show them about half the volume of the boat but then it is on a secret treasure hunt so why should he? And they didn’t see any of the ‘shareholders’ but then it was siesta time, maybe they were all napping…

There may be suspense for Bond, but there is none for the reader.

Confirmations

In quick succession:

1. Bond goes to the Nassau casino that evening where he meets Largo and Domino. First – in a scene which echoes the intense card game scenes in Casino Royale or Moonraker, Bond takes on Largo at baccarat and just about wins. He deliberately spooks Largo by mentioning the word ‘spectre’ several times to see what affect it has. Then Largo encourages him to go have a drink with Domino. She tells him her extended fantasy about the man portrayed on the front of packs of Players cigarettes, an entertaining piece of whimsy which reminds us that Fleming was also the author of the smash hit children’s story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. For the purposes of the plot, she lets slip that her real family name is Petacchi and that she has a beloved brother who is something in the air force. Like the Italian observer flying in the Vindicator. What a coincidence.

2. Bond borrows a scuba diving kit and swims underwater out to the Disco Volante. He confirms that there is a great seam in the hull which probably opens to allow ingress and egress of possibly naughty machinery. Barely has he done so than he is clobbered by the butt of a compressed gas harpoon and has a vividly described fight with an underwater guard, presumably from the boat which ends when the guard is attacked by a six foot barracuda. Dazed, Bond just about makes it back to shore and the waiting policeman who has accompanied him.

3. Bond and Leiter rent an amphibious plane and go scouting low over the sea, looking for the sunken plane. The odd circling of three sharks prompts Bond to go back to a particular area, land and again scuba dive to the ocean bed where, sure enough, he finds the plane hidden under a large tarpaulin. Fleming again gives a vivid description of the foulness of the water, polluted with the five corpses, and of their wrecked appearance, half eaten by sea creatures. He is particularly memorable on the interior of the plane which is absolutely stuffed with small octopuses which are eating the dead air crew. For the purposes of the plot he discovers a) the atom bombs are not on board – they have been removed, b) the body of Giuseppe Petacchi, and snaps off his identity tag, along with the rest of the crews, before finally escaping the nightmare scene and resurfacing by the flying boat.

While flying around and scouring maps, Leiter and Bond had discussed possible targets for SPECTRE’s attacks. They speculate that the first one might be against the NATO missile-firing base ‘at a place called North-West Cay at the eastern end of the Grand Bahamas’ (p.199). They fly near it, observing the rocket gantries, missile launchers, radar beacons and the rest of the paraphernalia.

Bond and Leiter had been keeping their respective services informed of developments and now are told that senior military men are flying in and Washington has dispatched a nuclear submarine, no less, to Nassau. Bond and Leiter must obey these orders, but have still not located the exact location of the bombs.

Snogging Domino

Back from the flight, and having assimilated the responses of their services, it is still daytime and Bond phones Domino at the house she and Largo are renting and casually asks if she’d like to go swimming. She gives directions to the beach where she’ll be and Bond races there in a Land Rover borrowed from the Governor’s staff. There follows a strange interlude which is meant to be moving: for Bond is affectionate and kind to her, all the time knowing he is about to break the news to her that her brother is dead, and that he was more than likely involved in a massive conspiracy to blackmail the world’s governments.

She emerges from the sea with some bits of black sea urchin in her foot and Bond very gently, very sensuously, sucks them out for her. Then carries her up to the primitive changing rooms and there they make love. And only then, does he tell her the truth. Tears. Recriminations. I hate you. Slowly she recovers as he presses on her the importance of the situation. Eventually he recruits her: will she agree to go on board the Disco Volante with the Geiger counter-disguised-as-a-camera which he will give her and snoop about: if she finds something come on deck; if nothing, remain in her cabin.

Bond leaves her to be collected by the Disco Volante and motors back to the docks to join the police who are now keeping it under surveillance. There is a message to join Leiter for the arrival of the nuclear submarine.

Nuclear submarine

The USS Manta arrives and Leiter and Bond go onboard to be greeted by the cheerful, confident commander P. Pedersen. They brief him on the whole situation including the crux that they don’t know where the bombs are. At this point they are all informed the Disco Volante has weighed anchor and steamed off north-west. The girl didn’t come up on deck, the pre-arranged signal that there were no bombs aboard, if she managed to carry out her search and not get caught, that is…

But Bond is still concerned: a) If the sub intercepts the Volante, they still won’t have the bombs and it’s just possible some other team is gathering and deploying them; b) Captain Pedersen informs Bond and Leiter the catamaran can skate easily over the countless reefs and shallows in the area, whereas the Manta can only follow guaranteed deep water channels, so they can’t give close chase to the baddies.

Aboard the Disco Volante

Cut to the interior of the Disco Volante, where Largo has called an emergency meeting of the ‘shareholders’ ie the other SPECTRE crooks. He announces to the shocked meeting that Domino was found snooping round with a camera which, on closer inspection, turned out to a Geiger counter: looks like someone put her up to it, so someone is on to them.

Domino has been detained and will be tortured to find out who commissioned her snooping. Meanwhile, the Omega plan goes ahead. The meeting is disrupted by one of the Russian delegates who sows seeds of doubt, saying while some of them are being frogmen accompanying the bomb to its destination, who’s to say the boat won’t weight anchor and scarper, leaving them in the lurch. Largo replies by shooting the complainer three times. We get the picture: SPECTRE are ruthless people.

Then Largo goes down to the cabin where Domino is tied spread-eagled to a bed, rips off her clothes and leans over her naked vulnerable body with a lighted cigar and a bucket of ice cubes, and starts to torture her. [This feels like it steps over a line: Fleming torturing Bond is one thing, as happens in the earlier novels – Bond is the hero and at least part of the mind of the male reader is experiencing the physical ordeals vicariously and wondering how he would fare. I think this is the first time we’ve seen a woman be tortured, really sadistically, cold-bloodedly tortured, and it’s not only not entertaining, but it feels wrong for Bond’s persona, for the feel of the books.]

Underwater fight

Bond and Leiter are aboard the American sub. The commander is under orders to take their orders, so Bond gives out a plan of battle to the best ten hand-picked men. They will wear skin-diving outfits, use makeshift spears, and attack Largo’s men wherever they find them.

Hours later the sub makes contact with the Wavekrest anchored off North-West Cay, the missile testing base, just as Bond and Leiter had speculated. Bond, Leiter and the ten best men suit up and exit the submarine with their makeshift weapons. They approach in a flanking movement the SPECTRE crew, but Bond immediately realises the odds are against them, as there are many more of the baddies, who have also got little propeller packs on their backs giving them greater mobility. In the middle of his posse sits Largo, riding an underwater sub which is towing the bomb.

A massive fight breaks out, Bond skewers several bad guys, before himself getting cut, cuffed, then saves Leiter’s life as a bad guy is about to shoot him, then escapes the melee to hunt down Largo. Largo is still riding the mini-sub and Bond throws himself onto it, they have a desperate cat-fight, but Bond manages to slip back onto the rudder and twist it so the machine rears up and breaks the surface, throwing them both off.

Exhausted Bond sinks to the bottom, only for Largo, still fighting fit, to approach him spear-gun at the ready. In a typically Flemingesque ghoulish detail, Largo clamps a baby octopus over Bond’s mask then puts his enormous hands round his throat to strangle him (ah, those enormous hands which have been continually referred to) and Bond is passing out, everything is going black, when….

The pressure has gone, Bond wipes the octopus away, Largo is on the ocean bed flailing with a big spear through his neck, and the girl Domino is behind him, harpoon gun in hand, her body covered in ugly red burn marks from the torture. Together, the wounded hero and heroine struggle to the surface.

Bond has been cut by a harpoon, clubbed in the head, exhausted himself fighting the rudder of the min-sub and then nearly strangled to death, all but blacking out before Domino saved him – but this, like many of the other scenes, felt to me rather like going through the motions: Bond has to be beaten to within an inch of his life because this is what happens in all Bond novels – it doesn’t necessarily follow from the actual action.

Certainly it was a tough fight, but doesn’t compare to being nearly incinerated at the climax of Moonraker, tortured to a bloody pulp in Casino Royale, or subjected to the degrading punishment in Dr No. His suffering, like so much else in the novel, feels willed in order to fit a formula.

Epilogue

Bond in hospital, as at the end of so many other adventures. Leiter visits and tells him what happened: CIA, MI6 et al now know all about SPECTRE, have identified Blofeld (who got away), their plan had been to bomb the missile launching base, then make Miami the second target. 10 men from the yacht including Largo were killed, six of the 10 volunteers from the submarine ditto, both bombs were successfully recovered. And, wow! that girl – she escaped by squeezing through a porthole with a diving suit and a harpoon gun, and saved Bond’s life. Totally believable.

Then Leiter’s gone – but all Bond wants to know about is Domino: Is she alive? How is she? Bond’s doctor comes in next and Bond feverishly asks after the girl. After hesitation, the doc tells Bond she’s next door, still in great pain from having been cruelly burned and tortured. Bond staggers into the next room, holds Domino’s hand as she regains consciousness and weakly murmurs to him, then collapses to the floor and passes out. She moves her pillow so she can lie and watch him.

The book may be manipulative, sentimental slop concocted from preposterous escapades and ridiculous escapes, but something in the desperation of their commitment, the fierceness of their ‘love’, made me burst into tears. Maybe all really fierce, heart-breaking loves are emblems of all others.

Co-authorship

By 1960 Fleming was deeply involved in various schemes for turning his creation into TV series or movies. Thunderball the novel itself originated as the screenplay for a movie which was a collaborative effort between Fleming and four others – Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce and Ernest Cuneo. After he published the novel, Fleming was sued by two of the collaborators who claimed part authorship of the plot, and the part ownership of the copyright explains why two movie adaptations were subsequently made, by different production companies (Thunderball 1965 and Never Say Never Again 1983 both, rather confusingly, starring Sean Connery.)

I may be influenced by this knowledge, but I think you can feel this troubled origin in the book: in certain turns of phrase which are unusual for Fleming, and in the way the plot – although just as garish and grandiose as other Bond novels – is somehow also very heavy and lumpy. Nuclear weapon threatens major city was the plot of Moonraker; the Caribbean was the setting of Live and Let Die, Dr No, the opening of For Your Eyes Only and tropical diving was the theme of The Hildebrand Rarity.

By this, the ninth book, it feels like the building blocks of a Bond novel have become so well-defined that they are transforming into clichés in front of the reader’s eyes.

Credit

Thunderball by Ian Fleming was published in 1961 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers from 1961

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.

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by Simon on May 18, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 18, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/05/18/thunderball-ian-fleming/

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