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Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen (1993)

‘Men will try anything,’ Monique Jr said, sceptically. ‘Anything for pussy.’
(Strip Tease, page 16)

There are many levels on which to consider this book:

  • for its place in Carl Hiaasen’s series of comedy thrillers
  • its dramatic theme (strip club)
  • its socioeconomic theme (the corrupt Florida sugar cane industry)
  • its political theme (corrupt drunk politicians)
  • its feminist theme (woman objectified and abused by men, and badly let down by a patriarchal legal system)
  • its contribution to the thriller genre – blackmail and murder
  • as gruesome farce – a man’s tongue is swallowed by a wolf, a man’s arm is replaced by a golf club

At the most factual level, Strip Tease is the fifth in Carl Hiaasen’s series of 15 bitingly funny, savagely farcical comedy thrillers set in the moral swamp that is South Florida, and it closely follows the winning formula established its predecessors.

The theme: erotic dancing

Top level is the book’s main theme and setting. The previous four novels each rotated around a distinct and colourful theme, namely: eco-terrorism, corrupt fishing competitions, bogus plastic surgery and crappy theme parks. This one centres on a not-very-successful nude dance club called ‘the Eager Beaver’ (which changes its name half way through to ‘The Tickled Pink’ (p.331).

It is not, the owner and performers emphasise, a strip club, but a venue for ‘exotic dancing’ – albeit the dancers are almost naked to start with and then take off their bras or g-strings to become fully naked. Characters refer to it as a ‘nudie bar’ or a ‘tittie bar’ (p.51).

The Eager Beaver is owned by Mr Orly, a sweaty, nervous man who tries to awe his customers and the disgruntled dancers he employs with lies about the club’s mythical Mafia owners – whereas, in fact, with comic irony its main investors turn out to be harmless orthopedic surgeons from Lowell, Massachussetts (p.102).

The Eager Beaver has a bouncer (who prefers to be referred to as a ‘floor manager’) named simply Shad, owner of an enormous bald head and impervious to physical pain, which comes in handy during the various fights he gets involved in (Shad’s full name is only finally given in the Epilogue on page 403: Gerard L. Shaddick).

And the club employs a set of 6 or 7 exotic dancers, chief among them Erin, the lead character in the novel. Other dances include Monique Sr and Monique Jr and Urbana Sprawl, a black stripper with big boobs and a no-nonsense attitude. (The word ‘sprawl’ made me think of William Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy of novels and also Les Murray’s wonderful poem, The Quality of Sprawl. Great word, ‘sprawl’.)

The setting of a ‘tittie bar’ provides countless opportunities for characters or the author to reflect on the sleazy nature of strip clubs, exotic dancing, the sex trade (although there is very little actual sex), and, in particular, loads of editorialising about:

  1. men, the sleazy men, sad men, frustrated men and scary men who attend titty bars, specially the new generation of bankers wearing Wall Street braces, driving BMWs, off their faces on cocaine, and
  2. the generally honest women who staff them, the novel giving a realistic depiction of their day-to-day worries as discussed in the poky dressing room (they complain about the air conditioning, the temperature, the pay, the character Lorelei complains about the crappy replacement she’s given after the original boa constrictor she danced with is kidnapped and chopped to pieces) when they’re not bumping and grinding on the stage or at high-paying individuals’ private tables

Orly’s club is in fierce competition with a rival just a mile down the road, the ‘Flesh Farm’ run by the Japanese Ling brothers. This doesn’t impinge on the ‘serious’ plot much but is a source of running gags as the Lings are continually trying to persuade Orly’s dancers to go and work for them, which leads Orly and Shad to plan increasingly florid counter-attacks. This low-level feud climaxes in Shad buying a hundred rats and vermin off a snake dealer down on his luck and chucking them down the air con vents at the Flesh Farm, having previously called up a hygiene inspector who is, therefore, on the premises just in time to observe the sudden outrageous vermin infestation.

Divorce law and Erin the exotic dancer

So, the strip club is the book’s obvious setting and this sub-set of the sex trade the novel’s obvious theme. But just as powerful, just as dominating in the narrative, is the plight of Erin the dancer (I don’t think we ever discover her last name), victim of what is portrayed as a brutally unfair, patriarchal legal system.

Erin is the daughter of a woman who became a professional gold-digger, marrying and divorcing a series of richer and richer men (p.26). In a bid to be different, Erin married Darrell Grant who was tall and handsome and kind but turned out to be a drug addict, lowlife thief. Once she’d realised this, Erin was on the verge of leaving him when she got pregnant and Darell promised to clean up his act. Thus it was that Erin had a daughter, Angela, but all too soon Grant fell back on his old ways. Erin sued for divorce but two things utterly screwed her.

One is that Grant had earlier been busted by two corrupt cops, Piccata and Merkin, who made a deal to not prosecute him if he became a stoolpigeon and copper’s narc. As a result, they deleted his long and seedy criminal record from the computer records so Erin had no evidence for his egregious worthlessness.

Meantime, Erin discovered that lawyers’ fees for pursuing a divorce case are very expensive and found out the hard way that she couldn’t afford them, as a clerk working in the office of the local FBI (p.40).

So a friend recommended exotic dancing as a way of trebling her income and the novel describes Erin’s first tentative steps in front of a mirror (p.26), her first few nights at the club (p.86), and then how she settled into a regular 5 night a week job at the Eager Beaver, paying four times as much as her clerk wage.

(The trick, she says more than once, is to forget about the smutty men grabbing at your legs and lose yourself in the music and indeed a lot of music is mentioned in the book, Madonna, Prince, ZZ Top, rap music. Erin prefers white rock if she’s in the mood – ZZ Top or the Allmann Brothers – or singer-songwriter stuff if she’s feeling more soulful – Jackson Brown, or Van Morrison, ‘Dancin’ in the Moonlight’.)

Trouble is, when the divorce case came to court: a) Grant’s egregious criminal record had been disappeared by the two cops, and b) Grant can easily prove to the court that Erin is a stripper and therefore an ‘unsuitable mother’ to have custody of her child.

Thus, through the corruption and hypocrisy of the system, the drug addict thief Grant is granted custody of little Angela, now aged four. He sets a terrible example. It is a travesty of any kind of justice.

To really rub it in, we are given three additional facts:

  1. Scumbag Grant’s latest money-making scam is stealing wheelchairs for the disabled. Turns out they have no licence plate or identifier, are easy to buff up and sell on to hospitals, old peoples homes etc. Erin is driven to distraction when she learns that her little girl is being used in these wheelchair heists, but she has no legal way of rescuing her.
  2. Grant has a sister, Rita, who is raising and training a litter of wolves. Rita is sympathetic to her divorced sister-in-law but her husband, Alberto, who works at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant (p.36) drools over Erin on her occasional visits. Eventually, fed up of his leching, she agrees to perform a little private dance for him when his wife is out back with the wolves. Erin leads Alberto on and then, just as he’s started to froth with excitement, gives him a violent knee to the jaw which makes him bite his tongue off and knocks him out. Rita bursts in with one of the wolf pups, which promptly gobbles up Alberto’s severed tongue before anyone can stop him (p.189).
  3. Adding maximum insult to injury, the very same judge who denied Erin custody of her daughter because of her so-called ‘immorality’, himself becomes a regular visitor to the Eager Beaver, achieving an acme of male hypocrisy by prominently displaying a Bible on his desk next to his cocktail, and loudly telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s here to ‘save’ the poor benighted girls, all the while under the table with his other hand he’s busy whacking off at the sight of all this poon.

The ultimate peak of scumbag hypocrisy is reached when this two-faced judge tells Erin, when she confronts him at his table in the club, that he’ll reverse his custody decision only if she gives him a blowjob (p.68). Erin is a woman of principles, almost the only character in the book with any, and angrily refuses. Men!

‘All you got to do is flash your twat and men throw money. Isn’t it a great country, Erin? Aren’t you proud to be an American?’ (Darrell Grant, p.62)

Sugar money

American politics has always been about money, power and corruption. It’s amazing how many journalists, commentators, academics and naive liberals think otherwise, think it’s something to do with democracy or liberty or some such.

So the other central theme of this novel is the vast amount of money generated by the Florida sugar cane industry. Hiaasen is so exercised by this that he explains it in journalistic detail not once but at least four times (pages 13, 111, 210, 366). The last chapter intersperses plot with chunks of factual exposition which could come from a magazine article about sugar cane, its agriculture, profits, work practices, how it is grown, harvested and refined (chapter 31).

Key fact is: The US Federal Government keeps the price of domestic sugar cane artificially high,  thus subsidising the big sugar companies with taxpayer money. At the same time the US government also bans the import of sugar cane from the poor countries of the Caribbean and Latin America, helping to keep those nations in dependency and poverty.

Nonetheless, the wretched job of growing and in particular cutting the ripe cane crop falls to the poorest immigrants from precisely those wretched Caribbean countries, who work a punishing 10 hour day in the blistering Florida heat for a pittance.

Hiaasen invents a super-rich sugar cane family, the Rojo dynasty, who own just such a huge sugar cane growing and refining company, the Sweetheart Sugar Corporation. The senior and spooky owners of the corporation are Wilberto and Joaquin Rojo. Through these characters Hiaasen describes the nature of the business, the way government subsidises them, how they ruthlessly exploit their labour to the limit, and how all the pollution and waste from the industry is poured off into the Everglades to kill the eco-system.

The guaranteed government subsidies mean that the Rojo family has so much money it literally doesn’t know what to do with it. This is epitomised by the young scion of the family, dashing cocaine addict Christopher Rojo, who spends his entire life cruising in a chauffeur-driven limousine from high-class parties to strip clubs, awash in champagne, coke and hookers.

The drunken lecherous politician

What about the plot, I hear you ask. Well, the novel kicks off at the Eager Beaver one night when a totally drunk husband-to-be, Paul Guber, out on his stag night, drunkenly clambers onto the stage and embraces Erin while she’s doing her routine, grabs her round the waist, so close that her pubic hair looks like his goatee.

What nobody expects is that Erin has a secret, not-to-say obsessive admirer, a US Congressman named David Lane Dilbeck (p.174) (detailed backstory p.232).

On this particular fateful evening. Congressman Dilbeck also happens to be in the Eager Beaver, drunk off his face, and when he sees some guy groping his favourite dancer, he too lurches up onto the stage and starts beating Paul Guber over the head with a heavy champagne bottle. Again and again. When the Beaver’s bald bouncer, Shad, tries to stop him, Dilbeck’s minder and bagman, Erb Crandall, draws his gun as a threat. The whole thing has got wildly out of control in just a few moments.

What makes this absurd incident the trigger for a 400-page comedy thriller is that several people in the club that night recognise Dilbeck (despite his feeble disguise of a false moustache), someone takes a series of photos of the incident, and so his people are agonisingly aware that he could be blackmailed and ruined: for being in a stripclub at all, and for aggravated assault.

Now Dilbeck, routinely described by all who know him as a scumbag dickhead, is not himself unexpendable save for one big fact: Dilbeck plays a key role in Congress in getting the US sugar subsidy laws renewed each year. In other words, he may be a pitiful ‘pussy hound’, a thick-witted alcoholic and a prey to the every pretty woman he sees – but behind him stand some very seriously rich heads of the Florida sugar cane industry and they are not about to see their fortunes jeopardised. After all:

In politics, stealing is trouble but pussy is lethal. (p.260)

An election is pending and Dilbeck is up against the admittedly bonkers right-wing Republican candidate, Eloy Flickman (who wants to nuke Havana) but still, he is the sugar lobby’s swingman in Washington so anything which threatens Dilbeck threatens very rich powerful people which is why some of the little people who think they can swing a little blackmail are in for a very nasty surprise.

The political fixer

Which is where we come to the political fixer who is employed by the powerful Rojo family to keep dim Dilbert on the straight and narrow. This is the cold, calculating Malcolm J. Moldovsky. (It is a very fleeting coincidence that this Machiavellian political fixer bears the same first name as the Machiavellian political fixer in the British TV series The Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker.)

Malcolm is very short (‘no taller than a jockey’, p.236), very clever, dresses carefully and precisely and his political hero is John Mitchell, Attorney General to President Richard M. Nixon, convicted for his part in covering up the Watergate break-in (pages 126 and 323).

Moldovsky is used to doing political deals, bribery and payoffs, he is sued to the subtle interplay of power and money, so he is unhappy when the crudeness of the Eager Beaver affair forces him to take unusually direct action.

First is the murder of Jerry Killian (profile p.82). Killian is a sweet and fairly innocent guy who just adores Erin’s dancing and attends the club night after night to watch her. He was one of the few to recognise the Congressman and he makes the bad mistake of trying to shake down Malcolm. In fact, when the pair have a meeting Malcolm is genuinely surprised when all Killian wants is for the Congressman to have a word with the presiding judge in Erin’s custody case in order to award her her well-deserved custody. We learn that the judge in question wants to get promotion to the federal circuit, Killian wants Dilbert to tell this judge he will put in a good word for him in exchange for the judge reversing his decision and awarding Erin custody of Angela. That appears to be how the legal system works in America.

Despite his modest aims, Malcom realises he can’t have Killian swinging round making wild claims and so has him bumped off by three Jamaicans. His body is found in the Clark Fork River in far-distant Montana where he was wont to take his annual leave and where, by farcical coincidence, Detective Al García is on vacation with his second wife and his step-kids. Al García? Yes the very same Dade County detective we have met in the previous three Hiaasen novels. Thus, despite being on holiday, he finds himself being drawn into a murder case originating over a thousand miles away.

Second to be murdered is Paul Guber’s fiancée, Joyce Mizner (p.321), and her fat shyster lawyer Jonathan Peter Mordecai (comic backstory p.191, full name p.402). Mordecai also tries to contact the Congressman and is put through to Malcolm, meets and tries to shake him down. He claims to have photos of the whole incident.

(It is very funny the way Joyce Mizner is corrupted: at first she is amazed and shocked to discover her fiancé was at a strip club; then she is all devotion and attention when visiting Guber in hospital where it takes him several weeks to recover from his battering; then the lawyer slowly tempts her, holding out the possibility of big bucks compensation; then crosses a line by suggesting they blackmail the Congressman, Joyce becoming steadily more interested in securing her and her husband-to-be’s futures; and finally the lawyer corrupts her enough that Joyce drops all plans to share the money with Paul and settles in to becoming the lawyer’s partner in their ill-fated blackmail scam.)

Anyway, cunning Malcolm says he needs time to consider, then arranges a second meeting. He doesn’t attend the second meeting. Instead Mordecai and Joyce (Paul is away on business in New York) are met by some tough guys who kill them then attach their car to an empty freight vessel which is due to be blown up and sunk in Biscayne Bay and where, many months later, a horrified honeymoon couple on a scuba diving trip discover them. Very elaborate, violent and grotesque. Very Hiaasen.

Grotesque incidents

A lot happens in 400 pages, after all it’s one of the characteristic features of farce as a genre, that the plot becomes evermore manically complicated, featuring wildly improbable coincidences, garish characters and gruesome events. For example:

I’ve mentioned Erin’s sister-in-law’s husband biting off his own tongue when she kicks him under the jaw and that one of their pet wolf cubs eats it.

The judge who awarded against Erin in the custody case has a heart attack and dies at the Flesh Farm. ‘The man died staring at pussy, ‘says Shad. ‘There’s worse ways to go’ (p.169).

Darrell, high on drugs, gets into a fight with Shad, wrestling him down on the ground and carving a G into his bald head.

A lot later Shad is able to return the favour by swinging a tyre jack at Darrell so hard that it shatters his arm, exposing the bone (p.309). Darrell’s endlessly patient sister, Rita, fixes him up, using a golf club as a splint, arranging it head downwards so that it becomes a very effective bludgeoning tool when Darrell goes on one of his rampages.

We learn that Al García’s non-descript Chrysler always has an Igloo ice-box in the back. At one point his new buddy Shad asks him if there are any beers in it. No, García replies, he uses it to store dismembered body parts.

In what is probably the most macabre scene, Shad, an imposing figure, forces his way into the office of the Ling brothers at the Flesh Farm, strips and dangles the younger Ling brother by his hands from a wall fitting and then looses from a bag he’s carrying a live boa constrictor.

We experience Ling’s (comic?) terror as the huge snake twines round his leg and then spots something hanging between his thighs which looks like a nice juicy hamster (his penis) before it springs at lightning speed (pages 338 to 339). This extreme measure, in case you’re wondering, was payback for Ling touching up one of the Eager Beaver dancers who went to work for him and came back in tears.

Both Shad and Orly are oddly puritanical. In fact it is a running joke that after 11 years exposure to bare naked women, Shad doesn’t even realise they’re naked any more. He can only get remotely turned on by clothed women.

Late in the plot García is late to the yacht where Erin has made a date with the congressman because he is delayed by a domestic homicide. Jesse James Braden spilt some of his Bloody Mary on the freshly laundered upholstery of his wife’s Toyota Camry so she shot him three times in the genitals. According to witnesses who saw the dying man stumble from the car, his schlong was pumping like a firehose as he bled to death (p.344).

See what I mean by grotesque?

The climax

The climax comes when Erin agrees to go and do some private dancing for Dilbeck on the luxury yacht he’s allowed to use by the fabulously wealthy Rojo family (and which they have punningly named The Sweetheart Deal).

Malcolm hangs around nervously outside on deck, ostensibly to protect his ward, which is where Darrell, out of his tree on a range of painkillers and wolf medication (provided by his sister), and in pursuit of Erin who he blames for his increasingly violent accidents, confronts Malcolm and quickly bores of the short, smart man’s clever answers and simply bludgeons him to death with the club. Oh well.

When Darrell stumbles into the cabin where Erin is dancing for the Congressman, she deftly pulls a gun and guides both men out to the waiting limo. She’s gotten friendly with Dilbeck’s chauffeur, a Haitian who’s fed up of his employer’s casual racism and warms to Erin who treats him as a human being.

So the chauffeur doesn’t ask any questions but drives Erin, spaced-out Darrell and drunk Dilbeck miles out of town to, fittingly enough, a sugar cane plantation. Here Darrell brandishes his golf club before running off and Erin can’t quite bring herself to shoot him. In any case, the narrator tells us, Darrell the lowlife scumbag finds a hopper full of cut cane and falls fast asleep in it. Next morning the hopper feeds its load, along with hundreds of others, onto a conveyor belt and into a cane cutting machine which dices comatose Darrell into thousands of shreds and flakes, before the metal golf club gums up the works and prompts workers to call the cops.

Erin didn’t want Darrell anyway. Back in the cane field, she forces Dilbeck to start chopping cane with the machete she’d thoughtfully packed. Of course he is flabby and red with exhaustion in just a minute. Neither of them can believe that the Haitian and Dominican workers in these groves cut 8 tons a day each! Modern slavery.

Next Erin strips a little and allows Dilbeck to dirty dance with her. He has just got predictably carried away, and has pushed her to the ground and is fiddling with his willy, when a load of cars pull up and illuminate them in their headlights.

Remember I mentioned that back before she took up dirty dancing, Erin had worked in the Florida office of the FBI, for a cleancut good guy named Officer Cleary. Well, they had stayed in touch, he’d tried to help her with her divorce and custody case, and now she had phoned him and told him to come with backup out to this specific cane plantation and catch a crooked Congressman.

And so it is that three carloads of FBI agents catch a half-naked, sweaty Congressman rolling on the floor with a woman half his age, attempting rape. Soon afterwards Detective Al García and Shad roll up. Through the complex convolutions of the plot they have formed an unlikely buddy-buddy partnership  based on joint concern for Erin’s safety and, although they arrived at the luxury yacht too late to find Erin, she had written the location of the cane plantation in lipstick on the toilet mirror, which explains why they turn up now to discover the placed crawling with Feds.

So now Erin puts her plans to the Congressman. Plan A is she prosecutes him for rape with carsfull of FBI agents as witnesses, and his name is ruined forever. Plan B, Dilbeck has a strategic heart attack, retires sick for a few weeks, thus effectively conceding the upcoming election and, at least temporarily, and in a small way, breaking the stranglehold of the sugar lobby on Congress.

I didn’t like this ending at all, it felt like it just didn’t come off. Previous novels ended in balls of flame like James Bond movies, but Erin taking the Congressman out to a field in the middle of nowhere and encouraging him to get naked and aroused by dirty dancing with him, in the hope that the Feds would turn up in the nick of time… It felt wildly implausible but not in a crazed, bizarre way, just in a ‘not very good plan’ kind of way.

The patheticness of men

Quite a steady stream of criticisms of how lame and poon crazy men are, incapable of thinking with anything except their dicks.

  • Men are easily dazzled. (p.368)
  • It taught Erin one of life’s great lessons: an attractive woman could get whatever she wanted, because men are so laughably weak. They would do anything for even the distant promise of sex. (p.26)
  • How easily amused they are! she thought. There was little difference between this and what her mother did; it was the same game of tease, the same basic equation. Use what you’ve got to get what you want. (p.27)
  • Erin was constantly reminded of the ridiculous power of sex; routine female nakedness reduced some men to stammering, clammy-fingered fools. (p.87)
  • In such extreme states of desire, men tended to lose their fine-motor skills. (p.188)
  • Men were so helpless, she thought, so easily charmed. Monique Jr was right: they’d do anything for it. Anything. (p.243)

A possible solution

What to do about men’s insatiable appetite for sexual stimulation? Well, hundreds of thousands of feminists have been working on the problem for half a century. A character in this novel, clear-eyed Malcolm, suggests wanking. After all it is the ultimate in safe sex and, in our COVID times, entirely lockdown-compliant. As he tells the helpless ‘pussy hound’ Dilbeck:

‘Know what we need to do? We need to teach you to masturbate creatively. Then maybe you wouldn’t bother women.’ (p.158)

But the way both Shad and Orly have become utterly indifferent to all the naked boobs and bums around them suggests a different way forward. To some extent the naked female form excites such lust in men because it is so strictly rationed; in cold puritanical England, a bare boob is a rarity ogled at by every man in sight.

The obvious solution is for women to wear less, a lot less. In this respect the Free The Nipple campaign is onto something. If topless women were ever to become as common and everyday as men who work (doing manual work) topless or sunbathe topless, it would remove a lot of the mystique, it might even become boring, boring enough that men didn’t break their necks ogling and leering over every millimetre of cleavage to women’s disgust and, often, bewilderment. After all, what’s the big deal, as Erin tells the drunk and lecherous Congressman:

‘Two pleasant handfuls of fat… That’s your basic human breast, Davey. Ninety-eight percent fat, with a cherry on top. What’s the big attraction?’ (p.356)

But that will never happen. Nothing much has changed since this book was published 30 years ago; I don’t expect much to change in this regard in the next 30 years, if I live that long.

Miami Vice references

Hiaasen referenced the smash hit TV show Miami Vice in the previous novel. Figures, it covers his turf.

And the stubble,’ Erin said. ‘Come here, let’s see.’
‘No way.’ He stood up sullenly.
‘Is this your Don Johnson period?’ (p.61)

Except it doesn’t really. The TV show promoted an image of South Florida as cool, full of handsome dudes in designer stubble wearing Armani jackets and driving shiny convertibles. Hiaasen, as we have seen, is more about low rent strip clubs, corrupt businessmen, drunken Congressmen, lowlife psychopaths and trailer trash.

Types of fuck

In an earlier novel Hiaasen introduced me to the concept of ‘sportfucking’ i.e. sleeping around just for laughs. In Native Tongue Joe Winder’s girlfriend Nina offers him a ‘mercy fuck’. Now, Congressman Dilbeck considers he is (that sleeping with him amounts to) a ‘powerfuck’ i.e. having sex with the rich and powerful. It’s good to be educated about these matters.

Epilogue

Hiaasen’s novels routinely feature an epilogue giving us brief summaries of the fates of his characters. From this we learn that even though Dilbeck quits the election race he is still elected in his absence, but nonetheless retires. But that doesn’t stop the agricultural committee of Congress renewing the multi-million dollar subsidies to the sugar industry.Nothing can. Big money corruption is eternal (p.401).

Credit

Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen was published in the UK by Macmillan London in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen (1991)

An irresistible convergence of violence, mayhem and mortality. (p.280

Frankie ‘the Ferret’ King was a low-level operative for the mob in New York. When he was arrested for supervising the import of a consignment of pornographic videos (which accidentally get shown to junior school children, since they were labeled as kids programmes) he happily turned State’s witness and sang like a canary about fellow racketeers in the mob. After which the State put him in the witness protection program and sent him to South Florida:

prime relocation site for scores of scuzzy federal snitches (on the theory that South Florida was a place where just about any dirtbag would blend in smoothly with the existing riffraff). (p.39)

He takes the name Francis X. Kingsbury (the X is for Xavier, which he invents because he thinks gives him ‘class’) and trains as a real estate salesman. It was the era when unspoilt Florida land was being sold off to developers to quick-build condominiums, resorts, golf courses, endless roads, and Kingsbury quickly got rich as a realtor.

But then he got ambitious and announced his plans to the local chamber of commerce for a South Florida rival to Disney World, to be called The Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, complete with Wet Willy water flume, Magic Mansion, Orky the Killer Whale, Jungle Jerry, the Wild Bill Hiccup show, a petting zoo and much more (pages 32 and 107).

Within a few years the Kingdom of Thrills is a roaring success and has a full-time press and PR section, in which nobby ‘vice president in charge of communications’ Charles Chelsea oversees much cleverer, down-on-his-luck journalist, Joe Winder. Joe was fired from his newspaper for getting into a fistfight with a senior editor about a damning story he (Joe) had written about his (Joe’s) own property developing father (p.133).

Joe’s girlfriend, Nina, makes a living on a sex chatline spinning elaborate erotic fantasies to men who jerk off to her voice at premium rates meaning that, on her one night a week off, the last thing she wants to think about is sex, leaving Joe very frustrated.

Among Kingsbury’s many scams he tumbles to the fact that Federal wildlife agencies will give you money to look after endangered species. So Kingsbury contacts a crooked wildlife dealing woman he met once while they were both waiting outside court during their trials, and between them they cook up the idea of a fictional species, the ‘blue-tongued mango vole, Microtus mango‘ (p.288), and Kingsbury persuades the authorities that he is protecting the last surviving pair of this almost extinct species and gouges $200,000 out of them for their care.

Of course there’s no such thing as the ‘blue-tongued mango vole’, they are just common or garden voles whose tongues Kingsbury and his team paint with indigo dye at regular intervals. In fact the original female vole died and the Amazing Kingdom’s security chief (the vast Pedro Luz, addicted to anabolic steroids) replaced her with a female hamster, with various bits nipped and tucked. Despite this, the male vole is likely to try and mate with the hamster, who replies with fierce violence and so a security guard has to be stationed at the voles’ enclosure to prevent them from murdering each other.

So far, so farcically ludicrous, And the voles are just one of the centrepieces of the Rare Animal Pavilion at this amazingly crooked, corrupt theme park, where fat tourists from the cold North (known to native Florideans as ‘snowbirds’, p.32) queue up to admire the little critters, to buy blue-tongued vole t-shirts, posters, key-rings or make a donation to their preservation. Kingsbury even made up tacky names for the fake couple, Vance and Violet Vole (p.313).

Everywhere he looked there were old people with snowy heads and pale legs and fruit-coloured Bermuda shorts. All the men wore socks with their sandals, and all the women wore golf visors and oversized sunglasses. (p.29)

The plot is set rolling by a sweet but crazy old lady, Molly McNamara, who lives in a nice apartment in a retirement home and runs a little group of like-minded pensioners who are dreadfully concerned about the environment called The Mothers of Wilderness (p.31). Unknown to the other nice old ladies, Molly has hired a couple of small-time crooks, specialists in breaking and entering, the dim Bud Schwarz and even dimmer Danny Pogue, to break into the Amazing Kingdom and liberate the voles.

This they do, one fine night, but when one of the voles escapes through an airhole in the cardboard box they’ve put them in, on the seat of the car they’re driving, Danny playfully throws it into a passing convertible full of a tourist family (causing a near crash and consternation) and a little later, when the other one escapes, they throw it into a passing truck. This is because Molly neglected to tell them how rare and precious the voles are, and the two dim burglars mistake them for common rats.

When they turn up shamefaced at Molly McNamara’s apartment, the little old lady amazes them, and the reader, by shooting Bud Schulz through the foot and Danny through the hand. She doesn’t mess about. She reminds me of the character Maude, played by the redoubtable Ruth Gordon, in the 1971 movie, Harold and Maude.

Farce

This is enough of a taster for you to see that Native Tongue is another of Hiaasen’s violent and savagely satirical crime farces. Wikipedia defines farce as:

a comedy that aims at entertaining the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable. Farce is also characterised by heavy use of physical humour; the use of deliberate absurdity or nonsense; satire, parody, and mockery of real-life situations, people, events, and interactions; unlikely and humorous instances of miscommunication; ludicrous, improbable, and exaggerated characters; and broadly stylised performances.

Well, that’s what we have here. Another aspect of a farce is its absurdly complicated plot and this, also, characterises Hiaasen’s fictions. Rather than try to untangle it, I’ll give some of the more absurd and excessive highpoints. Basically the plot spins out of control as Kingsbury tries to cover up for the disappearance of the blue-tongued voles, threatening and then bumping off the small number of employees who were in on the scam.

Joe Winder emerges as the ‘hero’. After putting up with a series of lies and accidents at the Amazing Kingdom he eventually quits and goes freelance, trying to puzzle out the various shootings, murders and other violent events which have started to take place there.

The most florid of these is the mystery disappearance of the Amazing Kingdom’s vet, Dr Will Koocher. A day or so later one of the Kingdom’s star attractions, Orky the killer whale is found dead. When the state authorities conduct an autopsy they discover Orky choked to death on the body of Koocher! Joe liked Koocher so his suspicious death is one of the triggers to him digging deeper into what is really going on, and eventually quitting/being fired.

There’s an entertaining back story about Orky (original name Samson) who is, in fact, a rogue and bad-tempered animal who rarely performs as he’s meant to, and – we learn – had been rejected and sold on by a number of other reputable theme parks before he comes to rest at Kingsbury’s park, the lowest of the low. Everything about the Amazing Kingdom is like that – all the performing animals are duds, the floats don’t work, ‘Uncle Eli’s friendly elves’ are a bunch of bad-tempered, dope-smoking midgets, and so on.

‘You mean it’s a scam.’
‘Hey, everything’s a scam when you get down to it.’ (Joe and Carrie, p.75)

One of the first things Joe does after he’s been fired, is issue a series of satirical and facetious ‘press releases’ on Amazing Kingdom-headed notepaper, designed to stir up maximum trouble for his old employer. The first one satirically points out that the recent outbreak of hepatitis at the Amazing Kingdom, or the sudden infestation of moccasin snakes, is not that serious, and not that many tourists have been injured or died. He faxes these to every media outlet in the country, driving Kingsbury wild with frustration and ordering Charles Chelsea to write press releases countering them.

Thus the middle of the novel contains an entertaining battle of the press releases which are quoted in their entirety. They reminded me of the medieval genre of flyting, the ritual exchange of insults in medieval literature, or of the pamphlet wars which characterised Elizabethan London or the vituperative Grub Street satirised by Alexander Pope in the 1730s (pages 198 to 262).

During this period Joe has been slowly breaking up with Nina who a) isn’t keen on sex b) has aspirations to write longer, more imaginative erotic scenarios (in the amusing Epilogue, Hiaasen tells us that after the events of the novel are concluded, Nina goes on to write poetry which is promoted by Erica Jong and ends up as a Hollywood scriptwriter).

Instead Joe gets into a relationship with Carrie Lanier who works at the Amazing Kingdom wearing the ‘Petey Possum’ costume. After he gets beaten up by unknown assailants, Carrie takes him back to her trailer in a trailer park, where he eventually moves in, bringing along his collection of classic rock cassettes and his typewriter (on which to write the satirical press releases).

Meanwhile, the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills’s head of security, Pedro Luz, is mildly injured and put on an IV drip at hospital, but is so thick he takes to drinking the drip through his mouth. Since he was already on an unhealthy diet of steroids and body enhancements, this begins to have a drastic effect on his health and appearance. Basically, he turns into a mutant: his cock and balls shrivel up, his face bloats like an old melon and he becomes covered in florid acne.

Tiring of the war of press releases, Kingsbury sets the increasingly grotesque Pedro Luz to ‘deal with’ Winder, so Luz trails him back to Carrie’s trailer park. When he presses his head against the trailer wall, Luz hears a shower going and blasts a load of bullets through the shower wall. At this very moment Carrie drives up and, seeing Luz doing this, carries right on and knocks him over with the car, parking on his foot.

By this point off his face on steroids and other drugs, Luz chews his own foot off above the ankle, and makes off on his stump, driving himself to hospital. It’s at moments like this that Hiaasen goes way beyond the standard amount of killing and physical mayhem you might find in a crime novel, into a whole new level of the macabre and gruesome. It is his signature manoeuvre, his distinctive strategy.

Property development

Eventually we discover that the real motor for the plot, as so often, is corrupt property development. Having sold property in the first part of his career, and having amassed a few million running the Kingdom, Kingsbury’s next step is to create a huge new complex, the Falcon Trace Golf and Country Club Resort Community (p.228). (Just as the Reverend Charles Weeb’s plans for a vast housing development with fishing lakes was at the centre of this novel’s predecessor, Double Whammy).

Creating the space for this new development has required devastating a large area of untouched Florida forest and lake and it just happens to be an area of lake which, since he was a boy, has been important to Joe Winder as an escape and a refuge from his difficult relationship with his father.

One day Jim turns up with his fishing rod and the entire place has gone. All the trees and underbrush, everything has been scoured flat leaving a wasteland of sand and gravel and some huge diggers ready to start excavating the foundations. Joe expresses what sound like Hiaasen’s own howls of pain at seeing the beautiful landscape of his boyhood state being massacred, flattened, burned and blown up by corrupt, crooked and soulless exploiters.

‘I’m just sick of asshole carpetbaggers coming down here and fucking up the place.’ (p.296)

An extra spin is given to Joe’s grief and anger by the fact that his very own father was one of the original Florida land developers and so he carries a heavy load of Oedipal guilt.

Skink

And Skink the 6-foot-6, hulking environmentalist vigilante, punisher of bad guys and all-round avenger, Skink is back!

For new readers Hiaasen gives a brief recap of Skink’s backstory, namely that he was once Clinton Tyree, dashingly handsome ex-Vietnam vet with a gleaming smile who stood for governor determined to clean up Florida’s corrupt politics. But when he vetoed the latest in a long line of corrupt land development deals, the powers that be (banks, developers, golf course and lake and condominium developers, TV companies and advertising agencies) ganged up to stymie his every policy and law until on one climactic day, when a case he’d brought against demonstrably corrupt developers was thrown out of court and a famous wildlife area began to be bulldozed, Clint snapped. He walked out of the Governor’s mansion, disappeared into the outback, has never been seen since, as Clinton Tyree (chapter 17).

For fifteen years the governor had been living in an expatriation that was deliberately remote and anonymous. (p.149)

Instead, Clint changed his name to Skink, lived wild, ate only roadkill and berries and fish, grew his hair into a long grey ponytail, took to wearing bright orange hazard suits and floral decorated showercaps.

Hiaasen introduces Skink at a dramatic moment about a third of the way into  the story. Joe Wilder had been lured to a meeting at an isolated point on the coast by someone who said they had information about the (at that point still-unsolved) disappearance of Dr Will Koocher. It’s a trap. Two thugs bear down on Joe and then start to beat him up, badly. He is just about passing out when the beating stops, he’s aware of screams, out of one half-closed eye sees one of the attackers running for his life, then passes out.

It’s Skink, come to the rescue at just the right moment – although it’s a while till Joe formally meets the ex-governor. With typical savagery, we later discover that Skink strangled one of the attackers and hanged him by the neck from a nearby bridge and the other one is found dead and folded up in the boot of a wrecked car.

Skink is a hero of sort, and his cause – defending the environment – is just, but he frequently steps way over the boundaries. He is chivalrous to ladies – it turns out he has a long-standing friendship with old Molly McNamara who set the entire plot rolling – but he also blows off his frustration by shooting at planes coming into land at Miami airport or just at random tourist hire cars on the freeway. He is, as Bud Schwartz remarks, ‘Bigfoot without the manners’ (p.191).

Bud Schwartz said, ‘You realise we look like total dipshits.’
‘No, you look like tourists.’ (p.105)

Trooper Jim Tile

Special mention must be made of Trooper Jim Tile, one of the few black highway patrolmen in the state of Florida, who Governor Clinton promoted but who lost his job and was kicked back into the boondocks the moment Clinton disappeared. Trooper Jim recurs throughout the novels as Skink’s loyal minder and protector who tries, with uneven results, to keep him and other ‘good guys’ in line with the law. Jim emerges as, quite simply, the most dependable, sound and moral character in the series.

Bad stuff happens

From this point onwards the plot assumes a similar shape to its predecessors, in that around Skink cluster a constellation of good guys –Joe Winder, girlfriend Carrie, at one remove Molly and the two burglars Bud and Danny – against the bad guy, Francis Kingsbury and his very bad henchman, steroid-crazed Pedro Luz, who goes right off the rails and starts beating up or trying to kill everyone he can.

It is Luz, for example, who breaks into Molly McNamara’s apartment and beats her very badly, breaking some ribs and knocking out some teeth, for her part in liberating the blue-tongue voles. Mind you, during the struggle Molly manages to bite off the tip of one of Pedro’s fingers.

See what I mean by ‘savage’, as in savage and brutal farce. When there is violence it is brutal violence: Dr Koocher being stuffed down a killer whale’s throat, Jim’s attacker being strangled and hanged from a bridge, Molly being savagely beaten, Luz getting his finger bitten off. Like Jonathan Swift, you feel Hiaasen’s savage satire goes beyond specific wrong-doings and expands to become mockery of human beings as a species, vulnerable as we are to so many absurd and risible physical catastrophes. It is a multi-angled attack on the very idea of human dignity.

To make Skink even more grotesque than before, Hiaasen now has him trialling a new mosquito repellent for the army (Extended Duration Tropical Insect/Arthropod Repellent, EDTIAR, p.124). He’s also wearing a 150 megahertz radio collar he took off a dead panther. Florida’s environmental agency tags its pitifully small population of panthers. Skink is wearing the collar of number 17, which he found dead on the highway, run over by, naturally, a tourist hire car (pages 102 and 234).

I haven’t made clear that the dimwits Bud Schwarz and Danny Pogue come round to liking and respecting old Molly (despite the fact that she shoots both of them in their extremities). They are genuinely outraged when the (at that point unknown) intruder breaks into her apartment and badly beats her (when the two dimwits are not there). Although twerps, they become enrolled on the side of the ‘goodies’.

Hence another grotesque highlight when Luz and a sidekick, Churrito, ex-Nicaragua military (p.158), lure Bud and Danny to a meeting at a rival theme park attraction, Monkey World where, when they all start fighting, a gun spins into the baboon enclosure and a baboon picks up the shiny object and accidentally shoots Churrito in the face (p.195).

Later on, Kingsbury organises a media event to launch the beginning of his property development and new golf course, by getting a tired old championship golfer, Jake Harp, to playfully tee off a couple of balls from a small patch of astroturf which has been set up on the building site and out over the ocean.

Not one but two snags foul up this plan, which are that a) the golfer turns up so terminally hungover that he can barely focus on the ball let alone hit it and b) remember how Frankie came to Florida under the Witness Protection Scheme? Well, the two small-time burglars inform on him, phoning mob connections in New Jersey (Salvatore ‘the Salamander’ Delicato, p.213) and, in return for a bag of cash, telling them where their stoolpigeon is hiding out.

With the result that the Mafia send a (disappointingly unglamorous) hitman, short fat, farting Lou, who tracks Kingsbury to this grand press launch and shoots an assassin sniper rifle at Kingsbury just as the golfer is teeing off. Except that, at that vital moment, the golfer had asked Kingsbury to adjust the tee, so the ex-racketeer ducks at the vital millisecond and the Mafia hitman ends up shooting the golfer instead (chapter 29). Oops.

Joe Winder hires a former military man and a boat and gets him to fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the diggers which are starting on the Falcon Trace development, more precisely at the concrete mixer which explodes and spews wet concrete high into the air before spattering down on all the workmen. These are all wonderfully over-the-top, entertainingly violent and amoral extravaganzas.

The climax

As I’ve noted the plot is complex because complicated plots is one of the hallmarks of farce. Complex and coincidence-riddled plots in a way satirise the entire idea of a ‘plot’, of a ‘story’, and mock the notion of fictional ‘realism’ i.e. that any story can be sensible and moral and meaningful in such a screwed-up, violent and immoral world.

Hiaasen’s novels characteristically build up to a big climax, a big cheesy event of the kind celebrated by straight-faced, media-dominated, consumerist American culture and which Hiaasen the savage satirist loves pulling to pieces, like the beauty pageant in Tourist Season or the live TV fishing competition in Double Whammy.

In this novel the grand climax comes when, in a bid to counter the bad publicity generated by Joe Winder’s malicious press releases, Kingsbury has the bright idea of celebrating the alleged 5 millionth visitor to the Kingdom with a big prize for the visitor and a gala pageant celebrating the Kingdom, complete with music, floats of all the animals and costume characters etc.

Not least among the pageant’s objectionable features is the way it utterly bowdlerises the history of Florida, glossing over the religious persecution, the Indian extermination and the slavery in order to create a series of floats celebrating how the Indians welcomed the white man and how happy the slaves were on those plantations (p.182). Outraged satire.

Inevitably, the whole thing goes madly awry. Trooper Jim Tile has, by this time, been recruited to the cause, and organises a police roadblock which stops the cars of the Amazing Kingdom’s entire security force as they drive over the bridge into north Key West. When some of the stopped security guards call on Tile’s white colleagues to sort out this ‘n……’, it seals their doom and they are all arrested (p.279).

So, with no security personnel to police the parade, it is left to the by-now deranged Pedro Luz to try and stop the mayhem planned for the parade by Joe Winder, Carrie the Petey Possum character and Skink. He fails, although there is a lot of violence along the way. The upshot is:

  1. The Mafia assassin who shot the golfer by mistake, makes a return visit, ironically posing as the 5 millionth visitor and thus winning a prize car, before he shoots Kingsbury dead in his control room.
  2. After capturing and badly beating Joe Winder, Luz (by now ‘percolated in hormones’, p.194) is pushing him across the back lots of the Kingdom (empty because all the tourists are attending the parade) when they encounter Skink and, after a struggle, Luz ends up being pushed into the dolphin aquarium where he is shagged to death by the dolphin who is in a very horny mood, has a very long schlong, and strong flippers (pages 302 to 305).
  3. Luz had interrupted Skink in the process of ferrying cans of gasoline around the Kingdom which, with Luz out of the way, he proceeds to light up, setting off explosions all over the site.

Joe Winder and Carrie make it to safety through the swamps and out to the clear ocean while the entire Amazing Kingdom of Thrills goes up in explosions like the climax of a James Bond movie. Jim Tile turns up in a state police car and whisks Skink, who has also escaped the premises, off to safety.

In the comic Epilogue, which have become part of the Hiaasen formula, we are told that Bud Schwartz goes on to set up a private security firm. Danny Pogue, who had been converted by Molly McNamara to the cause of nature and the environment, goes off to Tanzania to train as a wildlife warden. Nina, Joes phone sex girlfriend, goes on to publish poetry then ascends to the giddy heights of writing Hollywood screenplays. Uncle Ely’s dope-smoking Elves never work again. Charles Chelsea retires from the PR business and sets about writing a novel.

Florida

A culture in terminal moral hemorrhage. (p.280)

Hiaasen’s novels take it for granted that Florida is the outstanding state in the USA for violence, universal corruption, and the utter amorality of a citizenry drenched in mindless consumerism.

  • Key West – where many of the judges were linked by conspiracy or simple inbreeding to the crookedest politicians. (p.31)
  • Like so many new Floridians, Kingsbury was a felon on the run. (p.38)
  • The Security Department at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills was staffed exclusively by corrupt ex-policemen, of which there was a steady supply in South Florida. (p.48)
  • ‘New Yorkers’, said Jim Tile, ‘they think they’ve cornered the market on psychopaths. They don’t know Florida.’ (p.266)
  • The man said, ‘I got a confession to make. I cheated a little this morning… I cut in line so we could be the first ones through the gate. That’s how I won the car.’ It figures, thought Kingsbury. Your basic South Florida clientele. (p.314)

Miami Vice

Hiaasen is aware that his fictional turf overlaps with the territory covered by the phenomenally successful TV series Miami Vice, which began to be popular just as he began publishing his novels. Miama Vice ran for five seasons on NBC, from September 1984 to January 1990, and popularised the image of Miami and South Florida as full of slick criminals and cool detectives wearing designer threads having high speed car and boat chases.

Hiaasen mentions Miami Vice several times, but his jaded cynicism comes from a very different place. Nobody is slick, nothing is ‘cool’ in Hiaasen-land; anyone who has any money must be a crook, a crooked lawyer, a crooked politician, a crooked land developer or a drug baron. The word ‘Miami’ doesn’t imply slick and stylish but degraded and corrupt.

The asshole probably did have a gun; it was Miami, after all. (p.138)

Credit

Native Tongue by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991. All references are to the 1992 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen (1989)

‘This is the worst year of my life, and it’s only the seventeenth of January.’
(Private investigator Mick Stranahan, Skin Tight, page 134)

Skin Tight is the third of Carl Hiaasen’s scathing and savagely satirical depictions of the corruption, greed and environmental destruction infesting his home state of Florida. If its predecessor, Double Whammy‘s central subject was the surprising corruption and violence surrounding coarse fishing and its big-stakes competitions, Skin Tight‘s central theme is plastic surgery. But, as usual, from the central topic all kinds of weird, macabre and violent threads spin off in all directions.

Mick Stranahan, Private Investigator, is the tough and capable guy we’re used to in the thriller genre. He has killed 5 men, some in Vietnam (p.21), been married and divorced five times (all to cocktail waitresses, p.90), now lives as an ‘outsider’, on a house on stilts built over the ocean ‘in the stretch of Biscayne Bay known as Stiltsville’ (p.11). (It’s worth noting in passing that Skink, Hiaasen’s great recurring character, also served in Vietnam.)

Mick had worked at the State’s Attorney’s office till he went to arrest a notoriously corrupt judge, Raleigh Gomper, who pulled a gun and, in the struggle, Stranahan shot Gomper dead. Though he was exonerated at the trial, shooting dead a judge didn’t sit well with an employee of the State Prosecutor and so Mick was forced to take early retirement. Hence, he is now a part-time private detective, the absolutely classic profession of the thriller genre, most famously embodied in Raymond Chandler‘s Philip Marlow.

Dr Rudolph ‘Rudy’ Graveline runs a plastic surgery clinic, the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Centre. In fact he himself is an unqualified butcher of a surgeon but is wise enough to concentrate on acting as the avuncular salesman and comforter of the nation’s many misfeatured and malshaped narcissists – taking their money but leaving the actual surgery to a team of four well-paid and infinitely more capable juniors.

The trigger for the plot is Maggie Gonzalez for Maggie knows that four years earlier, on 12 March 1986, Graveline ran a clinic called the Durkos Medical Centre and was giving a routine rhinoplasty (nose job) to a young woman, Victoria Barletta, when he accidentally killed her (p.39).

In a panic, Rudy called his brother, George Graveline, who had a gardening and tree surgeon business, and they disposed of the body in a timber grinder. When her family raised Victoria’s disappearance with the authorities, Rudy and all his staff swore she left the clinic after surgery, went and sat at the local bus stop but then disappeared, presumed kidnapped. To get them to agree to this cover story, he had to pay key members of his staff a hefty bribe. (A year or so later one of the doctors, Dr Kenneth Greer, tumbled to what had happened and started blackmailing Rudy, so Rudy paid for him to be disposed of in a ‘hunting accident’, p.285.)

Back to the present and, after a failed marriage and a series of pathetic failed relationships, Maggie is now broke and decides to cash in on what she knows (p.56). She goes to the New York office of a crime-investigating TV show, hosted by the unbearably preening TV presenter Reynaldo Flemm (who has a kinky penchant for doorstepping criminals and provoking them till he gets beaten up) and his long-suffering, clever and dishy producer, Christina Marks.

(It is typical of the duplicitousness of almost all the characters that we learn, late in the book, that the would-be smooth Hispanic Flemm is in fact really named Raymond Fleming and changed his name and appearance to appear more ethnic and glamorous.) Maggie tells Flemm and Marks her story and promises to repeat it on camera for $5,000.

Then it crosses Maggie’s scheming mind that she can probably have it both ways –getting money from the TV company and blackmailing the doctor – so she phones up Dr Rudy and says she’s scared because a Private Investigator, Mick Stranahan, has come snooping and seems to be about to revive the case. She has Mick’s name and number from back before he retired, was still an active prosecutor, and was briefly involved in the initial investigation. Now she just whistles his name up out of thin air as an entirely fictional threat solely in order to gouge more greenbacks out of Rudy.

Mick knows nothing about any of this but Maggie’s ploy not only persuades Dr Rudy to cough up some more hush money for Maggie but sets him thinking how to eliminate Mick as a threat. And so it is that when the TV people, Flemm and Marks, arrange a meeting with Dr Rudy, telling him they know all about the fatal accident though refusing to reveal their source, Rudy mistakenly believes that their source really is Stranahan (not, as it actually is, Maggie) and that Mick is about to blow the whole story and get him arrested for murder.

Thus it is that, based on this misunderstanding (Maggie’s deception), Rudy decides he has to get rid of Mick and so phones a contact in New Jersey, ‘Curly Eyebrows’. Rudy used to do basic plastic surgery for the Mob up there, nothing too complicated, just nose jobs and tummy tucks for the wives. Now he uses these contacts to hire a Mafia hitman, Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola (p.59).

The novel opens with Mick innocently sitting on the decking of his house out in the bay, watching the boat approaching carrying a guy who we, the readers, know to be this hitman. You don’t get many strangers round these parts so Mick retreats into his house, takes down the stuffed marlin head from the wall and, when the hitman makes his move, standing in the doorway with gun in hand, Mick leaps out and thrusts the marlin’s long frontal spike into the man’s chest, severing his aorta and snapping his spine. Ah. Oh.

All this information is conveyed in the book’s first 30 pages, as a scene-setter or prologue, a kind of powerhouse of information structuring and communication.

Undeterred, Rudy hires a second hitman who will turn out to dominate the novel, a freak called Chemo, 6 feet 9 inches feet tall. Chemo acquired his nickname after suffering a catastrophic accident during a routine electrolysis treatment for a couple of unsightly pores on his nose. The surgeon, Dr Kyle Koppner, had a stroke and swept the electrolysis machine right across Chemo’s face, with the result that it looks like it’s made of Rice Krispies.

He looked like Fred Munster with bulimia. (p.207)

In agony, Chemo killed Koppner on the spot. For added incongruity, Hiaasen gives Chemo (real name Blondell Wayne Tatum, age 38, six foot nine, p.223) a long convoluted backstory which has him orphaned at an early age, raised by the Amish relatives, before he finally rebels and holds up a bank,. However, Chemo then (typically for Hiaasen) discovers he has a talent for local politics, with its combination of intimidation and corruption. But the facial disfigurement and the murder of the doctor abruptly ends his career in politics which, in America, is all about appearance.

The plot ramifies outwards like ripples in a lake. We learn that Gravelines had planned to invest some of his millions in a crooked real estate deal at a property named Old Cypress Towers. When he comes under pressure from – as he incorrectly believes – Mick Stranahan, he lets the crooked authorities who were taking bribes to let the planning permission go ahead, know that he is going to pull out unless something is done about Stranahan.

And so the head of the cabal of crooked local councillors, Roberto Pepsical, goes to see two of the thickest, slimiest cops on the police force, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, and tells them there’s greenbacks in it for them if they can get rid of Stranahan.

Meanwhile, Stranahan, realising someone is out to kill him, calls up his philandering brother-in-law, Kipper Garth (married to Stranahan’s sister, Kate), a supposed lawyer who in fact runs a sort of phone sales operation which chases claims of malpractice or injury and passes them on to reputable lawyers (pages 113 to 114) in what he calls ‘the referral racket’ (p.309).

Stranahan tells Garth that, for once, he’s going to have to prosecute an actual case himself, against Rudy, and hands over files of over a dozen patients of Dr Gravelines who have made various failed attempts to sue him. Pick one and sue him for real, Stranahan tells his brother-in-law, otherwise he’ll tell his wife all about Garth’s numerous infidelities which, with his connections at the Prosecutor’s office, Mick has managed to get documentary evidence about.

The plot then thickens over 400 pages of increasing complications, farcical twists and violent outbursts:

Maggie goes to New York and records a video giving her eye-witness account of the death of Victoria Barletta. Rudy pays Chemo to track her down and kill her but, when he finally confronts her in her New York hotel room, Maggie is so touchingly sympathetic about his face and his crippled hand that they end up becoming an extremely odd item. It helps that she herself has just undergone some plastic surgery with a view to changing her identity, so they can compare scars.

Mick gets to know the TV producer Christina and ends up having an affair with her, showing her the delights of nature, far from the city, making love under the stars on the decking of his house on stilts.

Improbably but comically Rudy Graveline has an affair with a stunningly good-looking model and TV star, Heather Chappell, who insists he operate on her even though her body is absolutely perfect. To get a discount for the operation, Heather lets Rudy screw him every which way in a variety of unexpected locations.

Detective Al García from Dade-Miami Police Department (who Hiaasen fans will recognise from the first two novels) shows up, sympathetic to Stranahan but representing a kind of recurring threat that he  (Mick) might be arrested at various points when various congeries of evidence point against him. For example, García doesn’t believe Stranahan’s claim that he has nothing to do with the macabre deaths of the two corrupt cops.

However, Stranahan steals a copy of the video in which Maggie describes the killing of Victoria Barletta and shows it to García who from that point onwards becomes a staunch ally.

In a dramatic scene Mick visits Rudy’s brother, George Graveline, at work as a tree surgeon. His questions rattle George so much that he whacks Stranahan over the head with a mahogany log and starts to feed his unconscious body into the timber shredder. However, García, who is quietly tailing Stranahan, sees this all happen and shoots Graveline, who drops Stranahan and himself falls head-first into the shredder and is blattered all over the place as Mick woozily regains consciousness.

Maggie reveals to Chemo the gravity of Rudy’s crime (murder) emphasising that Rudy is paying him an insultingly small amount. Angered, Chemo uses his garden strimmer on Graveline’s new apple red Jaguar.

Rudy takes a heavy suitcase containing $25,000 to meet the corrupt commissioner Roberto Pepsical in the confessional of a Catholic church but as they kneel, Rudy injects Pepsical with enough potassium to cause a massive heart attack, packs up and discreetly leaves. He is becoming a serial killer.

Meanwhile Kipper Garth had some luck with one of the plaintiffs Mick had turned up, one John Nordstrom who paid Rudy for his wife, Marie, to have a boob job which was so bad the boobs in question became rock hard and one day, during sex, she moved quickly and literally had his eye out, being blind in one eye leading him (Nordstrom) to lose his job as an air traffic controller. Savage comedy.

Garth pops round with the legal papers to see the couple and discovers that John is at work, in  his new job as a sports coach. Seeing an opportunity, slimy Garth talks the wife, Marie, into letting him touch her rock hard boobs. He’s in the middle of doing it just when John walks in. John’s new job as as a jai-alai coach and so quick as a flash he fires off a hardball with his wicker-glove which hits Garth at the back of the skull, knocking him unconscious to the floor.

Maggie and Chemo help Rudy sell Reymondo Flemm’s corpse to a man named Kimbler who sells body parts to schools and colleges in Central America.

At some point in all this mayhem Chemo kidnaps Christina the TV producer from her hotel under Rudy’s orders. Rudy gets a messenger to deliver a ransom note to Mick out on his stilt house. However, Mick bites back by kidnapping the actress Heather Chappell who Rudy is boffing and taking her back to his house on the sea, leaving a written note for Rudy and his gang to bring Christina out to the house for a hostage exchange.

And it is this exchange of the two women which forms the climax of the novel: Rudy, Chemo, Maggie and their hostage Christina turn up in a boat at Mick’s stilt house expecting to do a hostage swap for beautiful Heather. Except Heather doesn’t want to go. Rudy had promised he’d give her light plastic surgery all over, had doped her out for a day, covered her in bandages and lied that he’d done the procedures. After kidnapping her, Stranahan removes all the bandages and proves that her ‘boyfriend’ is a liar. So now Heather doesn’t want to go back to Rudy.

Rudy, Christina, Chemo and Maggie clamber aboard Mick’s deck but as she gives him a helping push upwards, Maggie pickpockets from Chemo the keys to her and Chemo’s motel room, where they’ve stashed all the loot they’ve stolen from Rudy, meaning to head back by herself and take it all. When Chemo realises she’s done this he dives on top of her to seriously hurt her but Stranahan knocks him out with the butt of his shotgun.

When Chemo comes round, the boat has left with the women, Christina, Heather and Maggie. It’s just the men in the stilt house, Mick, Chemo and Rudy.

Mich has handcuffed Rudy spreadeagled to his bed. Mick has a cunning plan. He is going to recreate a nosejob on Rudy in order to terrify him into confessing everything, how he killed Victoria Barletta, got rid of the body, paid for a hit on the doctor colleague who was blackmailing him, hired Chemo to kill Mick, and so on.

But as the interrogation reaches its vital moment and as he has a small cold metal chisel stuck up Rudy’s nose as if he really is going to break the bone, unexpectedly Chemo gives it a big whack with a hammer and it goes right up into Rudy’s brain, killing him instantly. Shit. Stranahan had promised García he would hand over the culprit to the murder along with a full confession. Shit. Mick is going to have to come up with a plan B.

In the short concluding chapter Detective Al García is motorboated out to the stilt house by Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, a good guy, where they find Chemo by himself with the corpse of Rudy Graveline. No Mick anywhere. The cops immediately jump to a false conclusion about what must have happened. They mistakenly assume that Chemo lured Rudy out here and subjected him to a torture which went gruesomely wrong. It all fits together. The bad guys are either dead or going to gaol.

When they look for Mick Stranahan there is no sign and his skiff is holed and sunk under the house. Off in the distance, hard to focus on, García thinks he sees a porpoise or giant turtle amid the waves. Couldn’t be a man. Couldn’t be Mick Stranahan swimming in the distance. Nah. He turns back to the murder suspect. It is a happy ending. Sort of.

Gruesome violence

‘It’s like a nightmare of weirdness.’ Al García (p.323)

The book is littered with cruel, grotesque and macabre violent incidents:

  • Chemo’s face being wrecked by a plastic surgeon having a stroke.
  • Mick killing the hitman Tony ‘the Eel’ Traviola with the spear of a stuffed marlin.
  • For a spell, Chemo hooks up with Chloe Simpkins Stranahan, one of Mick’s ex-wives. She tells Chemo that when Mick found her shagging one of the many men she was unfaithful with, Mick didn’t beat him up but glued him by the testicles to the bonnet of an Eldorado convertible (p.74).
  • Chloe eggs Chemo on to burn down Mick’s shack but eventually makes the bad mistake of ridiculing Chemo’s appearance while they’re driving a speedboat through the lagoons, with the result that Chemo chucks the boat’s 30 pound anchor at her, which knocks her straight over the side and down to the bottom of the lagoon, drowning her (p.99).
  • Mick feeds fish to a huge barracuda which likes to idle in the shade beneath his house on stilts. When Chemo comes to kill him, Mick shoots Chemo backwards off the decking and into the water where Chemo’s splashing attracts the big fish which darts up and bites off Chemo’s hand. Chemo survives and makes it back to civilisation where he goes to see a doctor. They offer him various prosthetic replacements, but Chemo’s preferred option takes across the narrative across a border into Hiaasen bizarro land when Chemo attaches a mini-lawn strimmer, a Weed Whacker, to his stump, powered by a battery tucked under his armpit, and which he uses to devastating effect in the second half of the book.
  • When the corrupt cops Joe Salazar and John Murdock hire a boat to motor out to Mick’s lake hideaway and bump him off, as ordered by their corrupt superior (in fact Mick is now staying in the rundown cabin of an old buddy, after his own house on stilts has been ransacked), Mick doesn’t wait for a shootout but ties super-strong fishing twine across the narrow entrance to the lagoon front of the house so that the two cops, approaching in a boat at 42 miles per hour, are  instantly garroted. Well, one of them is, the other one takes a while to die in agony (chapter 23).
  • Stranahan goes to see George Graveline to try and get him to talk his brother into laying off the assassination attempts. George makes a bid to strangle Stranahan who punches him under the heart then in the balls, then treads on his neck to calm him down, then kneels down next to him to carry on the conversation. At which point George whacks him with a chunk of mahogany and starts feeding Stranahan’s unconscious body into the timber shredder. At which point, García, who’d accompanied Stranahan to the meeting but stayed in the car, shoots George Graveline who himself falls into the timber shredder and is shredded to a pulp and bone splinters (p.282).

See what I mean by violent and macabre?

But the cherry on the cake is the incident near the end of the novel when Reynaldo Flemm decides to go undercover at Dr Graveline’s clinic in order to get a TV scoop. He checks in under the false name Johnny LeTigre pretending to be a male stripper who needs liposuction and a nose job. The plan is that Flemm’s cameraman, Willie will burst in mid-nose job, toss Reynaldo a microphone and the latter will bombard Graveline with cutting questions about the Victoria Barletta murder and so get a TV exclusive.

But the plan all goes horribly wrong. 1. Instead of doing the nose job first, Graveline decides to do the liposuction, which requires a general anaesthetic so Flemm can neither shout out instructions to his cameraman loitering outside, carry out an interview or anything. 2. Graveline is an unqualified incompetent who barely knows what he’s doing. 3. When Willie finally finds the correct operating theatre and bursts in, distracting Graveline with his bright TV lights and bewildering questions, Graveline is so put off his stroke that he pushes the liposuction tube (the cannula) beyond the narrow band of fat he’s meant to be sucking out and deep into Reynaldo’s gut, sucking out one by one all his vital organs and killing him (chapter 30). Gruesome.

Clothes

There’s something deeply wrong and corrupt about a worldview which happily accepts the most violent incidents, corruption and casual murder, but is obsessed with identifying the exact labels and brands of what people are wearing:

  • [Flemm] was wearing another pair of khaki Banana Republic trousers and a baggy denim shirt. He smelled like a bucket of Brut. (p.50)
  • [Tina] wore a baggy Jimmy Buffett T-shirt over a cranberry bikini bottom. (p.86)
  • [Stranahan] was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a khaki short-sleeved shirt, open to the chest. (p.87)
  • [Chloe] was wearing a ridiculous white sailor’s suit from Lord and Taylor’s. (p.94)
  • [Al García]’s J.C. Penney coat jacket was slung over one arm, and his shiny necktie was loosened half-way down his chest. (p.101)
  • Kipper Garth wore grey European-cut slacks, a silk paisley necktie and a bone-coloured shirt, the French cuffs rolled up to his elbows. (p.114)
  • Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. (p.132)
  • He saw a god-looking woman in a white cottony top and tan safaris shorts hop off the shrimp boat… (p.149)
  • The man wore blue jeans, boots and a flannel shirt with the left sleeve cut away. (p.167)
  • Chemo was dressed in a tan safari outfit… (p.183)
  • She wore a red windbreaker, baggy knit pants, and high-top tennis shoes. (p.227)
  • Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy grey workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan worse jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. (p.248)
  • Rudy Graveline was wearing a tan sports jacket and dark, loose-fitting pants and a brown striped necktie (p.278).
  • [Marie Nordstrom] wore electric-blue Lycra body tights, and her ash-blond hair was pulled back in a girlish ponytail. (p.310)
  • [Rudy] was wearing Topsiders, tan cotton pants, and a Bean crewneck pullover. (p.351)
  • [Stranahan] wore blue jeans, deck shoes, a pale yellow cotton shirt and a poplin windbreaker. (p.353)

Odd that so many modern American writers are so obsessively precise about clothes and brands and so utterly indifferent to the value of human life.

Anti-Florida

Amazing that a man with such a bilious view of his own home state could keep a job on its premiere newspaper and in some sense become its literary representative, despite the outrageous examples of corruption he chronicles in his novels, and the throwaway references to the ubiquity of corruption and graft at every level of Florida life.

One of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption; there was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you. (p.108)

When some of his maltreated patients organise a suit against Graveline, he simply buys the hearing officer a shiny new Volvo station wagon and all charges are dropped. Not only that, but:

The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s licence and sealed all the records from the public and the press – thus honouring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are his patients. (p.109)

All the commissioners have off-the-record accounts in the Cayman Islands to stash the earnings they make through corruption and graft (p.110).

Commissioner Roberto Pepsical… found himself surrounded by ruthless and untrustworthy people – nobody played a straight game any more. In Miami corruption had become a sport for the masses. (p.228)

Miami, home of corruption and coke dealers.

Half the new Miami skyscrapers had been built with coke money and existed largely as an inside joke, a mirage to please the banks and the Internal Revenue Service and the chamber of commerce. Everyone liked to say that the skyline was a tribute to local prosperity but Stranahan recognised it as a tribute to the anonymous genius of Latin American money launderers. (p.316)

And crooked lawyers:

‘But lawyers aren’t supposed to solicit.’
‘Al, this is Miami.’ (p.324)

And all-purpose criminals:

‘Neighbourhoods like this are hard to find, Mick. You know, we’ve only been burglarised twice in  four years. That’s not bad for Miami.’ (p. 322)

Hiaasen does have a few good characters: Luis Córdova, a young marine patrolman who regularly calls by Stranahan’s house, in his boat, warns him if trouble is coming. The old black guy, Cartwright, who Stranahan helped in a battle with crooked property developers back in the day (is there any other kind?).

And he creates a heavily symbolic figure, Timmy Gavigan, a retired cop who is lying in a hospital bed far gone with terminal cancer. He’s an old friend of Stranahan’s who visits him several times during the course of the novel, as does the TV producer Christina Marks as part of her investigations.

Gavigan is pretty obviously designed as a symbol of old-school Integrity and so it is no accident that he’s wasting away and dying, symbol of an old world of integrity and decency being drowned in a sea of scumbags.

There’s a scene where Gavigan is in bed, barely able to breathe, being visited by compassionate Christina, when the two piggish and corrupt cops, Joe Salazar and John Murdock, barge in and try to bully Gavigan into incriminating Stranahan, while she tries to moderate their behaviour. Worthy old symbol of honour harassed to the grave by swinish corruption.

Against this one good man is set a panorama of everyday corruption at every level and in every area of Florida life. And the terrible thing about corruption is it’s so dynamic, it has so much energy.

The county had hired [George Graveline, Rudy’s tree-trimming brother] to rip out the old trees to make space for some tennis courts. Before long a restaurant would spring up next to the tennis courts and, after that, a major resort hotel. The people who would run the restaurant and the hotel would receive the use of the public property for practically nothing, thanks to their pals on the county commission. In return, the commissioners would receive a certain secret percentage of the refreshment concessions. And the voters would have brand-new tennis courts, whether they wanted them or not. (p.275)

Anti-American

From time to time, Hiaasen suggests it’s not just Florida, that the vista of unreasoned violence and chaos which he so furiously depicts extends out across the entire United States. For example, he jokily refers to the occurrence of the ‘regular’ mass shooting in Oklahoma as if mass shootings are now a boringly familiar occurrence; or jokes that a shootout and fight at Chemo’s New York apartment (when Chemo finds Stranahan has broken in and is going through his things) barely even makes the papers in that ultra-violent city (p.223).

There are numerous other minor, casual incidents which highlight the casual sexism, violence and cynicism of American culture. At the start of the novel Mick boats it back to the house on stilts to discover that while he’s away a speedboat of young people has deposited their young women to sunbathe (nude) on his decking while the guys goof around and waterski on the boat.

Mick is polite to the women, who quickly cover up and is only a little disconcerted when one of them, Tina, strolls into his shack and asks him to assess her naked body. Why? Because she wants to have plastic surgery to perfect it.

But the point of the story is that when the young men return to the shack, Tina’s boyfriend, Richie, is jealous when he sees her walking out of the shack naked and accompanied by Mick. Mick courteously ferries the girls out to their boyfriends’ boat and has turned and is making away, when he hears and sees Tina’s boyfriend start badmouthing her and then smacking her. Mick turns his skiff round, jumps onto the speedboat and beats the crap out of the boyfriend.

I take the point that Mick is a beacon of chivalry in a sleazy shitty world but… not really. He himself is liable to violent rages and violent attacks. Everyone is. It comes over as a very, very violent place.

Even without the corruption, violence and killing, Hiaasen often appears to simply not like Americans, especially the chavvy scum he sees visiting the Sunshine State.

[Maggie and Chemo] got in line at the Pan Am counter, surrounded by a typical Miami-bound contingent – old geezers with tubas for sinuses; shiny young hustlers in thin gold chains; huge hollow-eyes families that looked like they’d staggered out of a Sally Struthers telethon. (p.221)

Bands

An entertainingly comic thread running through the book is the way that Chemo, in between his jaunts as a hit man, has a crappy job as a bouncer at a low-rent venue called the Gay Bidet, which hosts a succession of ‘punk’ rock bands, such as the Fudge Packers (p.163), Cathy and the Catheters, Queen of Slut Rock (p.236) or the Fabulous Foreskins (p.302).

I found these band names, and the fights which generally break out at the gigs between neo-Nazis and rednecks or rival gangs of skinheads, much more realistic and fun than any of the laboured, would-be ‘cool’ band references in the rock-obsessed novels of William Gibson.

Mind you, Hiaasen’s rock references are nearly as dated as Gibson’s. As a test to see whether they’re going to be compatible, Stranahan routinely asks his girlfriends to name the Beatles. Most fail. After sleeping with young Tina (who he rescued from her violent boyfriend and who, later, comes back to see him alone) a couple of times, Mick realises she’s far too young for him and, when she fails to name all the members of the Beatles, gives that as a reason for dumping her.

Whereas when he eases into an affair with the investigative TV producer, Christina Marks, taking her nude swimming at midnight etc, the fact that she not only names all four members of the Beatles but throws in early member Pete Best, jokily cements the affair (p.248). 1989 it was published, nearly 20 years after the Beatles split up. Hiaasen comes over as a textbook example of ageing Dad Rock.

Human relationships

I know it’s meant to be grotesquely extreme and fiercely satirical, but Hiaasen’s novels confirm the sense I get whenever I watch modern American TV or read about American novels or movies, which is that – Americans have stopped being able to relate to each other as decent human beings.

Everyone in Hiaasen’s fiction uses everyone else instrumentally, as tools to an end: the bad guys egregiously so, but even the good guys like Brian Keyes or R.J. Decker (in the previous two novels) or Mick Stranahan in this one, they also manipulate and use the other human beings around them, lying, deceiving and manipulating as necessary to achieve their goals.

There’s no-one in these novels who isn’t a crook or a user, in the sense of someone who takes advantage of or exploits others. The relentlessly bilious cynicism can, eventually, become a little wearing. And so, despite the presence of many comical and farcical moments, the book somehow lacks the joi de satiriser of the first two novels, the sprezzatura. The portrait of a society mired in corruption and casual violence is too persuasive and too depressing.

The name’s Bond

In my reviews of William Gibson’s novels I pointed out the slight but detectable ‘anxiety of influence’ they evince, the text’s feeling that, at key moments, it is veering very close to James Bond territory (Machiavellian mastermind, handsome omni-competent hero, dishy woman, state-of-the-art gadgets) and how Gibson tries to address and defuse the perception with a couple of jokey references to Bond movies or villains.

Interestingly, Hiaasen does the same. Sooner or later one or other of the characters realises the all-action adventure they’re in is coming perilously close to Bond territory, and Hiaasen anticipates the reader twigging this by making his own jokey reference. In the previous novel the slippery vamp, Lanie, tells the hero that her favourite Bond is Sean Connery. Here, the reference comes when Mick’s ex-wife Chloe is goading Chemo:

‘Have you got your plan?’ Chloe asked
‘The less you know, the better.’
‘Oh, pardon me,’ she said caustically. ‘Pardon me, Mr James Fucking Bond.’ (p.95)

Soon afterwards Chemo chucks the anchor at Chloe which drags her to the bottom of the lagoon and drowns her. Don’t mention Bond. That said the book contains more references to the TV series Miami Vice which was undergoing an explosion of popularity at the time and, maybe, threatened to steal Hiaasen’s thunder. In America, competition, for everything, is always fierce (pages 307, 348).

Recurring characters

Mick Stranahan returns to feature in Hiaasen’s 2004 novel Skinny Dip.

Chemo returns in the 2010 novel, Star Island.

Credit

Skin Tight by Carl Hiaasen was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1989. All references are to the 1991 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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by Simon on May 21, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 21, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/skin-tight-carl-hiaasen/

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