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Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South @ the Royal Academy

From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy

1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation

There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:

advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists

Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.

Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.

What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?

Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy

The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.

2. Outsider art

Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.

So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.

Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.

Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.

The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.

Raw materials

Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!

Anatomy by Archie Byron

Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).

Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal

The exhibition

The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.

Artists

The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.

Room 1. Friendships and family ties

The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.

The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.

Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)

I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.

Room 2. Personal stories, local sources

Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.

This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.

Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.

Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy

By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.

Paintings from room 2.

For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.

Paintings by Purvis Young

By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.

My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.

Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire

Room 3. The yard show

As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.

One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.

Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.

Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts

This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.

More Gee’s Bend quilts

I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.

Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.

Marfa Stance and quilts for sale

‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.

Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.

There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.

Marfa Stance and the quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend

More Royal Academy reviews

More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on May 29, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition

Tagged Alabama, Alabama River, American art, American Civil War, and Henry and Georgia Speller, Archie Byron, Arte Povera, Atlanta, Bessie Harvey, Black art, Black artists, Boykin, Charles Williams, cubist sculpture, Dada, Deep South, Eldren M. Bailey, exhibition, First World War, Gee’s Bend, Georgia, Georgia Speller, Hawkins Bolden, Henry Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Joe Minter, Joseph Gee, Langston Hughes, Lonnie Holley, Loretta Pettway, Marcel Duchamps, Marfa Stance, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, Mary T Smith, Max Ernst, Memphis, Miami, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Outsider Art, Pablo Picasso, Painting, Picasso, Purvis Young, Ronald Lockett, Royal Academy, Sam Doyle, sculpture, Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers, Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South, South Carolina, Southern US, Surrealist sculpture, the Mississippi Delta, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, The Souls Grown Deep Foundation, Thornton Dial, USA, William S. Arnett, yard show

Posted by Simon on May 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/29/souls-grown-deep-like-the-rivers-black-artists-from-the-american-south-the-royal-academy/

Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (2016)

‘This is Florida, the land of batshit, trigger-happy motherfuckers.’ (p.82)

Andrew Yancy

The most notable thing about Hiaasen’s 14th novel is that it is a direct sequel to his 13th, featuring the same protagonist (former Monroe County detective Andrew Yancy), the same girlfriend he ended that novel with (Dr Rosa Campesino), and the same running feud with the owners of the vacant lot next to his, on the island of Big Pine Key, who are threatening to build a mansion which will block out Yancy’s restful view of the sunset.

At the start of book 13 Yancy was kicked off the small Monroe County police force for assaulting the husband of his then-mistress. Bonnie Witt. The easy-going head of the Monroe police, Sonny Summers, had to drop Yancy after the press furore about the assault, but got him a job he cordially hates, as a health and safety or ‘roach’ inspector of local restaurants.

Yancy is ‘a tall, lean man with a baked-in Florida tan’ (p.134) in his early 40s. He is a regular smoker of dope, who sometimes does his job or gets involved in the novel’s various criminal escapades, half-stoned. Like other Hiaasen heroes he is too honest and blunt for his own good, ‘prone to an acid bluntness that produced poor results careerwise…’ (p.55)

As usual with Hiaasen, Yancy was soon joined by a blizzard of other characters, all of whom are given complicated backstories and then placed in ever-complexifying situations and interlinking storylines.

Buck Nance

The central thread which just about keeps all the complex storylines of this novel together concerns a popular reality TV show titled Bayou Brethren, about a family of rednecks who live and bicker on a chicken farm in the Florida panhandle.

The star of the show is one Buck Nance, a middle-aged redneck with a long salt-and-pepper beard, who runs the chicken farm and so has acquired the ironic nickname Captain Cock (p.58). He lords it over his brothers, has a tough bitching wife, Krystal, but is also screwing a ‘sex-crazed’ mistress with the porny name of Miracle, on the side. (It is a given in all Hiaasen novels, that American marriage entails infidelity.)

In reality, like everything in Hiaasen, the entire show is a meretricious fake and a scam. Buck’s real name is Matthew Romberg and he and his three brothers ( Bradley (TV name: Junior), Henry (TV name: Buddy) and Todd (TV name: Clee Roy, p.68) are actually from rural Wisconsin.

They were in an unsuccessful band named Grand Funk Romberg (a jokey riff on the actual American hard rock group, Grand Funk Railroad) when they were talent-spotted on account of their hick appearance and cast as the central characters in the new show (p.71). The brothers have had to be extensively coached in every aspect of the Florida redneck life which their adoring fans consider them to epitomise: the Cajun accent, the chewing tobacco, the down-home oaths and jokes, it’s all fake.

Lane is kidnapped

The novel opens with Buck’s agent, Lane Coolman, a no-nonsense, cynical New York talent agent working for Platinum Artists Management who owes his career and wages and expense account lifestyle to Buck’s success, arriving in Miami to supervise some ‘gigs’ Buck is scheduled to give. These ‘gigs’ consist of Buck sitting up on stage telling good ole boy stories and jokes while a guitarist noodles folk melodies behind him and Lane supports and whispers prompts from the wings.

Instead, as he drives from the airport to his hotel, Lane is kidnapped by the criminal Zeto (full name Juan Zeto-Fernandez) and his sexy, unhinged sidekick, Merry Mansfield. They use a technique known as ‘bump and grab’ whereby Merry bumps her (stolen) car into the rear of Lane’s hire car. When he pulls over and gets out to remonstrate, he notices her jeans are down to her knees and her knickers pulled down and she is shaving her pubic hair while she is driving. Merry is the Razor Girl of the book’s title.

Lane is speechless with astonishment and anger, as he watches Merry apologetically pull up her panties, then quickly becomes addled with lust. Thus, when Merry declares her car a write-off and asks if he can give her a lift to the nearest service station, Lane readily agrees. But when they get there, Zeto is waiting with a gun, climbs into the passenger seat and orders him to drive. He’s done gone and been kidnapped, the sucker.

Martin Trebeaux and beach renourishment

In fact, typically for Hiaasen’s comedies of accidents and misadventures, it turns out Zeto and Merry have grabbed the wrong guy. Zeto had been hired by a New York mobster, Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola, from the Calzone crime family (p.139) to kidnap a crooked businessman named Martin Trebeaux, who was scheduled to drive a similar colour car along the same highway at the same time and looks similar to Lane. Oops.

Why was Trebeaux the intended target of a grab? This requires a bit of explanation. Trebeaux runs a big company resanding Florida beaches in a process known as ‘beach renourishment’. This is because global warming and rising sea levels are washing away lots of Florida’s luxury sandy beaches. Trebeaux’s company, Sedimental Journeys, rakes up tonnes of sand from just offshore and replenishes vanishing beaches.

So far, so reasonable. But Trebeaux is a crook. His company has been dogged by scandal. Firstly, the resanding process tends to muddy up the water and produce thousands of dead fish which wash up ashore, putting off the very tourists it’s meant to attract. Discovering this early on, Trebeaux moved his sand dredging operation to the Bahamas, shipping the sand back to Miami. But it had the same environment-destroying impact in the island and when this was reported on the news and even prompted a BBC investigation, he was forced to shut it down, too (p.32).

Then Trebeaux took some bad advice from a contact who told him he could use sand from a ‘burrow pit’ (something I think we would call a gravel pit) on the edge of the Everglades. This Trebeaux proceeds to excavate and ship to the beach behind the Royal Pyrenees hotel. But the sand from this source turns out to be not only hard and sharp but to contain recycled asphalt and even broken glass! Soon after it is laid, tourists start cutting themselves to shreds and trade to the hotel plummets.

And this is where the mob comes in because the Royal Pyrenees hotel is owned by them and managed by their man, Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola. This is why Big Noogie had hired Zeto to kidnap Trebeaux. But Zeto screws up and kidnaps Lane, who quickly makes it clear he’s the wrong guy. Nonetheless, Zeto and Merry tie and gag Lane while they ponder what to do with him, Zeto casually weighing the pros and cons of killing him.

Long story short, after failing to bump Len off on a boat, Zeto reluctantly agrees to take him along with them when they have another go at bumping and grabbing the actual Martin Trebeaux the next day and, during the confusion, Lane manages to wriggle out the window of the car he’s being held in and run off, eventually finding a payphone and calling his boss in LA.

Buck’s disastrous gig

Now the important thing about Coolman being mistakenly kidnapped is that he provides a vital psychological support to his TV star Buck Nance when the latter does his ‘gigs’. Buck has a guitarist strumming along in the background but it is Lane’s reassuring presence just offstage that gets him through the gigs, giving him confidence beforehand and prompting him if he dries, as he tells good ole boy stories and jokes to his redneck audience.

So Buck turns up for his ‘gig’ at a bar called the Parched Pirate on Duvall Street in Key West and, without either the guitar player (whose absence is unexplained) or Lane (who we have seen being kidnapped en route to the gig) Buck’s set goes disastrously awry. Instead of the usual stories he panics, forgets his script and ad libs some off colour jokes from Wisconsin about blacks and then about gays. This turns out to be a terrible idea because the Parched Pirate is actually a gay hangout.

The upshot is there’s a riot, Buck is grabbed, beaten up, has his shirt ripped off and his long grey beard forcibly chopped off with scissors before he can flee for his life, ducking through a maze of back alleys and eventually hiding out in the tangled branches of a huge banyan tree where he stays, thoroughly razzled, for the entire night.

During the ruckus he has lost his wallet and his mobile phone and he looks like crap. He has been reduced to bum status.

Enter Yancy

Believe it or not, this is where Yancy comes in, because next day he’s called to a restaurant run by Irv Clipowski (‘a long-distance runner with a goatee which he dyed goosewhite’), which generally has good hygiene standards, but where they’ve found hanks of grey hair in the quinoa vat. The hair has apparently been chucked there overnight and the reader quickly realises it’s the remnants of Buck Nance’s beard, forcibly cut off him by an enraged crowd and chucked through an open window.

Yancy clears up the sample of rogue hair cuttings and orders the restaurant owners to do a thorough deep clean of their kitchen.

As it happens, later that day, Rogelio Burton, a friend of Yancy’s who’s still a detective on the Monroe police force, mentions that a big fuss has kicked off about this TV star, Buck Nance, who’s gone missing and when, that evening, Yancey watches a few old episodes of Bayou Brethren out of boredom, he suddenly realises the grey hair in the quinoa looks identical with Buck Nance’s grey beard in the TV show. Huh. A clue!

Now, Yancy is bored with his job and pissed off because his long-term girlfriend, smart Dr Rosa Campesino, formerly of the Miami morgue (her job when he met her), now working in a hospital emergency room, has abruptly announced that she’s going to Europe, to Norway, without him. It feels like a snub and they part at the airport on bad terms. At a loose end, on impulse, Yancy decides, what the hell, he’ll have a go at tracking down this missing TV star.

Fallout from Buck’s bad gig

Meanwhile, the president of Platinum Artists Management, John David Ampergrodt, known as Amp, is going nuts because Nance’s homophobic, racist jokes were recorded by some of his audience and immediately posted on YouTube. Not only that, but Buck’s unhinged girlfriend, Miracle, becomes convinced that the missing Buck has run off with some other woman and so hacks into the Bayou Brethren‘s Facebook page, adding a photo of Osama bin Laden and making it look like Buck is jokily comparing his own beard with the famous terrorist’s.

So Amp finds himself in the midst of a major PR disaster, when Zeto lets Lane rings up desperately begging for a ransom to be paid so that mad Zeto doesn’t waste him (while Zeto and Merry are still holding him). You can see why Amp doesn’t immediately believe Lane or grasp the seriousness of the situation. 12 hours later Lane rings from a roadside phone box to say he’s managed, as we’ve seen, to free himself from his kidnappers but, again, Amp is too distracted by the crisis in hand to take him seriously.

(There’s a running thread that Lane has a wife, Rachel, who is planning to divorce him and is currently ‘revenge fucking’ her way through all the men in Los Angeles, notably Lane’s boss John David Ampergrodt, who routinely meets her at the Wilshire Hotel for quick cunnilingus and boning sessions [p.144]. We are given graphic descriptions of comic moments when Amp has his head rammed firmly between Rachel’s parted thighs and is slurping away when his phone goes off with an important business call. The hard life of a Hollywood agent, eh. Lane has a divorce lawyer working for him and trying to discredit Rachel. The lawyer’s name is Smegg [p.278].)

Pause for breath

So: what’s going to happen to Martin Trebeaux, who by now Zeto and Merry have successfully kidnapped? Where’s Buck Nance hiding out and what’s going to happen to him, now beaten up, penniless and beardless? Will Yancy manage to find Buck or will he get dragged into the whole Zeto-Merry-Trebeaux storyline? Will there be a happy resolution to Yancy and Rosa Campesino’s relationship, which seems to have fallen on hard times? Stay tuned, folks.

Main plot developments

There are so many complicated plot ramifications and complexifications it’s hard to keep track. Here are the highlights:

Zeto electrocutes himself trying to adjust the plug on the cable to an electric car he’s stolen, so he’s out of the story quite early on.

Trebeaux is handed over to Big Noogie who, with a hardass assistant (‘the man with the ivory toothpick’), attaches surgical clamps to Trebeaux’s ‘nutsack’ (scrotum) and then dangles him from a local railway bridge until Trebeaux admits the sand he rebeached the Grand Pyrenees with was sub-standard and promises to do everything in his power to fix it.

Merry astonishes Lane by bumping into Lane a few days after he escaped from her and Zeto and calmly asking if she can move into his motel room with him. Merry is a splendid fictional creation, a constant fount of unexpected and unpredictable behaviour. She refuses to conform to any conventions, kidnapping someone one minute then wanting to be their friend. She concocts extravagant and hilarious lies at the drop of a hat. After a brief period with Lane she then arrives on Yancy’s doorstep (see below). There’s a funny piece of dialogue where she explains to Yancy that she doesn’t regard herself as a criminal at all, but more of a performance artist (p.93).

Brock and Deb I need to mention Yancy’s neighbours. After he drove away the property developer who was trying to build on the lot adjacent to his house in the previous novel, the lot has now been purchased by a shyster lawyer, Brock Richardson, and his good-looking spoiled fiancée, Debbie. As with the previous owner, Yancy embarks on a campaign to drive them away, which includes drunkenly firing his rifle at beer bottles he lobs into the air close to the border fence when Brock and Deb are around. In a later gag he gets a buddy of his that he plays poker with to pretend to be a state archaeologist and ‘discover’ ancient teeth on the site, which he claims must have belonged to the Calusa native Americans who occupied this land thousands of years ago. The fake archaeologist immediately declares that all building works will have to be suspended while the site is fully excavated, much to Brock’s fury (p.177).

Pitrolux Worth mentioning that one of the book’s dozen or so storylines focuses on Brock’s role as the lawyer for a series of class actions he’s managing against a new wonder-product named ‘Pitrolux’. This is a combination underarm deoderant which also cures erectile dysfunction i.e. gives men boners which last for hours. Despite what he knows about its ill effects, Brock himself starts taking Pitrolux and his rock-hard, everlasting erections rekindle his love life with Debs, until he starts to suffer from the same side effects as all his clients, namely a) the erections won’t go away, last for hours and become really painful, and b) the growth of unsightly skin tags or polyps in the shape of tiny penises in his armpit, which Debs discovers and freak her out.

The diamond ring A simple incident occurs early on which turns out to become central to the plot. Yancy spies Deb poking around in the as-yet-unbuilt-on plot. He jumps over the fence and aggressively questions her. Turns out she has lost the massive engagement ring Brock gave her which cost him $200,000. She’s pissed off because it was slightly too big for her finger, Brock having originally bought it for an earlier, tubbier fiancée. Yancy pretends to help until Debs gets fed up and leaves, at which point Yancy picks it up from where it was lying concealed in long grass.

Yancy stores the monster ring in a tub of hummus in his fridge and what happens is, through various coincidences, a series of bad guys hear about the missing ring and come to pay Yancy visits. Thus, at one point Trebeaux and Richardson meet by complete accident in a bar and both mouth off about their woes. But when Richardson mentions the missing $200,000 ring, and that he thinks Yancy has stolen it, Trebeaux passes the news along to Big Noogie in a bid to impress his new mafioso boss.

Big Noogie immediately decides the ring will be just perfect for his son to give to his fiancée, and sends a couple of hard men round to Yancy’s to intimidate or, if necessary, torture its whereabouts out of him. They only have to start slashing up Yancy’s sofa before Yancy gives in and hands it over.

Merry moves in By this point half a dozen other things have happened. For a start, when Lane moves out of his motel into a smarter hotel, Merry has nowhere to stay and so turns up on Yancy’s doortstep. To his own surprise he takes a keen liking to her, for her independent, free-spirited sassiness. She’s great fun, an outrageous liar and flirt and fantasist. Some of her extended riffs are very funny and help to make this, at least in the first half, arguably Hiaasen’s funniest novel (for example, page 166).

‘You don’t know what to do with me, do you? I love that!’ (p.257)

There’s also broad comedy when Yancy’s estranged girlfriend, Dr Campesino, phones from Oslo and every time it seems, by bad luck, to be Merry who answers the phone. One time by bursting into the bathroom where Yancy is having a shower so that she answers the call from Rosa but then hands it over to an obviously naked Yancy (p.148). Yancy finds this (understandably) difficult to explain and Rosa for her part announces that she wants to stay in Norway.

Comedic though the shape of this storyline is, it contains a very serious social point. Rosa has worked all her life in either the Miami morgue or Miami emergency ward and she’s had enough. She’s snapped. She’s had a sort of breakdown. She just can’t face the sound of endless police sirens from morning to night, and she can’t face any more the task of patching up children – children – with extensive gunshot wounds. On one of their long, difficult calls Rosa tells Yancy how many murders there have been in Oslo that year. The answer: one. Two farmers got into a drunken fight and one hit the other with a shovel a bit harder than he meant to. Guns are illegal in Norway, so there is no gun crime, compared to:

a place as ethnically diverse and gun crazy as Florida. (p.298)

It’s a serious point about the stupidity of America’s gun laws and its out-of-control epidemic of violence and I read it on the same day there was a mass shooting in the very same Miami Rosa is talking about, Hiaasen’s Miami.

‘These people [the Norwegians] have evolved in a positive direction,’ Rosa said. ‘Americans are heading the other direction.’ (p.377)

Anyway, the fact that Merry seems to have moved in with him explains why she is present when Big Noogie’s goons arrive and why she helps to persuade Yancy to give in and hand over the diamond. Mind you, Yancy is easily persuaded because he is, at the time, lying on his sofa recovering from a bad knife wound to the gut. Knife wound?

Yes, because there is an entirely separate plotline which only really gets going in the middle of the book but then comes to dominate it. This rotates around a redneck cretin named Benjamin ‘Blister’ Krill who is a fanatical fan of the Bayou Brethren, so fanatical that he has a massive tattoo inked across his shoulders reading HAIL CAPTAIN COCK.

When Buck climbs down from the banyan tree the morning after the riot in the bar he sets about shoplifting a new shirt and hat and shades etc. But Blister Krill recognises his hero and tries to engage him in conversation. When Buck repeatedly rebuffs him (p.200), idiot Blister gets furious, whips out his knife and frogmarches Buck through the tourist crowds in Key West, out to the dock and onto a little put-put boat which he drives out to a knackered old boat he owns, a cabin cruiser named Wet Nurse. Here he handcuffs Buck to a bunk in the cabin until he learns some manners.

From this point onwards Blister becomes a sort of daemon ex machina, the wild card driving the plot. Things escalate when Blister, inspired by the kind of racist language Buck used at his ill-fated gig and which has triggered an outpouring of redneck bigotry across the internet, spots a foreign-looking guy on the tacky touristy Conch Train which weaves through Old Key West, goes up to him and starts yelling Islamophobic abuse.

This poor man, Abdul-Halim Shamoon, is from New York where he has a family and children and runs a harmless electronics retail shop (p.126). He’s loaded up on tacky souvenirs which he’s planning to take home for the kids when a rough redneck confronts him and starts spitting insults in his face. So Shamoon tries to get off the train while it’s still moving but falls awkwardly onto a tacky porcelain gewgaw he’s bought which pierces his sternum and punctures his aorta. There and then he bleeds to death all over his tropical tourist shirt and souvenir knick-knacks. Blister runs off into the crowd.

Hiaasen’s early novels feature some outrageously grotesquely violent incidents, such as the hitman who gets a dead pitbull attached to his arm in Double Whammy and the angry New Yorker who crucifies a crooked property developer to a satellite dish in Stormy Weather. Later novels try but, I think, generally fail to match the first fine careless insanity of these early incidents. Having Shamoon fall on some tourist gewgaws and bleed to death isn’t outrageous enough to be blackly funny. Instead it feels genuinely tragic and sad.

Anyway, Blister runs off, but some bystanders provide identification of sorts and the ‘murder’ of Shamoom gets mixed up with the ongoing disappearance of TV star Buck Nance in a whole load of complicated and twisted ways.

Yancy, bored and hoping to impress his ex-boss by solving the crime, picks up various clues which lead him to Blister in his crappy apartment, where he’s barely begun questioning him (with absolutely no authority; he is no longer a detective and the head of Monroe’s Police force has emphatically told him to stop interfering) when Blister takes a ‘spazzy’ swipe at him with a knife, not stabbing him but raking a cut across his stomach.

Luckily enough Yancy was accompanied by Merry, who manhandled him out the apartment, into their car and ran all the red lights to get home to a hospital ER in 6 minutes.

Being the tough guy hero of a thriller / obstinate failed cop and stoner (take your pick) Yancy refuses to stay in hospital overnight after he’s been stitched up, and insists on going home where he can lie on his own sofa and get pleasantly stoned while Merry tends to him. Which is precisely the moment Big Noogie’s hoods choose to arrive and threaten to turn over his house till they find the $200,000 engagement ring.

Complicated, isn’t it? There’s a lot more. Blister then kidnaps Lane Coolman as well as Buck and ends up with both of them handcuffed to bunks in the cabin of his rancid old motor yacht. The only way the two men can persuade Blister to let them go is with a plan which goes beyond any bounds of sanity or probability: the three concoct the idea that Blister will join the cast of Bayou Brethren as Buck’s long lost brother. It’s Blister’s idea, and he comes up with a long and extravagant backstory to justify his sudden appearance in the show. Lane is one tough, cynical agent and, despite having been kidnapped and handcuffed to a bunk in a rancid old boat, he can actually see Blister’s plot twist working.

The result is that Blister releases them from their handcuffs, takes them back to the mainland, Lane calls Amp at the agency’s office in Los Angeles, pitches the story and, to the reader’s increasing disbelief, Amp flies out to meet the (by now genuinely psychopathic and dangerous) Blister in person.

This storyline now spins way out of control leading to a scene where Blister is taken for a spin in Amp’s private jet along with his common law wife, Mona, and Lane and Buck as they drink champagne and discuss the finer points of the contract he’s going to be signed to. All is going well until Amp’s big black bodyguard, Prawney, makes a grab for Blister’s Glock semi-automatic which he’s been carrying round for the past hundred pages. The gun goes off, shooting Prawney through the cheeks and in the chest. Amp orders the pilot to turn the plane round and land back in Key West. Well, as business meetings go, that wasn’t a great success.

Trebeaux and Juvenile

Now he’s come all this way south to sort out the sand situation, Big Noogie likes it in Key West. After Trebeaux had been hung off the bridge and made the wise decision to co-operate fully with the mob, he’d been flown to New York to meet the heads of the Calzone family who made him an offer he couldn’t refuse i.e. took over his company wholesale (p.139). On the way Trebeaux had introduced Noogie to a scam he’d never heard of before, which was to get hold of a dog and dress it in a hazard jacket and pretend to be disabled so as to blag a better seat on the plane. Americans appear to call this a ‘service dog’ (p.410). When they fly back to Key West together, Trebeaux wants nothing more to do with the dog and the Noogie finds himself looking after it and slowly getting to like going for regular walks through the tourist crowds of Old Key West and along the beach. Yes, life here is nice and relaxing.

Anyway, Trebeaux is still orientating himself in his dangerous new situation vis-a-vis the mafia, and is unpacking in his hotel room when there’s a knock on the door and Big Noogie’s mistress, a big florid flake nicknamed Juveline (a name she acquired when a New York cop couldn’t spell ‘juvenile’ on her arrest sheet) walks into his room and asks whether he fancies a mind-blowing fuck. Trebeaux says yes and they go for it. Soon she has become his mistress, two-timing the Big Noogie.

Trebeaux knows this is a very bad idea but is turned on by the sheer outrageousness of the situation and they keep having regular sex, Juveline explaining that Big Noogie is such a big, fat, middle-aged guy that he isn’t that interested in it. Also, Noogie doesn’t get jealous if she disappears for days on end to her relatives’ houses or shopping and such, which gives her plenty of opportunity to be unfaithful.

This plotline reaches a peak when Trebeaux tries to pull a scam on the Big Noogie, bullshitting that he has heavyweight connections in Havana Cuba who will do a deal to supply world-class pink sand from Cuban beaches to make the Royal Pyrenees beach the envy of Florida. Unwisely, Trebeaux lets Juveline talk him into taking her on the 2-day jaunt to Havana.

Only trouble is that Juveline talks in her sleep and one night cries out ‘Harder, Marty, harder’, much to the surprise of Big Noogie lying next to her, who instantly realises what’s going on (p.389). Thus, when Trebeaux has landed and made himself at home in Havana, and goes to meet Juveline off a later flight, it is not Juveline he sees walking through passport control but the same hardman who applied the surgical clamps to his nutsack and helped dangle him off the bridge. Ah. Oh. Bad. In fact Trebeaux’s body is discovered a few days later, buried on a beach. So, that’s the end of him, then.

Funny

Razor Girls may well be Hiaasen’s funniest novel, meaning the one which made me laugh out loud the most. For two reasons: Yancy develops a really buddy-buddy routine with fellow detective Rogelio, which leads to lots of snappy repartee:

YANCY: ‘The human bloodhound is what they call me.’
ROGERIO: ‘A pain in the sphincter is what they call you.’ (p.87)

OK, so it’s not Oscar Wilde, but in the context of a fast-moving, American crime comedy caper, and in the context of the sustained backchat between the pair, it’s good, it works.

But the main reason is for the indefatigably unpredictable behaviour of fantasist and survivor Merry Mansfield. Almost everything she says and does is wonderfully confident, bluff and canny. Unquenchably amoral. At several points Yancy realises it would be wise to tell her to move out and make a break with her, but she’s just so much fun to have around.

It was hard to picture an even-keeled relationship with a person who took her last name from a dead movie star and and crashed automobiles half-naked for a living. (p.284)

Men

Once again, as in many previous Hiaasen novels, the entire male sex comes in for sustained criticism, yet again, for their pitiful addiction to sex. Flash most men some boob or a whiff of your panties and they turn into drooling slaves. Most of this comes from the mouth if Merry, inventor of the shaving pubes scam, who has the lowest possible opinion of pathetic men.

Merry said, ‘Men. I swear.’ (p.44)
‘Men are so pitiful.’ (p.93)
‘his poor little pecker…’ (p.119)
‘You men.’ (p.134)
He said, ‘Yeah, I know. Us men, we’re pitiful.’ ‘Totally, Andrew.’ (p.190)
‘Men, I swear.’ (p.285)
She had had ‘a lifetime of being disappointed by men.’ (p.360)
‘Men are the worst.’ (p.364)
‘Men are so freakin’ predictable.’ (p.415)

One touch on the pecker and men become ‘immune to rational thought’ (p.388). I wonder if Hiaasen made the same kind of sustained criticism of women or Jews or blacks or Muslims, whether his liberal readers would take it all in good spirit and laughingly accept the sustained barrage of negative stereotypes.

American slang

Hiaasen’s novels are notable not only for their very dense plots, overflowing with colourful characters and garish incidents, but for the aggressive ‘attitude’ of the narrator himself, who freely uses street slang and swearwords to describe his characters and their doings, and liberally sprinkles the text with those handy terms for things and actions which Americans just seem to have and we Brits don’t. I found this novel particularly rich in new terminology, in fact I became addicted to collecting them.

app = short for appetiser. ‘His calamari app.’
baggie = a brand of plastic bag, Yancy uses them for stashing mank he finds on his restaurant inspections, such as rodent ‘scat’
baked = stoned
to ball = to fuck cf. to bone. ‘Is she still balling that dickface Drucker?’ (p.370)
to bang = to fuck, cf, to ball, to bone. ‘Don’t bang a stranger.’ (p.404)
bank = big money. ‘You saved the agency some serious bank.’ (p.63)
a beat-down = a severe beating. ‘So I can cancel your beat-down?’ (p.414)
berserk-o = adjective meaning wild, crazy. ‘The beserk-o side of the place [Miami] was basically all you saw, if you were a cop or a coroner.’ (p.190)
to bitch someone out = nag someone, generally a woman bitching out a man (p.252)
blow smoke = to bullshit, make something up. ‘… that didn’t mean Trebeaux wasn’t blowing smoke.’ (p.182)
to bone = to fuck
bonehead = ‘A stubborn, thickheaded and determined person that doesn’t think things through before acting upon them’
boner = erection (p.374)
to brace = to meet, to confront (p.393)
a bumblefuck = insult
Bumfuck = generic term for inconsequential settlement in the middle of nowhere, as in Bumfuck Wisconsin or any of the other anonymous mid-Western states.
a bump and grab = a type of criminal scam: one crim bumps their car into the back of the victims car; when the victim stops, they’re hijacked / kidnapped
to bus tables = to be a waiter
buy the farm = to die. ‘… a biker who’d bought the farm at Mile Marker 19.’ (p.304)
buzzed = adjective meaning ‘stoned’
to can = to fire. ‘No wonder the sheriff canned your ass.’ (p.188)
chunk-muffin = fat person (p.36)
cockhead = variation on dickhead, an idiot, an annoying or vexatious person (p.367)
cold one = a beer (p.306)
cooch = pussy, fanny, vulva. ‘…shaving cream all over her cooch…’ (p.260)
to crack the blinds = of closed blinds, to prise them apart to spy through them (p.327)
courtesy fuck = a guy buys a woman dinner, chocolates etc, she owes him a courtesy fuck
cracker = term of contempt for poor whites, particularly of Georgia and Florida, dating back to the American Revolution, and derives from the cracked corn which was their staple diet
to dick around = to waste time (p.309)
dickface = loser, idiot (p.370)
dickweed = an asshole or idiot so pernicious they are like a weed (p.384)
dirtbag = person who is committed to an alternative lifestyle to the point of abandoning employment and other social norms i.e. washing
to do = have sex with. ‘I’d do her.’
Dogpatch = name of a fictional poor rural community in the U.S., especially in the South, whose inhabitants are unsophisticated and have little education. Hence its use as an adjective: ‘A Dogpatch moniker like Clee Roy should have stuck in his head.’ (p.188)
a doobie or doob = a joint, cannabis cigarette (p.328)
dopp kit = small bag made for transporting toiletries in a convenient and portable manner
douche, short for douche bag = ‘a dick, an asshole, a jerk, whose crass behaviour has led them to be compared to a cleansing product for vaginas.’
a dust bunny = ball of dust and fluff (p.326)
dweeb = abbreviation of ‘dick with eyebrows’, implying the person is a walking penis
flake = an unreliable person; someone who agrees to do something, but never follows through (p.311)
four-top = table for four in a diner
to frog = to punch someone in the upper arm or chest with the middle knuckle partially extended to inflict a sharp concentrated blow
fry cartons = generic name for the kind of flimsy, grease-stained cardboard cartons you get takeaway fast food in
fuckwhistle = idiot, moron, one who lacks the most basic common sense to make correct decisions
fuckweasel = person who behaves in a sneaky manner to create favourable circumstances for themselves at the expense of others
gank = to steal. ‘I think the asshole who lives next door might’ve ganked it.’ (p.181)
gas up = fill a car with petrol (p.346)
goatfuck = a monumental screwup. (p.410)
goober = term of affection for a lovable, silly, lighthearted person: ‘…a crew from ET [was] interviewing some sunburned goober’ (p.97)
googan = a person wearing trendy sports clothing that is completely clueless in the ways of fishing
goomah = a mafioso’s mistress
grab-ass = the act of wrestling or chasing another person with the intention to touch or squeeze that person’s butt
a grow house = a room or rooms or larger space where marijuana plants are grown (p.245)
a hardass = someone who takes no shit off anyone, someone who expects to get their own way and won’t take no for an answer; dominating (p.364)
hard chargers = party animals. ‘Rogelio didn’t screw around on his wife, never stayed out late with the hard chargers.’ (p.82)
hardcore = adjective meaning serious, intense, relentless. ‘This judge is hardcore.’ (p.370)
honcho = a person in charge of some group or function. ‘The network honchos…’ (p.247)
horn, on the = on the phone
horndog = a guy or girl that is always horny. ‘He couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was a hopelessly shallow horndog.’ (p.284)
iced = adjective meaning killed or completed, depending on context. ‘I’ll have [the contract] iced by the next time we walk.’ (p.238)
an innie = belly buttons come in two shapes, innies and outies
to jack = jack something or somebody (for something) to steal something from somebody, especially something small or of low value (p.322)
jackoff = a stupid, irritating, or contemptible person
jag = ‘To “be on a jag” or “go on a jag” means to be completely unrestrained, whether you’re on a drinking jag or a crying jag.’
jazzed = expression of extreme happiness. ‘I am totally jazzed to hear your voice.’ (p.238)
jewels = penis and testicles. ‘I mean she’ll kill me, cut off my fuckin’ jewels and kill me all over again.’ (p.90)
jizz = semen (p.268)
Johnson = penis (p.374)
junk = cock and balls. ‘Next she made him dunk his junk in a bucket of ice cubes…’ (p.287)
landing zone = woman’s genitals (p.331)
look fly = look smart, well presented (p.359)
mash = press hard. ‘He mashed the Lobby button half a dozen times…’ (p.309)
meathead = overmuscular man, too much time at the gym, can’t string a sentence together (p.292)
meat hog = muscle i.e. goons i.e. hired enforcers (p.322)
mick = Irish (noun or adjective) (p.373)
mo-fo = adjective, short for ‘motherfucking’, suggesting ‘big’ (p.180)
a mope = a person of any race or culture who presents themselves as uneducated and possibly criminal either by behaviour or clothes
a mouthbreather = a retard: someone so stupid they never learned to breathe through their nose
nooner = a sex session during a lunch break or around noon; made famous by Al Bundy of ‘Married with Children’. ‘She promised him that she was done with payback nooners at the Wlshire.’ (p.409)
nosebleed heels = heels so high your head is in the upper atmosphere, hence the nosebleed
a numbnut = someone who is a constant source of trouble, an individual who screws up, or constant makes mistakes
nut sack = scrotum; male characters in Hiaasen novels are always getting something bad happen to their nut sacks, in this novel Trebeaux has some surgical clamps (hemostats) attached to his balls
nuts = testicles
on the lam = on the run, very old slang
a peckerwood = used by Afro-Americans to describe a rural white southerner, usually poor, undereducated or otherwise ignorant and bigoted (p.381)
to peel out = to drive or go away. ‘Yancy grinned at the sight of the Taurus peeling out.’ (p.190)
to peel rubber = to accelerate an automobile very rapidly (p.364)
piece = gun (p.370)
poon = woman’s genitals. Short for ‘poontang‘, ditto (p.308)
a pop tab = the flip top on drink cans
to pop a tent = to have an erection that shows through your trousers, or erects a bedsheet
pussy hound = ‘a dude who’s main goal in life is balling ladies.’
rearview, to put someone in your rearview = get over someone, move on (p.302)
rebar = reinforcing steel used as rods in concrete.
revenge fuck = joins mercy fuck, courtesy fuck and sportfucking as categories of fuck. ‘Rachel was the undoubted queen of the revenge fuck in a town with many contenders for the title.’ (p.42)
the root prong = of a tooth (p.178)
salvor = ‘a person engaged in salvage of a ship or items lost at sea’
sawbuck = $10
scat = poo; ‘rodent scat’ (p.84)
schlep = noun: a long and tiresome journey; verb: to make a long and tiresome journey. Yiddish (p.373)
to screak = to make a harsh shrill noise : screech
shit-bird = a completely useless individual who is unaware of their own complete uselessness
shit-heel = adjective. ‘…his shit-heel brothers…’ (p.221)
shitkicker = insult
shitstick = insult
shitsucker = insult
shitweasel = person who is sly, sneaky, and opportunistic; someone who is looking to slip their way into a shitty situation and make it even shittier
a shucker = someone who shucks oysters, clams, corn, walnuts etc out of their shells
sick = adjective meaning really good, cool or very impressive
a slim jim = a tool used to open doors on cars, by ‘pulling up’ the lock within the door, hence the verb, to slim jim a car. ‘… content in mid-life to be slim-jimming cars…’ (p.275)
slut puppy = person who uses their adorable looks to attract a partner or partners for a casual sexual encounter
to snitch out = to betray. ‘A million bucks says you wouldn’t never snitch out your wife.’ (p.358)
to spazz out = sudden, fast movement(s); to go mental (p.373)
spazzy = adjective meaning clumsy or inept, with an overtone of demented or mad. ‘Benny Krill had made one spazzy swing with the blade…’ (p.192)
to stare down = verb: to look fixedly at someone in a hostile or intimidating way till they look away
a stare-down = noun: the act of looking fixedly at someone in a hostile or intimidating way till they look away (p.386)
stoner = someone who regularly smokes marijuana: there are many different types of stoner
swag = merchandise. ‘He promised to donate a truckload of Brethren swag to an auction benefiting the local kids’ baseball league…’ (p.248).
tanked = stoned
tank suit = a woman’s one-piece swimsuit with high-cut legs. Merry wears one (p.300)
a thundercunt = that much more cunty than an ordinary cunt. ‘She’s a major thundercunt.’ (p.62)
toot = to snort, generally cocaine (p.329)
to tune up = to give someone an attitude adjustment by beating their ass. ‘… the man who’d just tuned up Rick and Rod…’ (p.275)
a tweaker = a methamphetamine addict; derives from ‘tweak’ which is a slang name for methamphetamine’. ‘Mr Nance isn’t just some homeless tweaker.’ (p.47)
unspooled = adjective meaning unhinged, bonkers
weed = marijuana aka grass
a whack job = a nutcase, a lunatic
to whale at something = to hit something forcefully and repeatedly
to whorehop = to go from one (loose) woman to another, regardless of consequences (p.61)
to wig out = ‘to suddenly become unnecessarily worried, anxious, upset, or paranoid most often while under the influence of an intoxicating substance, especially marijuana’
wild-ass = adjective meaning crazy. ‘The van driver figured out they were being tailed, and made a wild-ass turn off Flagler Avenue.’ (p.362)
wood = an erect penis; thus ‘to get wood’, ‘to have wood’. Brock Richardson: ‘Never waste good wood.’ (p.288)

Englishisms

In among the blizzard of Americanisms I was struck by a handful of times Hiaasen uses what I think of as very English terms, such as nitwit (p.361) and thick (p.215). I wonder whether he was deliberately trying to include as much novel slang as possible in this book i.e. it has a conscious philological interest over and above the storyline.

Once again I note that the woman riding cowboy style is Hiaasen’s (fictional) sexual position of choice, Merry riding Yancy (p.254) just as Dr Rosa Campasino rode him on the morgue dissection table and, later, in his bath. Appropriate for the general ‘girls on top, men are pitiful’ theme of so many of his novels.

Handy phrases

Sonny Summers wasn’t the sharpest tack on the corkboard. (p.47)
‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’ (p.185)

Credit

Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2016. All references are to the 2019 Vintage Crime paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

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by Simon on June 16, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Books, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 16, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/16/razor-girl-carl-hiaasen/

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).

It’s a lot to process, and the rest of the narrative continues at the same level of fact packedness.
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.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

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by Simon on June 14, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Books, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 14, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/14/bad-monkey-carl-hiaasen/

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen (2010)

The setup

Cherry Pye aged 22 (p.396) is a teenage American pop star. She was born Cheryl Gail Bunterman and her ambitious mother, Janet Bunterman was entering her for into talent competitions from the age of 4. Little Cheryl’s voice was poor but her parents compensated by dressing her in provocative clothes and getting her dance lessons from a local stripper. They changed her name to the soft porn-sounding Cherry Pye when she got her first speaking part in a TV show, aged 14, wearing a ‘dubious buckskin cowgirl outfit’ (p.5).

Cherry was spotted by pop impresario, closet paedophile and owner of Jailbait Records, Maury Lykes, who gave her 3 months of intensive coaching and released her first single on Cherry’s birthday. It wasn’t actually Cherry on the single, she was never going to be able to sing, they hired a backing singer and concentrated on teaching Cherry how to dance and lip sync ahead of the lucrative tours organised to cash in on the record (p.20). Together, Janet and Maury developed a special look to establish Cherry’s brand:

‘The BLS brand’, Maury called it – barely legal slut, the essential ingredient being an air of insouciant fuckability. (p.279)

But as a result of all this, Cherry (‘a simpleton, shallow as a thimble’, p.281), at the age of 22, has developed a major drug habit. More accurately, she scarfs down whatever is on the table, be it alcohol, pills or powders, even birdseed! The narrative opens as Cherry’s lying on the floor of a premier room at the luxury Stefano hotel, throwing up (again), worried over by her team, her mother, a young actor she spent the early evening with, her pair of identical twins PR advisers, Lila and Lucy Lark (backstory p.172), and her tough minder, Lev, formerly of the Israeli Mossad. They’re all waiting for the private paramedics to arrive, take Cherry to a private hospital and pump her stomach. Again.

It’s such a recurrent problem that Cherry’s team have a tried and tested procedure in place. For some time they have been using a body double, a lookalike, an actress who is the spitting image of Cherry, to fill in for her, to make public appearances, to attend celebrity parties and so on, when the real Cherry is either in intensive care or at one of her many visits to a rehab clinic.

This double is named Ann DeLusia, aged 24 (p.212), an aspiring actress. She gets fed up sometimes by being at Cherry’s mother’s beck and call, but the pay is good, $800 a week (p.100).

The other character we’re introduced to early on is a paparazzo, Claude ‘Bang’ Abbott, 44 (p.316), a fat, unhygienic slob, but a very good photographer with deep experience in newspaper work (‘back in the day when newspapers mattered’, p.25) before he switched to the more lucrative career of snapping celebrities’ unguarded moments.

Bang got a hot tip about Cherry’s latest overdose from hotel staff, but was then fooled into following and photographing Ann, the lookalike, who was brought out the back of the hotel on a gurney, rather than the real Cherry who was smuggled out the front into a nondescript car. Only as he closes the ambulance doors, does the paramedic reveal that Bang has been ‘had’, much to his irritation.

Bang is convinced that pretty soon Cherry is going to do an Elvis and expire on the john, overdose or generally ‘buy the farm’ i.e. die young – and he wants to have built up a portfolio of photos of the teen star in all possible states of wastage so that he’ll be in a position to bring out an entire coffee table book recording her sorry descent. Think Marilyn. He’ll make a fortune, be able to retire. That’s the plan. Wasted Cherry is his pension.

Pause to assess

So, as usual, Hiaasen is extremely effective at introducing us very quickly to quite a gallery of characters, each drawn with swift precise descriptions, so that within 40 or so pages an entire corrupt and rancid world has been vividly depicted.

As to the subject matter, regular readers of my blog know that I got progressively more disillusioned by the novels of William Gibson as he turned his back on his science fiction roots and wrote longer and longer books which aspire to be thrillers but also feature characters from fictional rock bands, thrillers in which the lead characters wear ‘cool’ leather jackets, ripped t-shirts and shades. Gibson’s early science fiction novels are strange and mind-expanding, while his later ‘thrillers’, especially in their tiresome depictions of the cool world of rock bands, are lame and clichéd.

So I am, in theory, bored of novels set in the shallow, cynical, drug-addled world of pop stars and celebrities and so, in theory, ought to dislike this one, too. Not only do I have a general aversion to this milieu, but Hiaasen has already set one novel in the corrupt world of contemporary music, Basket Case, centring on the murder of a leading rock star who, it turns out, was done in by his scheming wife. It’s a little disappointing that Hiaasen has resorted to covering the same territory twice in the space of just four novels.

On the other hand, it is still a Hiaasen novel, which means that even when it has hints of being a retread, it is outrageously funny. Instead of Gibson’s po-faced and pretentious world, Hiaasen’s savagely amoral frolics skip along at a cracking pace, the dialogue is razor sharp, the characters continually taking your breath away with their stunning amorality.

Unexpected alliances, arguments and double crosses come thick and fast. It is, in other words, continuously shocking and surprising and very entertaining. The characters aren’t rude, they are off-the-scale amoral, cynical, manipulative, grotesquely threatening and violent.

Take the moment when Maury, frustrated at Cherry’s behaviour, has treated himself to a quiet night in, and invites three underage prostitutes round to tie him to his bed and take turns spanking him with badminton rackets. That’s when he gets a phone call from Chemo, the grotesque bodyguard he’s hired to find Cherry when she disappears (again). Hence Chemo’s call, except Chemo announces that now he’s found the errant pop star, he’s not going to return her unless he gets more money, not least because she taunted him (Chemo) about his grim appearance. Hence the call:

Chemo said, ‘You wanna see her alive, then double my pay.’
‘Unfuckingbelievable.’
‘She called me “Waffle Face”. Normally I’d kill a person for that. Normally I’d stick a frog gig up their nostrils and yank their tongue out by the roots.’ (p.117)

It’s a kind of peak Hiaasen moment: the rancid pedophile agent being tied down and whipped by pubescent girls having to negotiate with a 6 foot nine freak hitman about the ransom for a drug-addled, talentless celebrity.

Presumably there are, somewhere in America, a few people who aren’t cynical, amoral, criminal, corrupt and violent scumbags, who don’t instantly resort to fury and physical violence whenever their slightest whim or plan is thwarted. Presumably. Somewhere. But not in Carl Hiaasen’s novels.

Plot developments

As a result of the Stefano hotel meltdown, Cherry is sent to rehab, again and Janet tells Ann DaLusia she can take a few days off, so she drives down to Florida which she’s always wanted to see. She takes the Card Bridge route onto Key Largo and is whizzing round a corner when she sees a man standing in the middle of the road, swerves and goes careening off the road, through a stand of trees and crashes into a creek. Oops.

Anna wakes up to find herself being tended by Skink, SKINK, Hiaasen’s most popular recurring character, the semi-deranged former Florida governor-turned-eco-vigilante, complete with plastic shower cap, long grey braids and dazzling smile.

As in each of the books he appears in, the author gives us a slightly new version of Skink’s backstory as well as a variation on his motivation, namely the depthless outrage he feels at the rape of the wild countryside he grew up in:

The cherished wild places of his childhood had vanished under cinder blocks and asphalt, and so, too, had the rest of the state been transformed – transformed by greedy suckworms disguised as upright citizens. From swampy lairs Skink would strike back whenever an opportunity arose, and the message was never ambiguous. (p.197)

But it doesn’t do to sentimentalise Skink. He is a violent vigilante. At one point he’s hiding out under a pier down on a beach late at night and happens to hear two men manhandling a drunk woman down onto the sand and then knocking her down with a view to raping her. Skink moves in and the paramedics who are later called to the scene are impressed to discover that each of the men has a compound fracture in every limb (p.239). Skink did that, not just beat them up but carefully broke their bones. We are told that from time to time he eats the pets of disagreeable people (p.262). He ties up a Haitian cabbie and steals his cab when it suits him (p.264). He is not a sweetheart. He is genuinely dangerous.

Having pulled her from her crashed car, Skink takes her off to his remote camp in the forest, tends to Ann’s light injuries and feeds her some roadkill alligator tail, which isn’t as disgusting as she first fears. But when she asks to be taken back to civilisation, Skink explains that first she has to help him with his latest scam. This is to hold up a bus full of corrupt and wealthy investors who are engaged in yet another of the countless crooked and environmentally ruinous property developments which Hiaasen’s novels are full of.

Skink tells Ann to step into the road and flag down the bus carrying the developers from the airport to a private hotel facility. Then he leaps out of the bushes and onto the bus terrorises them with a gun, and tying the most corrupt of them, Jackie Sebago, to a tree with a sea urchin stuffed down his pants and rammed into his ‘nutsack’.

By the time the cops arrive, Ann is ready with her story that her car crashed then she doesn’t remember anything till stumbling onto the bus. The cops believe her, let her go, and Ann returns to civilisation pretty dazed by this weird encounter.

Meanwhile, at the Rainbow Bend rehab centre Cherry has met Methane Drudge, drummer with fictional band the Poon Pilots (p.51) (shades of William Gibson and fictional rock bands with lame names).

Together they break out of the rehab grounds, scrambling over the five foot wall. Methane twists his ankle landing, and limps badly as he follows Cherry to the road. Here they discover a car parked and Cherry knocks on the window. The electric window winds down to reveal none other than Cherry’s fanatical paparazzo devotee, Bang Abbott, who is amazed at Cherry’s sudden apparition and staggered when she asks him to drive her to the airport. There is some typically brutal comedy when lame Methane knocks on the back door window asking to be admitted to the car but Cherry blithely tells Abbott to drive off and leave him behind.

Not only that but when they get to the airport and she whistles up her private jet, Cherry impulsively invites Abbott onto the plane to accompany her. So the excited fat man grabs his several cases of expensive cameras and jogs up the steps. And not only that, but half way across America (flying from California to Florida) bored, Cherry whips off her jeans and straddles him, presumably pulling out his pecker, because they have sex. It only last for four minutes but leaves Abbott seriously dazed and confused. (Women on top, riding a man in the ‘cowgirl position’, is Hiaasen’s favourite fictional sexual position, it recurs in most of the novels, most memorably enacted by Dr Rosa Campesino on a steel mortuary table in Bad Monkey.)

This brief intimacy doesn’t stop Abbott, when Cherry falls asleep, getting his camera out and knocking off some shots of Cherry lying asleep and snoring and unbuttoned and sprawled across her plane seat. These will prove excellent photos for the photo-biography he’s planning of her decline and fall.

However, all this comes to naught because, when they land in Miami, her chauffeur-driven car is waiting, the driver loads all the bags, including all Abbott’s cameras, and then, just as with Methane, she simply drives off before Abbott can get into the car, leaving Abbott stamping and fuming on the airport tarmac. Later, with an actor she’s picked up at an upscale nightclub, she reviews Abbott’s photos and blithely deletes them one by one.

Meanwhile, there is a significant development on the bodyguard front. The novel opens with young Cherry being bodyguarded by a tough goon named Lev, who is ex-Mossad. But goaded by Cherry’s mom one too many times, he quits, thus giving her manager, Maury Lykes, a headache about finding a replacement. Luckily he knows a country and western star, Presley Aaron, who went way off the rails for a period of addiction but turned his life around and is now fit and buff and recording again. The turnaround was managed by his brothers who hired a tough minder to guard him. It is this minder which Maury now hires to look after Cherry. She needs some tough love.

And as soon as Maury and Janet Bunterman are introduced to him in a nightclub, the seasoned Hiaasen reader immediately realises that Cherry’s new bodyguard is none other than the freakish sociopath nicknamed ‘Chemo‘ who we first met in novel 3 of the series, 1989’s Skin Tight.

Chemo, as you might imagine with Hiaasen, has a very detailed and freakish backstory (summarised on page 252 ff.). Suffice to say that Chemo stands 6 foot 9 inches tall, his face was fried in a freak accident during some minor plastic surgery (the dermatologist had a stroke and instead of excising a small growth, ended up applying the electric doodad across his whole face so that his face now looks like a bowl of rice krispies). Which explains why Chemo is in a permanently very bad mood. Most bizarre of all, after he had his hand bitten off by a barracuda in Skin Tight, he replaced it not with a prosthetic attachment, but with a battery-powered strimmer or weed whacker as the Americans call it.

Comedy

All this and more has been conveyed in less than the first hundred pages. The forms of Hiaasen’s comedy can be categorised into half a dozen or so levels or types:

Plots

Most obvious is the overall shape of the plots where grotesque and preposterous, farcically improbable events take place, such as the body double actress getting caught up in Skink’s hijacking of a coach full of property investors.

Characters

The characters themselves are often so grotesque as to be funny in themselves, such as the famously strong but half-deranged eco-vigilante Skink or the strimmer-handed, beanpole bodyguard Chemo. Although it is noticeable that this pair, the most garish and entertaining of all the characters in the book, were invented decades earlier (in 1987 and 1989, respectively).

Universal corruption

On a less extreme level, it is funny the way the narrator describes the semi-criminal or immoral activities of his characters, activities which most of us would regard as beyond the pale, but which the narrator mentions with a deliberate casualness designed to emphasise the rancid, rotten, corrupt and immoral culture he is dissecting. Such as the throwaway remark that Maury Lykes is not only a successful pop impresario but has a ‘criminal fondness for underage girls’ (p.20) and the later scene, only a few paragraphs long, in which he arranges for three underage girls who he’s promised parts in his next show, to come to his house, tied him with parachute cords to his bed and take turns spanking him with badminton rackets to the sound of the Disney track, ‘We’re all in this together‘ (p.116). That really is a standout scene.

On a quieter note, it is so casually said you barely notice it when Cherry tells the young actor Tanner Dane Keefe that he wants her to accompany her on her upcoming tour because: ‘I don’t like screwing strangers, especially roadies.’ (p.119) The implication being that, obviously, she has to be screwing someone, almost continuously, right, she’d just prefer if it was someone she knew or liked. That level of moral abandonment.

Compared to that level of debauchery it seems fairly bland, but nonetheless way out of most people’s orbit of experience, when the narrator explains that Janet put ups with her husband, Ned’s, long-standing bisexual affair with another married couple, a) because he’s good with Cherry’s earnings and b) because she herself ‘is sweatily involved’ with her 30-year-old tennis coach (p.68).

Everyone in Hiaasen novels is unfaithful. In fact it’s not clear that the idea of faithfulness exists any more. Why get married if you don’t want to have affairs?

Amorality

All the characters casually demonstrate the most breath-taking cynicism, putting into words ideas and collocations of incident and intention which are way beyond the average person’s experience:

Chemo was the first convicted murderer that Maury Lykes had ever put on the payroll, and he hoped the man understood the concept of boundaries. (p.116)

The comedy extends from what you could call high-level cynicism, through a hierarchy of criminality and casual amorality, down to the more gutter level of sheer venomous abuse, which all these horrible people routinely treat each other to:

Lev said, ‘I hope you get cancer of the schlong. I hope it falls off in your hand.’ (p.30)

It made me laugh because it’s so outrageous, and that summarises Hiaasen’s schtick in a phrase. These novels are outrageous festivals of amorality, horribleness and insult.

Seething narrator

Vituperation isn’t limited to the characters. The narrator himself boils with rage at the corrupt and scuzzy world around him. Within pages of starting reading the reader is forced to acclimatise to Hiaasen’s super-cynical attitude and abrasive phraseology. As a tiny example he doesn’t refer to Miami International airport but to ‘the clusterfuck known as Miami International’ (p.27), conveying three levels of implication:

dropping the ‘airport’ because he assumes the reader is hip enough to get the reference
letting the reader know his attitude to Florida’s ‘advanced’ i.e. heavily polluting and environmentally destructive infrastructure
signalling that he isn’t shy about using latest American vernacular = there’s going to be a lot of swearing

So, there is comic entertainment to be enjoyed at multiple levels:

plot
character
the narrator’s seething cynicism
his characters’ cynical attitude
their whip-smart repartee
or plain old abuse

Silly nightclub names

It is a typical minor running gag running through his books that Hiaasen – not, we suspect, a great fan of cocaine-fuelled nightclubs full of drug dealers, crooked lawyers and property developers – gives comic names to the fictional nightclubs which appear in his novels.

Skin Tight featured a club named ‘the Gay Bidet’ where a whole series of ludicrously named punk bands performed and where Chemo, incidentally, worked part-time as a bouncer. Strip Tease featured a strip joint which changes its name from ‘The Eager Beaver’ to ‘Tickled Pink’, and in other books there’s the club named ‘Lube’. In the same spirit, in this novel Cherry meets young Tanner Dane Keefe at a South Beach nightclub named ‘Abscess’ (p.118), which brought a smile to my lips.

Later on, we are taken to a gimmicky nightclub named ‘Club Ortho’ where everyone has to wear a cast and pretend to have a broken bone (p.244). In the second half the fictional nightclub named ‘Pubes’ gets namechecked and in fact provides the setting for the rather feeble shooting of Abbott, which more or less ends the main narrative (see below).

As it happens, William Gibson also has a fondness for silly nightclubs, in his case less notable for their names than for their ‘wacky’ gimmicks, such as the bubblegum-themed bar or the Kafka-themed club or the restaurant with a full-sized replica Russian tank parked in the middle, The Western World. It is characteristic that Gibson’s comic bar ideas are strained and pretentious whereas Hiaasen’s are gleefully obscene. I go for glee every time.

More plot

Abbott wants his cameras back and wants access to Cherry. Therefore he stakes out the hotel Cherry has checked into and waits till Cherry exits the hotel and gets into the waiting limousine. He cleverly hijacks this by getting a bellhop to drop a load of cases in front of the car, blocking its way, so that the chauffeur and Chemo the bodyguard get out to angrily help the bellhop pile them back onto a luggage trolley, only to hear the limo reverse and skid off with Abbott at the wheel. So far, so clever except that… it is not Cherry in the limo but Ann the body double!

The central part of the novel will be built around this mistake, with Abbott at first not knowing what to do with the body double and then contacting Janet Bunterman offering to return Ann in one piece in exchange for one day with Cherry. (They worry that he’s a pervert but we know it’s not for sex purposes but in order to take a massive portfolio of photos which he can use when, as he expects, she ‘buys the farm’ i.e. dies).

Negotiations are then carried out between Abbott and Chemo, representing the Bunterman family and the manager, Maury, Abbott having first drugged Ann and locked her up in the boot of a hire car.

In fact there’s a whole sequence of meetings between the two men, with Chemo then reporting back Abbott’s demands to his employers, who carefully weigh the options. One option they consider is to let Ann die since, when she is returned a) she’s unlikely to want to continue the job b) if she spills the beans her story will go bigger in the press than Cherry’s comeback album and tour, so she represents a financial threat to all of them.

Now, when Skink released Ann, he gave her his mobile number and, during a moment to herself in a motel toilet, Ann manages to phone Skink and tell him she’s been kidnapped. Skink, though old enough to be her father, had taken a liking to Ann during their couple of days together in the wild Everglades, and so now he sets out on a quest to track her down and release her.

I expected this whole situation would lead up to a mega-violent confrontation but it doesn’t, instead it’s something of an anti-climax. The Buntermans eventually agree to Abbott’s terms, namely that Abbott gets a whole day with Cherry in Keefe’s house (which is on the detached, millionaire enclave of Star Island, which gives the novel its title) to do a serious photoshoot, all under the watchful eye of the baleful Chemo. In the end, all pretty reasonable and non-violent.

Nonetheless, on the way towards this event, the plot at moments feels like the Maltese Falcon, with increasingly complex double crosses all round: without telling Janet Maury pays Chemo to kill Abbott, but Abbott persuades Chemo they can make a fortune by selling the camera full of great fashion photos Abbott has just taken (Abbott is genuinely a good photographer). Meanwhile Abbott, while he had kidnapped Ann, took a load of photos of her with her hair over her face so she looks like Cherry, handcuffed to a bathroom sink, apparently shooting up with a syringe, and he’s gotten in touch with the editor of a tabloid newspaper with a view to selling them.

It all gets very convoluted, a pell-mell of crosses and double crosses, and yet I became steadily more detached, and a bit bored. Maury tells Chemo to kill Abbott. Then to kill Ann. But Skink has by this time tracked down Ann and become her de facto bodyguard. Anyway, Chemo’s come to admire her spunky attitude. He thinks she’s a ‘pisser’, which is a term of praise.

The climax of the book is disappointing by Hiaasen’s standards. Cherry slips out of the house where she’s being kept to dry out before her upcoming tour and new album release and goes to the legendary nightclub Pubes. Here Ann is waiting for her and confronts her with what she intends to be the dazzling revelation that she, Ann, has been the spoilt little girl’s double for all these years and her parents never even told her.

But Cherry doesn’t respond with a sudden epiphany, a realisation of how shallow her existence is and a determination to turn her life around. She just attacks Ann, knocks her to the dancefloor (they’re in a nightclub) and starts feebly pummeling her until Chemo wades in, picks her up and takes her away.

Skink had come to the club with Ann (Ann had bought him a swanky suit and persuaded him to cut off his long grey braids) and he now picks her up and leaves with her.

Abbott is also at the club and furious with himself because he missed the shot of Cherry being carried out by Chemo. But then Ann calls out to him amid the scrum of paparazzi and he is just about to take her photo when a hired killer in the crowd takes out a gun and shoots him in the ass.

What? Why? Because in the complexity of the second half of the plot, Abbott had forgotten to pay off one of the many narcs and contacts he employs to routinely tip him off about celebs at hotels and bars. He has hundreds of them, he always owes them little sums of money, they’re calling and hassling him all the time, and he has been a little busy involved in a kidnapping scam. All this explains why he’s persistently ignored the calls of one contact in particular, and this guy has gotten so irritated that he’s hired a hitman to shoot Abbott.

So that’s the (rather thin) explanation for this climactic shooting except that… the man fails. They aren’t standing yards apart which would allow for a clean shot, they are smothered together in a heaving crowd and so the man only manages to shoot Abbott in the buttock. The shot disperses the crowd, including the hitman. Abbott is taken to hospital, the bullet removed, the damage to his big guts repaired. It’s all rather… inconsequential.

Tying up loose ends

Cherry’s album flops and the tour doesn’t sell out, so she changes her name and moves into TV. Ann works on a new career. Abbott returns to papping. With the revival of the property market, Chemo gives up being a gun for hire and returns to his former career selling mortgages (broad Hiaasian satire at the type of person who sells mortgages i.e. deranged murderers).

Skink disappears back into the boondocks, though it’s worth emphasising that the novel contains a distinct strand about a detective who has become interested in him. Remember Jackie Sebago the crooked property developer from the start of the book, whose coach Skink hijacks and down whose pants he stuffs a sea urchin? Well, one of the investors in his property development, a no-nonsense crim named Shea, insists he wants his money back and when Sebago is unable to return it ($850,000) because he’s spent it, Shea hires a hitman who kills Sebago by shooting him through the chest with a speargun.

The point being that the cops scour the locality of the murder and stumble across Skink’s camp in the outback. Detective Riley pieces together scattered appearances by Skink: holding up the coach, a speedboat is stolen from nearby; the testimony of the drunk woman who was saved from rape by a scruffy stranger on the beach; a man of the same description seizing the little pet dog out of the arms of a woman in a hotel lobby who was describing how her husband and friends clubbed some dolphins to death; and so on.

Riley gets so far as tracking Skink down to the Miami hotel where he’s staying with Ann, solely in the capacity of her protector. But as Detective Riley interviews, the couple Skink gives blissfully, surreally oblique answers and the cop doesn’t get anywhere. He’s looked up Skink’s record on computer and knows he served in Vietnam. He knows Skink now lives out in the woods not harming anyone. Well, unless they’re scumbags like Jackie Sebago. Detective Riley decides there’s no case against Skink, no evidence, and leaves town wishing him well.

This investigation-of-Skink storyline starts out being quite threatening, as if Skink might actually be arrested, but then becomes amusing but so inconsequential I wondered whether it was setting itself up for some kind of sequel. Will Detective Riley appear in subsequent novels and become Skink’s pursuer?

In this it’s a little like the other storylines, which all fizzle out. Cherry survives, Chemo survives, Ann survives, Skink survives and Abbott survives. They all go their separate ways. Is that it? Bit disappointing…

The banalisation of sex and drugs and guns

1. Sex

Fifty years ago, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of idealists thought that, if we only took all our clothes off, acknowledged our sexuality, forsook sexual jealousy and indulged in free love, the world would become a better place. The results, like any great social change, were complex and mixed. Without doubt many millions of people experienced genuine personal liberation and the breaking of taboos around gender and sexuality have been transformative.

On the other hand, the notion that simply getting naked and having sex changes or improves society has been roundly disproved. Arguably, the opposite has happened, and this novel contains numerous instances tending to indicate the way sex has ceased to have any special moral or psychological significance and become utterly debased, a bodily function with as much glamour or spiritual significance as having a crap.

Cherry is in one sense an embodiment of the complete degradation of sex to an empty transaction. She straddles and rides fat Abbott to orgasm because she’s bored. She whines to the young actor Keefe that she wants him to come on tour so she can fuck him instead of having to fuck the roadies, the implication being that she has to fuck someone on a daily, almost hourly basis. We are told that she got round her tough Israeli bodyguard, Lev, by fellating him on a regular basis or letting him ‘bone’ her with a platinum stud through the head of his penis. To get a room service boy at the Stefano to smuggle in drugs to her room (after Chemo has been made her bodyguard with strict instructions to keep her clean) Cherry offers the boy a blowjob.

In Hiaasen’s American sex has become a form of currency, just another version of the cash nexus.

And it isn’t just Cherry for whom sex is a mindless addiction. Abbott, aroused by remembering the mile high shag with Cherry, gets an erection while sitting in his car and whines that the steering wheel is getting in the way, so he shuffles over to the passenger seat to have a wank.

Knocking one off, squeezing one out, wanking, is as casual a business as wiping your nose, and as empty of meaning. From keeping close tabs on her, Chemo gets to know that when she has no-one to fellate or to bone her, Cherry sets her iphone to vibrate and puts it against her crotch so each incoming text or call stimulates her pussy (p.372).

At the bourgeois end of the spectrum, we learn that Cherry’s parents’ marriage is a purely business arrangement: her father has a long standing menage-a-trois with a Danish couple, the sophisticated Jorgensens, while her mom is boffing her tennis coach. So far, so normal, for American marriages.

At the other, more extreme end of the spectrum, we learn that the young actor Tana Dane Keefe has a part in the latest Tarantino movie where he plays a necrophiliac, ‘a corpse-diddling longboarder’ (p.205). It all reminds me of the old rugby song, ‘Bestiality’s best, boys, bestiality’s best.’

The trouble with this kind of thing, with the adolescent urge to shock, is that eventually there’s nowhere left to go. It is possible to hollow out human existence, the meaning of human life, entirely, until it’s completely empty. This is why I despise Tarantino and his ilk. It’s slavery for laughs, it’s murder for entertainment, it’s the death of any attempt to maintain manners, respect and subtlety. It is an insult to the human spirit. But hey, it wins Oscars!

So an infinitely more liberated approach to sex than was conceivable for most people in the 1960s has not led to a happier society or happier individuals, has it? Instead of being the road to freedom that the sexual liberationists imagined, sex has turned out to be just one more dead end, one more rut which only confirms our bad habits and bad decisions.

Relying on sex for a ‘fulfilled’ life is like relying on alcohol or any other drug. Sex has become just another activity like drinking or playing cards which is sometimes meaningful and significant but is mostly humdrum and often just a habit, a potentially smelly, selfish or disease-spreading habit. For the most part, for most of the scumbag characters in Hiaasen’s novels, sex has been emptied of any sacral or numinous meaning that it once had.

Hence the superficially funny but ultimately sad set of phrases which hip Americans have developed to categorise different types of fuck, the mercy fuck, the sport fuck and the speed fuck (p.338). Fucks are now as coolly categorised and named as brands of handbag.

2. Drugs

Something similar for drugs. It’s a long time since the hippies recommended that we turn on, tune in and drop out. Since then we went through the cocaine wave of the 1970s, the crack cocaine wave of the 1980s, and for the last few decades America has been enjoying the growing tide of the opioid epidemic.

Cherry and her buddies are symptomatic of a generation which has no reservations whatsoever about drugs and so has become greedily, selfishly addicted to whatever it can get its hands on. Thus Cherry quite literally swallows any pills available, including at one mildly comic moment, a handful of dog de-worming pills, doggie laxatives (p.370).

In Cherry and young Tanner Dane Keefe’s hands drug culture has just become a pointless addiction, and their readiness to take anything, anything at all to get off their faces, is about as spiritual or psychologically enlightening as sitting in a pool of your own vomit stuffing your face with Big Macs.

Thus Cherry bribes the room service boy to bring her every illicit substance he can get his hands on and this adds up to: Zanax, tramadol, Ecstacy, Bayer gelcaps, Ex-Lax, banana nut Cheerios and a bottle of Stoli vodka (p.317) all of which she proceeds to swallow, vomiting copiously some time later.

3. Guns

Something similar is true of guns, by which I mean that, in stories like this, shooting people is just an everyday activity which some people do as casually as drinking a beer or having a wank. Shooting someone, like taking drugs or casual sex, has (not for all, but for a fair percentage of the characters) been emptied of any particular meaning.

This really came home in the scenes where Abbott has kidnapped Ann. He asks about her nose, which got hit during the kidnap, asks to borrow headache pills, discusses Cherry’s personality, threatens to shoot her, takes her into a MacDonalds for a meal, explains the realities of life as a paparazzo, threatens to shoot her. It’s just another topic of conversation thrown in among other rather humdrum chats. ‘Pass the ketchup. Oh yeah, if I can’t get the ransom for you, I’ll have to kill you, OK.’ It has ceased to register as a big deal.

In one of the hotels where Abbott is keeping Ann hostage, they actually have a tussle over his gun which Ann grabs hold of, and in their half-assed struggle, the gun accidentally goes off and shoots the tip of Abbott’s forefinger off, the one he uses to press the shutter on his camera, which is vital to his career.

It is remarkable how neither of the characters are particularly upset about this and neither is the author. Not only does it typify the casual approach to guns and gun injuries, it demonstrates something else as well. In previous novels something really grotesque would have happened to Abbott for him having been the baddie all the way through, but in this one, it’s as if Hiaasen can’t be bothered to come up with anything really macabre. The climax of the novel is that the bumbling kidnapper gets shot in the bum.

The casual way modern Americans think about shooting and killing is demonstrated in the closing stretches of the novel where Cherry’s manager, Maury, first of all considers letting Abbott kill the kidnapped Ann, then pays Chemo to kill Abbott, then (when he doesn’t), orders him to kill Ann.

Nothing personal, it’s all purely business, these are just tactics to protect Cherry’s ‘brand’ and not jeopardise the upcoming tour and CD release. In this world, killing people is a legitimate business strategy.

My point is that the threats to kill someone come quite casually in among a range of other humdrum conversational topics; that the activity of shooting someone either to wound or kill them; have become utterly banal and empty and meaningless, as trivial as offering them a cigarette or holding a door open for them or blowing their head off.

Bang Abbott shook his head. ‘Unbelievable. I may have to shoot the fucker.’ (p.257)

Maybe shoot the fucker. Maybe not. Meh. Whatever.

Repetition

I can’t help noticing that this novel repeats several ideas or tropes from previous books. The entire notion of satirising the music industry had previously formed the basis of novel 9 in the series, Basket Case. Admittedly, that was about grown-up rock and adult rock stars whereas this novel is about the distinct and different teenybop market and focuses on a stroppy teenage pop star. But still, it’s fundamentally about the same glossy, empty, pop music-fashion-nightclubbing scene.

The return of Skink and Chemo can either be seen as the welcome reprise of old favourites or… as a sign that Hiaasen was running out of ideas for the kinds of grotesque characters which infested his earlier fiction. Any way you cook it, Chemo is a straight retread from an earlier, much more imaginatively varied and powerful novel.

What crystallised this sense of repetition was when I read in chapter 12 that Cherry’s two PR people, the twins Lucy and Lila Lark, had a long-burning ambition to have plastic surgery in order to be transformed into completely identical twins. The thing is, this is very similar to the storyline in Sick Puppy about the two leggy East European ‘models’ Katya and Tish who are housed, fed and watered by the slimy ex-drug smuggling property developer Robert Clapley because he wants to use plastic surgery to turn them into an identical pair of Barbie dolls. Or, as he puts it with typically Hiaasenesque crudeness:

‘How often in a guy’s lifetime does he have a chance to get sucked off by two semi-identical six-foot dolls?’ (p.137)

Feels like the same basic idea.

And there’s another repeat of an earlier book: Chemo becomes so incensed by airhead Cherry’s repetition of the same limited lexicon, that he retrieves a cattle prod he bought soon after leaving prison, and gives her electric shocks every time she says ‘like’, ‘awesome’, ‘sweet’, ‘sick’, ‘totally’, ‘hot’ and ‘dude’ (p.301). Quite quickly he has to only gesture towards the prong and she corrects herself.

This is pretty funny, and an apt satire on the spread of airhead Legally Blonde lexicon among America’s teens, but we’ve been here before. In Stormy Weather Skink hijacks a couple of newly-weds and fits the asinine husband with a dog-training electric collar. Every time he steps out of line Skink inflicts a massive electric shock which knocks the husband unconscious. Quite quickly the husband anticipates the shocks, eventually falling and rolling on the floor before Skink’s even administered a shock.

Same basic idea. Just saying that, as I read on, I had a disconcerting sense of these repetitions and echoes which, when combined with the lame-ass ending, couldn’t but help suggesting a falling off in Hiaasen’s fertility.

The decline and fall of American journalism

Another recurring theme is Hiaasen’s laments for the decline of old-style journalism, which have featured in many of his novels and, taken together, form an interesting commentary on the decline and fall of American journalism. Early on the narrator laments a time:

Back in the day when newspapers mattered. (p.25)

As I’ve read Hiaasen’s novels through the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s, many aspects of the society he describes have changed (more drugs, more explicit sex, the internet) but one of these threads is his comments on how journalism and the newspaper industry have changed over that period, consistently for the worse.

The early comments (and because the first novel features a star journalist, his managing editor and other journalists in a busy Miami newspaper, it is stuffed with them) are idealistic. Hiaasen thinks it is journalism’s place to hold corrupt politicians and business-people to account. In the 1990s he laments the advent of accountants who reshaped many American newspapers into money-making machines by cutting back on actual journalism and replacing it with features, competitions and prizes.

Thus Basket Case is narrated by a down-on-his-luck journalist Jack Tagger who boils over with contempt for the ‘smooth yuppie’ Race Maggad III who has bought the traditional, old-school newspaper he (Jack) works for and is only interested in it as a money-making machine. For Jack there’s still something worth fighting for in the idea of a civic-minded journalism which serves its community.

But by the time we come to this novel, in 2010, the fat paparazzo, Bang Abbott, is dealing with hard-nosed editors who are themselves having a hard time competing with the internet. The internet presents two threats:

It is immediate, unlike the creaking, 24-hour delay of hard copy newspapers.
And it is democratic, in the sense that absolutely anyone can photograph or take a video of a newsworthy event and upload it in seconds and it will have gone viral before a journalist has even uncapped their pen or turned on their laptop.

It’s a tiny but interesting detail that the editor of the magazine (National Eye) which is the best customer for Abbott’s sleazy paparazzo photos, is not American but Australian, and that he learned his trade on Fleet Street – the implication being that the British press is much more hard-nosed, business-like and ethic-free than US journalism (pages 106 to 111). Certainly we in Britain have to be reminded from time to time just what corrupt scumbags a lot of our journalism is (e.g. the phone hacking scandal).

Obviously, in the 11 years since this novel came out in 2010, things have got significantly worse for newspapers everywhere and the press in America now faces an existential crisis.

US newspapers face ‘extinction-level’ crisis as Covid-19 hits hard (Guardian article)

I wonder whether Hiaasen’s laments about the death of journalism continue in his more recent books…

Final thought

In terms of satire, Sick Puppy is maybe Hiaasen’s most effective novel because it really explains the workings of corrupt property development and politicians, and the precise way both interact, doing behind the scenes deals, creaming off money, the arrangements whereby all the politicians involved get payoffs and backhanders, and how the tax-paying public are dazzled by the handful of civic amenities which are used to disguise all of this. The novel is festooned with Hiaasen’s trademark grotesquery and violence and macabre deaths and so on, but it also contains this genuinely fascinating deep dive into how this kind of corruption really works.

By contrast, Star Island is, on the face of it, a satire on the discrepancy between the squeaky clean world of teen pop stars and the reality of drug addiction, nymphomania and bulimia. You could also argue it contains a parallel satire about the gutter values of tabloid newspapers or celebrity magazines, with their endless appetite for photos of celebs in embarrassing or squalid situations and so on.

And yet, it doesn’t dig deep. A leading pop start turns out not to be able to sing and to be a nightmare of drugs and sex. Hmm. Tell me something I didn’t already know. Ditto paparazzi. Everyone knows those magazines are trash and the paps who cater for them are reptiles. I remember Spitting Image satirising tabloid journalists as pigs in suits back in the 1980s.

That’s why I don’t like fiction about these subjects, whether by William Gibson or Carl Hiaasen – simply because the subjects feel old and tired and over-familiar right from the start.

Credit

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2010. All references are to the 2012 Sphere paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

1 Comment

by Simon on June 11, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 11, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/11/star-island-carl-hiaasen/

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

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

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by Simon on May 21, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on May 21, 2021

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

Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen (1987)

Decker said, ‘May I assume we won’t be alerting the authorities?’
‘You learn fast,’ Skink said.
(Double Whammy, page 115)

Carl Hiaasen, born in Florida in 1953, is one of America’s premiere writers of comedy thrillers, and by the the rather bland word ‘comedy’ what we’re referring to is savage, bitterly satirical and often very violent farce.

Tourist Season

Hiaasen started out as a journalist and by the mid-1980s was writing a regular column for the Miami Herald. By then he had co-written a couple of novels with a fellow journalist, before launching out on his own with his first solo novel, Tourist Season, a violently satirical portrait of a half-assed gang of would-be eco-terrorists who mount a doomed attempt to try and scare away Florida’s never-ending flood of incoming retirees and tourists (by kidnapping random middle-aged tourists and feeding them to a tame crocodile) in a forlorn attempt to save Florida’s last surviving areas of wilderness.

Everyone in the book comes in for satirical blasting – the journalists on the fictional paper covering the events and whose star columnist turns out to be the wild-eyed leader of the revolutionaries; the disgruntled black, Hispanic and Native Indian losers he recruits to the cause; the redneck white cops and the one, good, Hispanic cop who they patronise; the corrupt and cowardly Chamber of Commerce; along with excoriating satire of the fake razzamatazz of city parades and the hypocritical lechery of beauty pageants – no topic is too sacred to be roasted, no profession goes unmocked (‘Decker didn’t see much difference between the mob and an insurance company’), no situation is left unmined for brutal and macabre situations, and Florida, Hiaasen’s home state, comes in for unremitting, blistering criticism:

Every pillhead fugitive felon in America winds up in Florida eventually. The Human Sludge Factor – it all drips to the South. (p.202)

Along with repeated caricatures of the white racist rednecks who overflow the state and are also referred to as ‘crackers’:

To a man they were rural Southerners, with names like Jerry and Larry, Chet and Greg, Jeb and Jimmy. When they talked it was bubba-this and brother-that, between spits of chaw. (p.165)

Double Whammy

I thought Tourist Season was great, but Double Whammy is even better. The central subject matter is, improbably enough, the burgeoning sport of largemouth bass fishing. Hiaasen gives us plenty of well-researched background into the rise of national competitions to catch largemouth bass, details about fishing rods and baits and boats. (The ‘double whammy’ of the book’s title is a kind of bait or lure, ‘the hottest lure on the pro bass circuit,’ p.23.)

The point of all this is that there’s big money at stake, and the fishing competition at the centre of the story ties into bitter rivalries, fierce fights over ratings and TV sponsorship, competition for national sales of fishing products, with the result that people are cheating, really cheating, cheating bad enough to make it worth while to murder anyone who finds out.

Enter R.J. Decker, one-time fashion photographer, who switched to newspaper photography – less money but easier work – until one day found himself photographing the rotted corpse of a women journalist he’d worked alongside in the newsroom who’d been abducted, raped and murdered, and realising he couldn’t do it any more (p.44).

His wife, Catherine, divorced him and, two weeks later married a well-off timeshare-salesman-turned-chiropractor. On the day of their wedding Decker caught a black guy stealing the expensive cameras from his car boot, gave chase, tackled the guy and beat him to a pulp (p.42).

Which was a mistake, as the thief turned out to be the nephew of powerful people, who got Decker arrested and sent to Apalachee prison for 10 months for assault, his newspaper sacked him, and so there he was ten months later, an unemployed, divorced ex-con. No wonder his ex-wife Catherine’s nickname for him is ‘Rage’ (p.97). At a loss for anything better to do, Decker sets himself up as a private detective, paid to trail adulterous husbands or employees faking ill health to claim the insurance, and take incriminating photos to be used against them in court.

R.J. Decker is the ‘hero’ of the book and the story kicks off as he is hired by largemouth bass fishing fanatic Dennis Gault to investigate corruption on the largemouth bass fishing circuit. At first Decker thinks it’s a joke (as might the reader) so Gault is used as the main mouthpiece to explain the rise of largemouth bass fishing, the spread of state and national competitions, and the significant sums to be won in the endless series of competitions held across the USA (hundreds of thousands of dollars prize money) plus all the sponsorship, TV advertising and so on which comes with it.

We learn that one of the big names in the sport is Dickie Lockhart, who hosts his own carefully doctored TV show about catching big fish, and rakes in big money from sponsorship and ads.

The actual narrative starts with a run-of-the-mill fisherman named Robert Clinch, getting up in the middle of the night, driving to a fishing lake, launching his dinghy and poking about in the depths. We never find out why, for he never returns to his nagging wife and, a few days later, his corpse is dragged out of the lake. When Gault calls in Decker it is to explain that he (Gault) had hired Clinch to look into fishing skullduggery, and that someone had obviously bumped him off. Gault wants Decker to investigate Clinch’s murder.

From that moment we are on a rollercoaster ride of outrageous plot developments, grotesque caricatures, off-the-scale cynicism and corruption, all retailed in short snappy chapters which each move the plot along with brisk efficiency, all retailed in slick, über-articulate prose. We meet:

Characters

Ott Pickney A feeble old acquaintance of Decker’s from his newspaper days, who is eking out his time on the local newspaper of the remote, rural Harney County where Clinch was bumped off. Decker encounters him Ott when he starts investigating Clinch’s death, which prompts Pickney to do a bit of poking around himself, which is unfortunate. He has barely discovered that Clinch’s boat was tampered with to make his death look like an accident before he himself is bumped off by local toughs who are clearly behind Clinch’s murder.

The world at large learns that Pickney has gone missing from the characteristically bizarro fact that Pickney is not only a poorly-paid hack for a remote rural newspaper, but doubles as ‘Davey Dillo’, the mascot for the local Harney High School football team, the Armadillos. People know something’s wrong when he doesn’t turn up for that night’s football game to perform his clumsy stunts dressed as an armadillo on a skateboard (!).

Elaine ‘Lanie’ Gault Ex-model, terrific figure, Lanie is sister of Dennis Gault and sent by him to spy on Decker. Decker encounters her at the large funeral for Clinch, where he learns she was (rather improbably) the dead man’s mistress, and she crops up regularly after that, generally scantily clad, fragrant and very seductive. Turns out she and Decker met some years earlier, when she was a model on a fashion shoot with Decker. In fact it later turns out it was at her suggestion that Dennis hired R.J. in the first place.

Dickie Lockhart is the desperate fraud who fronts the smash-hit TV show, Fast Fish, all about largemouth bass fishing, but only maintains the show and his reputation at competitions by having paid associates pre-capture large fish and secure them in places they’ll be easy for him to uncage and claim as his own.

The Reverend Charles Weeb is president, general manager and spiritual commander of the Outdoor Christian Network (p.52) and front man for its hit show, Jesus In Your Living Room (p.194). He is everything you’d expect in an American TV evangelist, i.e. he’s a foul-mouthed, money-mad hypocrite who preaches to the faithful during the day and has sex with multiple hookers by night, something caught in the following sentences which are typical of the way Hiaasen casually states the most breath-taking hypocrisies and immoralities.

Weeb was wide awake now. He paid off the hookers and sat down to write his Sunday sermon. (p.198)

We later find out that Weeb is also, in a move clearly designed to make him as cynical a character as possible, Jewish! (p.193). It is typical of the novel’s hilariously foul-mouthed profanity, that Weeb thinks of Lockhart, his premiere TV star, as ‘a shiftless pellet-brained cocksucker’ (p.257).

Weeb also performs ‘miracle cures’ and there is a rich comic sub-plot in which his fixer, Deacon Johnson, has to go out and find children, preferably blonde to appeal to his redneck audience, who can be made to look halt or lame and then undergo a ‘miracle’ transformation i.e. be paid to pretend to be halt or lame then stand up and walk on cue.

R.J’s ex-wife is Catherine, beautiful and soulful and still half in love with him, as is demonstrated by the number of times she not only kisses but they have full-blown sex, despite the fact that she is married to her second husband, creepy but successful chiropractor, James. At the climax of the novel Decker saves her life, which often helps to rejuvenate a relationship.

Then there’s the retarded red-neck brothers Culver and Ozzie Rundell who run a bait shop and are involved in some of the early murders. Ozzie is a hilarious portrait of a mumbling, drooling moron with the comic habit of answering the questions he’s asked out of order. Ozzie was:

one of the most witless and jumble-headed crackers that Jim Tile had ever met. (p.251)

Slowly the reader realises that it is Gault, who ostensibly hired Decker to find who murdered Clinch, who is himself behind the murder, using his hired killer, Thomas Curl, a low-grade thug who Gault has hired to look after his interests and investments and bump off anyone who threatens them. When Thomas and his brother Lemus trail Skink and Decker into the backwoods and start shooting at them, Skink hides, doubles back and shoots Lemus neatly through the forehead – which doesn’t improve his brother, Thomas’s, attitude one little bit.

But the most important character in the book, and Hiaasen’s greatest fictional creation, is Skink, a huge dirty, demented environmentalist-cum-hobo, who wears dayglo jackets and a flower-patterned plastic shower cap, who lives in a shack way out in the boondocks and eats roadkill scraped off the state’s blacktop roads (p.32).

In chapter 9 we learn that Skink was once Clinton Tyree, 6 foot 6 ex-college football star and Vietnam vet, who successfully ran to become Florida state governor but wasn’t prepared for the rampant corruption and sleaze involved. When he refused kickbacks to allow commercial developments to go ahead, and in fact tape recorded the incriminating conversations and set the police onto the corrupt corporations, the powers that really run Florida – big business, banks, finance houses, property developers, holiday companies – decided Tyree had to go.

They suborned all the other state officials so that Tyree lost every important vote in the state senate. Then when the corrupt property developers came to trial they were all let off and, as fate would have it, on the very same day, an important wildlife preserve (the ‘Sparrowbeach Wildlife Preserve’, p.119) was sold off to more developers. (A lot later on we learn that Catherine’s salesman husband was involved in selling timeshares at the destroyed wildlife preserve, p.227.)

Depressed and disillusioned by this double blow (a double whammy), Governor Tyree gave up. He had his limousine drive him to a Greyhound bus terminal in Orlando, got on a bus to Tallahassee, but never arrived. Somewhere en route, at a gas stop, he slipped off the bus and was never seen again. It now turns out that he chose the little parish of Harney to hide out in because it is, politically and culturally, the most backwards county in all Florida (p.121), in fact it is:

the most backward-thinking and racist county in the state. (p.241)

Thus the backstory of ‘Skink’, the man Ott Pinkney introduces Decker to (before the former’s unfortunate demise). Pinkney drives Decker out to Skink’s remote shack and from that point onwards the two come to form a very unlikely double act as they delve deeper into the murky waters of Florida’s crooked largemouth bass world. We come to like the way Skink refers to Decker as ‘Miami’ throughout the novel.

Except it isn’t a duo, it’s a trio. Skink has a trusty assistant or compadre, Jim Tile, a black state trooper. Hiaasen goes out of his way to emphasise the entrenched racism of the Florida authorities, and pauses the narrative on a number of occasions to give ample accounts of the racist attitudes and professional obstacles placed in the way of Jim Tile, who is one of the few black troopers working in Florida’s highway patrol. When Tile announced his ambition to one day be in charge of Florida highway patrol, the white authorities promptly exiled him to the most remote dirt-bucket country in the state, Harney County in order to quash his ambition (chapter 11).

It was here, back when Skink was running for governor, that Tile was assigned the job of protecting the then-unelected gubernatorial candidate, Clinton Tyree, as he made a swing through Harney county on the campaign trail. Over the course of the day they spent together Tyree came to appreciate Tile’s honesty and steadiness and, when he unexpectedly won the governorship, he ordered Tile assigned to his personal detail in Tallahassee (which is the state capital of Florida).

So they got to know and trust each other more. When Tyree walked away from the corruption a few years later, Tile was immediately sent by the anti-black authorities back to Harney County, where Skink had, as it happened, decided to hole up, the pair remained in touch, and Jim emerges as a key figure in the novel.

Al García About half-way through the novel (page 206) we are surprised at the arrival of Al García as the detective sent up from Miami to investigate the murders in Harney County. Surprised, because García was a fairly central character in the predecessor novel, Tourist Season. Towards the end of that book García had been shot and badly wounded in the shoulder by the feverish screw-up of a would-be terrorist, Jésus Bernal, just before the novel’s ‘hero’, Brian Keyes, himself shoots Bernal dead. In this novel, there is no reference to any of those events, although there are references to the fact that Al’s shoulder still hurts and he needs painkillers (p.212).

Hiaasen’s prose

It’s a well-established principle that thrillers, especially American thrillers, foreground (generally male) characters who are super-competent, who can drive any vehicle, fly any plane, handle any gun, know how to fight, know how to work the system, know to schmooze journalists or cops or whoever necessary, are men of the world in the fullest sense. (It is revealing that Hiaasen, like William Gibson, is aware that the king of this trope is James Bond and so makes an explicit reference to Bond on page 126, where Lanie is watching an old 007 movie and tells Decker she thinks Connery was the best Bond.)

But in Hiaasen it’s the third-person narrator himself who is astonishingly knowledgeable and confident. To open up a Hiaasen novel is to be immediately in the company of a breezily confident dude who knows all the names for all the angles, all the lingo for all the kit, all the slang for every scam and racket in town and reels off highly informed factual sentences with wonderful brio and verve. Here’s TV host Dickie up in New Orleans for an out-of-state largemouth bass tournament.

On the night of January 15, Dickie Lockhart got dog-sucking drunk on Bourbon Street and was booted out of a topless joint for tossing rubber nightcrawlers on the dancers. (p.148)

There’s at least two levels of pleasure in that one sentence. Number one, it makes the (probably male) reader feel as if they also live in a world which is this rangy, open and confident, New Orleans, jazz bars, strip joints, wow! In reality, despite having knocked about a bit, I don’t think I have ever actually been to a ‘topless joint’ and never will. But for half a page I felt like I was at one.

The second level is the breezy confidence of the prose, which itself can probably be broken down into two levels. First, the grammatical clarity of the sentence. Hiaasen wasn’t an experienced journalist for nothing. Instead of showing off its oblique and angled surfaces like a William Gibson sentence, Hiaasen’s periods get on and tell you what happened, in no-nonsense, no stuffiness, unpretentious, rangy prose. When you come to visualise it, you realise an entire scene is captured in just that one sentence.

Secondly, the narrator shows boundless confidence with terminology, whether it’s street slang or specialised terms. Thus I think I’ve heard lots of synonyms for ‘getting drunk’ but never ‘dog-sucking drunk’ before. Always a pleasure to encounter a new word or phrase, specially if it’s a comically slangy one. And I had to look up ‘nightcrawlers’ to discover that they are, in line with the novel’s fishing theme, worms used as bait.

So it’s not Faulkner or Joyce, but sentence by sentence, Hiaasen gives a lot of pleasure just from his use of prose, its vim and energy, its confidence and its competence.

And this is before you get to any actual plot. The sentence quoted above marks the opening of chapter 12 which goes on to describe the ‘dog-sucking’ drunk Dickie getting thrown out the strip join and staggering over to the hotel where he knows his boss, the Reverend Charles Weeb, is staying, in order to confront him with the fact that he (Dickie) knows that he (Weeb) has been talking to Ed Spurling, another famous fisherman, with a view to sacking Dickie and replacing him with Ed as front man on the TV show Fish Fever.

It helps his case that Dickie discovers the Reverend Weeb in bed with two hookers, one wearing only thigh-length waders, the other riding Weeb’s manhood wearing ‘a Saints jersey, number 12’. Dickie threatens to blackmail Weeb. Weeb has to concede defeat. The reader has experienced a hilariously extreme satire on the nexus of Florida religion, TV business and the sex trade. Snappy stuff, designed to amuse, and it does amuse and entertain, and shock and amaze, very successfully.

Command of language

So many of the sentences stand out for their confidence. Rather than belabour the point they say what they want to say directly, with the minimum of fuss, but often with startling use of language.

Already one or two bass boats were out on the water; Decker could hear the big engines chewing up the darkness. (p.101)
A speeding motorist could see Skink a mile away. He looked like a neon yeti. (p.36)
It was only when he got to his feet that Decker saw what a diesel he truly was. (p.35)

With occasional bursts of real lyricism:

The Everglades night was glorious and immense, the sweep of the sky unlike anything he’d seen anywhere in the South; here the galaxy seemed to spill straight into the shimmering swamp. (p.383)

In addition to Hiaasen’s wonderfully casual fluency are the scores of new (to me) words, terms and phrases he lards the text with:

‘a hundred large’ = hundred thousand dollars (p.97)
‘hulking out’ = working out (p.96)
‘the goldbrick fireman’, where ‘goldbrick’ = super-fit (p.97)
‘it’s going gangbusters’ = the business is thriving (p.99)
‘sportfucking’ = sleeping around (p.322)
‘a through-and-through’ = a bullet wound where the bullet goes direct through soft muscle; Culver Rundell shoots Jim Tile through the thigh, before Tile disarms him, smashes his jaw and systematically breaks all his fingers (p.381)

And mystery words: there are loads of sentences which casually include a word I’ve never read before:

‘I figure they’re poaching gators or jacklighting a deer that came down to drink.’ (p.104) ‘jacklighting’?
‘What kind of work?’ Decker asked. ‘Scut work,’ Skink said. (p.107) ‘Scut work?’
‘Only thing I could figure is that he’d gone out Saturday night and tied one on.’ (p.134)

Occasionally this articulacy crystallises in memorable apothegms:

[García] hated trailer parks; trailer parks were the reason God invented tornadoes. (p.210)
Guns make people say the darnedest things. (p.404)

The second sentence would make a cracking TV show, a redneck version of ‘You’ve Been Framed’.

Omni-competence

The narrator has that thriller writer’s dazzling super-knowledge about every material aspect of American life, about its reams of products and brands. Thus every item of clothing that every character wears is described, as is the exact make of every car, boat, piece of fishing tackle, everything, is nailed and named:

Dennis Gault was holding a stack of VCR cassettes when he answered the door. He was wearing salmon shorts and a loose mesh top that looked like it would have made an excellent mullet seine. (p.86)

What is a loose mesh top? Is it like a string vest? What is a mullet seine? Is it a type of net?

Lanie was dressed in a red timber jacket, skintight Gore-Tex dungarees, and black riding boots. (p.390)
He put on his favourite desert-tan leisure suit, buffed his cream-colour shoes, and trimmed his nose hairs. (p.392)
[Weeb] wore a powder-blue pullover, white parachute pants, and a pair of black Nike running shoes. (p.304)

‘Timber jacket’, ‘leisure suit’, ‘parachute pants’? I don’t know what any of these are. And the author knows about lots of other stuff, about all aspects of everything. Here’s Skink explaining some background to the fishing:

‘Some of the guys fish the slough when the water’s up,’ Skink cut in. ‘You need a johnboat, and no outboard. Ten minutes from the highway and you’re into heavy bass cover.’ (p.103)

All the characters seem to be impressively knowledgeable about motorboats, possibly true of Florida as a whole, with its watery sports environment:

The boat was an eighteen-foot Aquasport with a two-hundred-horse Evinrude outboard; smooth trim, dry ride, very fast. (p.248)

Everyone is articulate, everything has a name and everyone knows the names of everything. There’s very little doubt or indeterminacy. I’ve just read Samuel Beckett’s complete works and his prose, in particular, is about the impossibility of knowing anything and, for that reason, of ever managing to properly express anything.

Hiaasen’s brazen American confidence is at the extreme opposite end of the psychological and literary spectrum. In Hiaasen’s world everything, absolutely everything, can be known and named and understood.

Decker nodded. ‘Sounds like a Ruger Mini-14’. Very popular with the Porsche-and-powder set in Miami, but not the sort of bang-bang you expected upstate. (p.113)

‘Porsche-and-powder set’. ‘Bang-bang’.

Another running thread is the way everyone eats out and the names of each restaurant or chain and the dishes ordered are specified. I never eat out. I can’t afford it. All the characters in all of Hiaasen’s novels eat out all the time.

They sat in a corner table at Middendorf’s
They went to the Acme for raw oysters and beer. (p.188)
Just what I need is that asshole jetting up for brunch at Brennan’s, thought Decker. (p.199)
They went to a Denny’s on Biscayne Boulevard. (p.214)
‘We hit Mister Donut on the way in,’ Decker said (p.347).

Same goes for human behaviour, it is supremely knowable and therefore predicatable. Routinely, characters expect the other person to say or do this or that, and that is exactly what they then do. This notion, that people are predictable robots with set repertoires is the basis of much humour, as pointed out by Henri Bergson a century ago. A good example comes on page 98 where R.J. is chatting to his ex-wife Catherine, and he can tell she’s about to go into her ‘You’re wasting your life’ routine and, sure enough, she does, much to the reader’s amusement.

Of course the weakness of this approach is that, if everything is already known and named and identified, both the plot and the characters risk realising that they are in a thriller, conforming to thriller stereotypes. It’s interesting how often thrillers themselves raise this issue, presumably hoping to allay the reader’s suspicions, but on the whole serving only to highlight their own secondariness, their ‘already-read’ nature.

Thus when Lanie visits Decker in his motel bedroom in the second half of the novel and bursts into tears, he knows by this stage that she’s a lying actor, knows it’s all an act, but nonetheless finds himself moving to the bed to hold her and comfort her, painfully aware how clichéd the whole scene is.

Of course then the tears came, and the next thing Decker knew he had moved to the bed and put his arms around Lanie and told her to knock off the crying. Please. In his mind’s eye he could see himself in this cheesy scene out of a cheap detective movie; acting like the gruff cad, awkwardly consoling the weepy long-legged knockout. (p.129)

‘Knockout’, the thing that’s often missed about tough-guy, hard-boiled prose is that it’s often funny, it’s knowingness is a fundamentally comic attitude. One way to avoid accusations of over-familiarity and stereotype, to decisively step out of the deep shadows of Fleming or Chandler, is to outgross and outgrotesque all your predecessors, and this Hiaasen very successfully manages to do.

Evermore grotesque

There’s a lot more plot, a plot which gets steadily more convoluted and farcical, but it is a savage farce in which people get beaten up, tied up, shot and gruesomely murdered. For example: Lanie, sent to seduce and spy on Decker, gets kidnapped, stripped naked and tied up in hundreds of yards of tough fishing twine; slick Dickie Lockhart gets hit in the head and drowned; and Dennis Gault is, eventually, revealed as the bad guy behind almost all the murders, and meets a sticky end when he catches a monster bass which pulls him by his rod and line backwards over the stern of a shiny new fishing boat where is instantly shredded by its state-of-the-art high speed propeller.

Probably the funniest element of the novel (or the sickest, depending on how squeamish you are) is that the hired hitman of the book, the thug Thomas Curl, is trying to break into Decker’s trailer when he is attacked by one of the chavvy neighbours’ pitbull terriers. The beast jumps up and bites him in the arm and, although Curl then stabs and kills it with a screwdriver, the pitbull refuses to let go.

In fact so tightly are the animal’s jaws clamped on his forearm that even after Curl’s sawed the head clean off, the dog won’t let go. And so killer Curl goes through the last third of the novel with a dead pitbull head clamped to his arm. Inevitably, the thing begins to rot and fester and the infection gets into Curl’s bloodstream, making him increasingly delirious and feverish.

Thus when he kidnaps the lovely Catherine, Decker’s ex-wife, she is terrified to realise that Curl is talking to the dead dog’s head as if it were a friendly pet. It’s a very funny moment when Catherine realises that, to stay on his good side, she’d better play along too, and so she starts to make doggy barking noises behind her hand, which Curl, in his hallucinatory state, takes to be the yapping of his nice doggy which he has, by this time, named Lucas.

The hallucinating killer with a rotting dog’s head clamped to his arm is one of Hiaasen’s most vivid and fabulously grotesque creations.

The climax

Tourist Season led up to a ghastly climax during the half-time entertainment of the big local football game, when the would-be environmental terrorists, led by renegade journalist Skip Wiley, kidnap the local beauty queen in front of not only a live audience but a stunned national TV audience.

Something similar happens here, for the ever-accelerating plot leading up to a climax set in the biggest richest largemouth bass fishing competition in the country, set up by the Reverend Weeb in order to promote the fishing ‘lakes’ created next to the building development he’s invested all his money in. For, deep down, the ultimate motor of the plot is not the fishing competitions as such, but Hiaasen’s deepest and most consistent enemy, illegal, corrupt and environmentally devastating property developments.

Weeb has invested a lot of time and money setting up this competition, offering the biggest prize money and invited all America’s top fishermen to ensure maximum coverage for his new housing development and scenic fishing lakes, and which he intends to preface with an extra special edition of his TV evangelism show, Jesus in Your Living Room.

As you might imagine, the religious show and the televised fishing competition which follow it turn into a chaotic fiasco with half a dozen plotlines all converging to create maximum havoc, not least the fact that the entire development that Weeb has invested millions in turns out to have been built on an old landfill site so that, in scooping out the supposed ‘lakes’ the developers created vast pools of toxic liquid not that dissimilar from battery acid, in which no fish – let alone the thousands of largemouth bass the Reverend has had carefully and expensively bussed in to stock the water and provide telegenic catches – can survive for even a day.

Another comic aspect of the climactic scenes is the way the black man Jim Tile and the Hispanic Al García enter this super-fishing competition a) thus outraging all the other whiter-than-white contestants, and the Reverend Weeb, but also b) taking the mickey out of their racist opponents by speaking each other’s idiolect, so that Tile speaks bad Spanish and García speaks street jivetalk. It is preposterous, absurd and very funny.

So the fishing competition turns into a catastrophic disaster with not one fish being pulled out of the so-called ‘lakes’ alive, but it is matched for farce by the TV evangelism strand in which the Reverend Weeb was meant to perform a miracle cure of a poor sinner, which leads to his poor assistant scouring the streets and towns near to the lake development to find a tramp or hobo, or preferably a kid from an orphanage who can be paid to play lame or blind or paralysed and then, at the climax of the Revere and Weeb’s prayers and performance, miraculously rise and see and speak. Except that the assistant, running out of time and getting desperate, chooses none other than Skink, sitting alone and derelict looking in a bus shelter and wearing sunglasses, who immediately twigs what is going on, and plays along pretending to be blind, right up till the moment the reverend claims to cure him when, of course, he reveals his true character and delivers a grotesque rant to the live TV audience with, as they say, hilarious consequences.

There’s a huge amount more plot and detail to this riotous book, multiple other plotlines which are laid out and drawn together with brilliant precision and comic timing, and all lead up to this savage, satirical, violent and riotous climax. Double Whammy is a brilliantly shocking, scandalously entertaining and hilarious novel.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

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by Simon on May 19, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on May 19, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/19/double-whammy-carl-hiaasen/

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming (1959)

Murder in Mexico

Bond dislikes killing and it gives him a bad conscience. He tries to persuade himself it’s just part of the job, he does it then moves on, but in reality he broods and worries. Thus Goldfinger opens with Bond in the departure lounge of Miami airport, obsessively going over his most recent job in Mexico. Fleming gives a brief description of how an informal heroin smuggling circle was set up by a posh, amateur Brit which led from poppy fields in Mexico via a courier to Victoria Coach Station and then distribution via Soho. Bond tracks the pipeline to its source and blows up the heroin warehouse, but then is approached in the street that night by an assassin hired by the gang, and after a brief intense fight, kills him. But Bond broods.

What an extraordinary difference there was between a body full of person and a body that was empty! Now there is someone, now there is no one. This had been a Mexican with a name and an address, an employment card and perhaps a driving license. Then something had gone out of him, out of the envelope of flesh and cheap clothes, and had left him an empty paper bag waiting for a dustcart. And the difference, the thing that had gone out of the stinking Mexican bandit, was greater than all Mexico. (p.7)

This passage, especially its portentous final phrase, reminded me of Fleming’s contemporary, Graham Greene (b.1904). (This brooding over the mystery of death, the extinguishing of life, also reminds of the shock Bond feels at the death of Darko Kerim, the one-man life force, in From Russia with Love, p.277.) At the end of the novel Bond will feel the same way about the broken rag-doll body of Tilly Masterton.

Bond stood and looked down at the little empty tangle of limbs and clothes. He saw the bright, proud girl with the spotted handkerchief round her hair in the flying TR3. Now she had gone. (p.205)

Death is the great mystery, the real puzzle, at the heart of these books.

Goldfinger exposed

As he sits worrying, Bond hears the announcement that his flight to New York has been cancelled, and then is approached by a middle-aged American. He introduces himself as Junius Du Pont, one of the couple who were sitting next to Bond during his climactic card game which forms the centrepiece of Casino Royale. Briefly, he is a millionaire but has a problem: he’s been playing canasta with a fellow millionaire, strange guy called Goldfinger, Auric Goldfinger, and has consistently lost, far more than the odds would predict, losing some $25,000. Having seen Bond in action and knowing him for an expert, he invites Bond to stay over in Miami a night, all expenses paid, then pose as a businessman come to visit Du Pont and in reality figure out how Goldfinger is cheating.

Excellent! This is just the kind of relaxing, easy, no pressure break Bond needs to take his mind off death and destruction. He goes with Du Pont in his chauffeur-driven car to a luxury hotel and has the best meal of his life: crab in melted butter with toast, washed down by pint mugs of pink champagne.

So Bond goes along next day to the poolside table where Du Pont plays and meets Goldfinger. As with all the Bond villains he is distinctively misshapen and ugly, really a kind of cartoon. Goldfinger is just five foot tall, tubby, with no neck and an enormous round moon-shaped head, topped by a crew cut of bright red hair. He is very rich and very cool. Bond is introduced and sits idly reading his paper and half watching the game. He watches Goldfinger win hand after hand of canasta, fleecing Du Pont, and eliminates all the usual card sharping tricks. When Goldfinger says he never moves from his chair because he doesn’t like the view over the sea, it gives him agoraphobia, Bond gets a clue. He realises Du Pont is sitting with his back to the hotel so someone in an apartment could, in theory, look over his shoulder and see his cards.

He gets a camera from his apartment and the well-connected Du Pont gets a pass key from the hotel manager. Then, during the afternoon game, while Goldfinger is fleecing Du Pont again, Bond sneaks into Goldfinger’s room to discover a beautiful posh English woman wearing only bra and panties (p.34, and is first seen from the back, just like Tiffany Case in Diamonds). She is looking through binoculars down at Du Pont’s hand and giving Goldfinger detailed instructions. This is how he wins so consistently.

Bond startles the girl by taking a flashlight photo of the set-up, then chatting to the (obviously) alarmed and scared woman, who gives her name as Jill Masterton (p.39). She is Goldfinger’s private secretary. As they chat, and Bond explains he’s working for Du Pont and simply wanted to discover the scam, she relaxes and even begins to warm to Bond. Having not told him the winning cards for quite a few moments, Goldfinger has begun to lose. Now Bond decides to put the finishing touches: he takes the radio microphone from Jill, and dictates his terms to Goldfinger: he will send the photo and full details of his scam to the police and FBI unless Goldfinger a) admits to Du Pont he’s been cheating b) writes and gives him a check for $50,000, including all the money he’s won off him as well as a tidy fee for Bond. And then, to rub it in, Bond insists Goldfinger pays for a luxury train sleeper compartment for him and Jill to New York. Reluctantly, Goldfinger agrees and does these things.

Bond gets effusive thanks from Du Pont, then takes the sleeper to New York (all told in retrospect) where he makes passionate love to Masterton, five times, apparently (p.43 – almost as soon as they met, she was looking at him with a look of submissiveness and longing, and later says she will do anything if Bond doesn’t hurt Goldfinger: ie she is much more quickly submissive than either the feisty Tiffany Case or distant Gala Brand, falling more into the ‘immediately seduced’ category of Solitaire, who fancied him straight off). But when they get to New York, Jill insists on going back to Goldfinger, despite both their misgivings about how he might react to having been so systematically humiliated…

Back in London

Cut to Bond back in the Secret Service building overlooking Regent’s Park, where he has been assigned night duty and is logging calls from stations round the world. Fleming has just explained how much he actually enjoys being up through the night, when he is called in for a breakfast meeting with M. Surprise surprise, it concerns the man he just happens to have met on Miami, one Auric Goldfinger who, M tells him, is the richest man in England. (It has rather the same effect as the way Sir Hugo Drax is introduced in Moonraker as the most popular man in England.)

The Bank of England

His name is mentioned as M describes having dinner with the Governor of the Bank of England the previous night and listening to his concerns about the drain of gold from England. A certain Colonel Smithers is Head of the Bank’s research department and an expert on the subject. ‘Go and meet him 007.’ So off Bond goes and submits to a long, detailed history of gold, its use, importance and why the Bank is concerned it is being drained out of the country. Smithers gives us the backstory to Goldfinger: refugee from Riga before the war, set up a chain of pawn shops which now operates round the country, paying cash for small gold trinkets; these are melted down in his smelting works / factory near Reculver in Kent, which also deals in fertiliser and other chemical works. Goldfinger had been exporting fertiliser to India for years but when one of his ships was wrecked off Goodwin Sands, scientists found traces of gold in a chemically treated form had soaked into the hold. Smithers deduced Goldfinger has been converting the gold into a brown powder which passes customs as fertiliser, then having it restored to gold and selling at a big profit in India.

Bond reports back to M at 6 that evening, where M has more to tell him. They know Goldfinger marks his ingots (out of vanity) with a tiny incised ‘Z’. The most recent ingots the Service has come across thus marked have all been recovered from SMERSH operatives! Yes! From being some cheating millionaire, Goldfinger has suddenly been revealed as SMERSH’s banker! Bond is ordered to find him, confirm his activities and stop him, so he motors down to Kent in a work DB III, along the way filling in Goldfinger’s backstory, mainly from speculation: trained and briefed by SMERSH, despatched to Britain in 1937, told to lie low and set up a network of pawnbrokers as a front; while all the time he was given greater and greater responsibility as SMERSH’s overseas banker. Who knows how many deaths, assassinations and terror attacks he has helped organise and fund (pp.62-64).

As Umberto Eco points out, unlike Sherlock Holmes, Bond rarely has to detect anything and certainly never discovers a baddie behind a criminal activity: the baddies are always identified early on in the text, Le Chiffre, Mr Big, the Spangled Mob etc, the only interest is what form the confrontation and final struggle will take. (In this respect, From Russia With Love is an exception, since Bond is unaware of the conspiracy to entrap him and doesn’t know who his opponents are – Klebb and Grant – until very near the end: maybe it’s this element of genuine puzzlement and revelation (for Bond) which explains why many people think Russia is the best Bond book.)

A game of golf

In Miami, during the open social chitter chatter, Goldfinger and Bond had both admitted a fondness for golf, and even promised to play each other one day. Now Bond drives down to Goldfinger’s house in Kent and on to the famous golf course of Royal St Marks. Says hello to his old caddie and trainer, Blacking, and we learn that the teenage Bond was a golf prodigy who his trainer thought could have gone professional. While they’re chatting Goldfinger’s immense canary-yellow car comes rolling up the gravel drive, driven by the striking figure of a bowler-hatted Korean chauffeur. Bond makes like them bumping into each other is a happy accident and after some banter, Goldfinger challenges him to a round, with the stakes being the $10,000 he took off him in Miami.

Chapters eight and nine contain a very detailed description of each of the eighteen holes the two men play during the ensuing game of golf. Goldfinger has a good game so that it is very close, plus he cheats by a) putting Bond off his stroke b) tamping down the ground around his ball to make his shots easier. Eventually Bond and his caddy decide to cheat back and swap Goldfinger’s ball for a different make on the last hole. Thus at the moment that Goldfinger wins the round, Bond is able to reveal it is with the wrong ball thus, technically, losing the match. Goldfinger sputters with fury, almost declares Bond guilty of cheating, then contains his anger, and invites Bond to dinner at his house that evening.

Dinner at the Grange

1. Goldfinger welcomes Bond, but says he unfortunately just has to pop out to sort out some trouble one of his servants has got to in Thanet; back in 30 minutes. Bond sees this as a transparent invitation to go snooping round Goldfinger’s house. A doorway takes him into the overseer’s office of the factory, from where he looks down into a workshop and sees men fiddling with the door of Goldfinger’s Rolls. Back in the house he pokes around in the upper floors, coming across a male bedroom, all the way followed by a friendly ginger cat. Everything in the bedroom is pure and clean until he follows a whining sound to discover cine-camera film from three concealed cameras whirring round their spools in a concealed closet: obviously turned on when Goldfinger left, to monitor Bond’s movements. Bond deliberately exposes the film strips all to the light, then puts the cat into the container where the film had been spooled, as a feeble attempt to explain his sabotage.

2. Goldfinger returns and treats Bond to a quality dinner: curried shrimp and rice, with a Moselle, the Piesporter Goldtröpfchen ’53; roast duckling with Mouton Rothschild 1947; cheese soufflé and coffee.

3. Throughout the book there has been mention of Goldfinger’s Korean servants: he employs five of them. Now he gets his personal servant, Oddjob, to demonstrate his skills, and Oddjob proceeds to: slice through the wooden banister on the stairs with his bare hand; create a divot in the mantelpiece with a flying kick; destroy a wall fixture with his steel-rimmed bowler hat, thrown as a weapon.

Goldfinger explains that all five are Karate experts, Oddjob being one of the only three karate black belts in the world. (It is striking that Fleming feels he has to explain from scratch what karate is and give its history.) Goldfinger claims the Koreans are ‘the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world’. The cat which Bond left in the cinefilm basket? Goldfinger hands it to Oddjob and tells him he can eat it for his dinner.

Throughout there is the strong sense of menace and threat, while Bond plays his role of pretending he is fed up with Universal Exports and wants a way out, a way to make easy money. He even retells the story of the heroin business he foiled in the opening chapter, but casting himself as one of its organisers. Goldfinger listens impassively and hints that he may have a role for Bond in his organisation.

Across France

Goldfinger had mentioned that he was flying out of Lydd airport the next day, with his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Bond gets the Service to book him a ticket on the next flight following. He drives up to the airport before Goldfinger is due and tells the Customs people he’s with Scotland Yard. They let him inspect the Silver Shadow after Goldfinger and Oddjob have boarded the plane, giving Bond the opportunity to insert a primitive homing device into it.

Two hours later Bond’s flight carries him and his DB III over to Le Touquet where he picks up the trail of the Silver Ghost. There follows a long knowledgeable tour across northern France, down to the Loire and then East heading towards Switzerland. Fleming knows his French Routes Nationales and shows off his acquaintance with the best hotels and Michelin restaurants along the route. On the first night Goldfinger stops at Orleans where Bond checks into the Station Hotel and enjoys ‘one of his favourite meals’: two oeufs cocotte à la crème, a large seule meunière and an ‘adequate’ Camembert.

Next day Bond tracks Goldfinger south and east along the N73 when he stumbles across the car pulled over for a picnic by a river. Bond just has time to drive off down a cart track and isn’t noticed, but after Goldfinger and Oddjob finish their picnic and drive on, Bond goes to investigate and discovers, under some freshly disturbed turf, a big gold ingot (with the tell-tale ‘Z’ scratched into it). He takes it with him a) causing Goldfinger and SMERSH inconvenience b) maybe saving lives in whatever schemes it would have financed.

Slowly he realises that another car is tailing Goldfinger, a nifty little Triumph driven by a pretty woman wearing a pink head scarf. Now he thinks about it he realises the same car was at Lydd airport. In the busy streets of Mâcon he sees it behind him and deliberately reverses into it, writing off the bonnet and fan belt. He apologises profusely while the pretty woman gets out and is livid, saying she must get to Geneva to play in some golf tournament. Bond discovers her name – Tilly Masterton – aha! she is the sister of Jill Masterton, Goldfinger’s confidential secretary. Bond offers her a lift and so they share the rest of the journey to Geneva.

Bond drops her at a hotel on the outskirts of Geneva, then trails Goldfinger’s Silver Ghost to a large mansion behind high railings, with a sign reading ‘Enterprises Auric A.G.’. He parks in nearby woods and doubles back to a vantage point where he sees technicians come out of a factory-like building and start to disassemble Goldfinger’s car. Then he drives on into Geneva and contacts the Service’s man there. 1. He hands over the gold bar and tells him to send it with a message confirming Goldfinger’s role as SMERSH banker, back to London. 2. The Service man knows about Auric Enterprises: it makes metal-work products, most notably chairs for Mecca Charter Airways planes, a company Goldfinger part owns and which flies to India. Aha.

Everything clicks into place. After his boat was wrecked and investigated off the Kent coast, Goldfinger abandoned gold smuggling by sea: now he fits his ‘armour-plated’ Rolls Royce with gold panels, drives it across France to his factory in Switzerland, where the panels are extracted from the car, and remoulded, with alloy, as airplane seats, installed in planes which are flown to India, there melted back to gold and sold at a terrific profit.

Captured

That night, after checking into a Geneva hotel etc, Bond drives back out to the woods above the Goldfinger mansion. He is creeping towards a good vantage point when he sees a slender figure in black lying by a tree ahead of him: it is Tilly. He jumps her from behind, putting his hand over her mouth, then slowly freeing her once she knows it is him. Furious she tells him her story: Jill Masterton returned to Goldfinger after her train trip of passion with Bond in the early chapters, and Goldfinger killed her, in a typically macabre Fleming way: he had her body painted with gold paint all over so her pores couldn’t breathe, evacuate sweat etc, poisoning her. (Fleming adds the gruesome detail that Goldfinger likes sex once a month with prostitutes who Oddjob paints with gold, but leaving their backs free to ‘breathe’ before the furious animal act. Then Oddjob sluices them down in a chemical shower to retrieve the gold.)

Well, Tilly is Jill’s sister; so she has come here with a rifle to take revenge. While they’re still squabbling about who is getting in whose way a crossbow bolt thwacks into the tree above them. Oddjob and some other Korean guards. Bond tries to make light of it, claiming Tilly is his girlfriend and they’ll call in on Goldfinger tomorrow, but the Koreans shepherd them down through the fence and towards the house, through the front door and into the main room where Goldfinger is waiting. Now Goldfinger knows Bond is an enemy agent and spy, and after a bit of banter, orders him to be taken to ‘the Pressure Room’.

Bond throws himself across the table, head butting Goldfinger in the chest, and gets as far as throttling him with his bare hands, when Oddjob hits him very hard and the lights go out.

Sawn in half

Bond awakes to find himself tied to a large table with a circular saw designed to cut right across it, up between his legs and carve him in half. ‘Talk,’ says Goldfinger, ‘or you’ll be sawn in two; and then the girl will be handed over to the Koreans for their sport.’ Bond swears (he’s taken to swearing four letter words a lot in the last few books – e.g. ‘You can go —— yourself’, p.149). As if the saw wasn’t enough, Bond is worked over by Oddjob who knows exactly how to hurt him very much. Fleming, as so often, takes us into Bond’s mind as he tries to master the pain, control the pain, rise above his body…

Next thing we know it’s a new chapter and Bond thinks he’s died and gone to heaven, complete with white lights, nice music, warm woozy feelings. Slowly he interprets the succession of lights and faces to mean he’s been doped up and flown somewhere, the American accents suggesting the USA. Eventually he regains consciousness in some kind of sealed accommodation, in a bed in a room with his clothes and case all carefully returned. Goldfinger enters with a handgun and explains: he was on the verge of wiping Bond out when he realised he may actually be of some small use in his next and final crime. Like all Bond villains Goldfinger has to unburden himself of his plans and so tells Bond that he plans to go down in history for pulling the biggest crime ever, and stealing the entire American supply of gold from Fort Knox! —Fleming always thinks with a kind of cartoon, bravura excess, egged on by his uninhibited villains.

The preparation

Briefly, Bond and Tilly have been kept alive to act as secretaries to the organisation of the job. The building they’re in is some kind of warehouse near the river in New York. At Goldfinger’s instruction, Bond types out and copies the agenda for a meeting with the six biggest organised crime gangs in America. When they arrive they are a suitably florid and ugly bunch, but the stand-out member is one Pussy Galore, leader of a lesbian gang in New York.

Goldfinger gives these men and Pussy a detailed explanation of his plan: to slip sleeping powder into the water supply of Fort Knox; to put the word out that there’s been some kind of attack or medical emergency; to organise a special medical emergency train to go into the danger zone, staffed by his own Korean and German guards along with selected members from each gang; to secure the perimeter of the Knox building, then to blow open the stainless steel doors of the vault with a small nuclear device!

Nuclear device!!

At this point Bond realises Goldfinger is a megalomaniac genius, and the reader realises how preposterous the entire scheme is. This warhead has been bought through bribery and corruption from the US Army in Germany, and is – allegedly – one of a new generation of fallout-free weapons. Yes. So the first men in will need radiation suits but will be able to pass the gold safely out to the gangsters waiting in their long lines of lorries to take their share of the gold wherever they want to.

Five of the gangsters sign up for the deal on the spot. The fifth says he’s not interested and leaves. Moments later Goldfinger tells the assembled hoods, the leaver has met with an unfortunate accident, fallen down some stairs and is dead.

After the hoods have gone, Goldfinger reveals that a) it is not going to be sleeping chemicals his men slip into the dam, but a deadly nerve gas which will kill the entire 60,000 population of Fort Knox, b) he is in fact going to take his $5 billion of gold to the coast where it will ship onboard a Russian submarine. The money will be used to fund SMERSH operations for decades. (For some reason, for the first time, the way everything comes back to SMERSH seemed silly to me, and also very small-minded: oh it’s another SMERSH operation.)

Next day Goldfinger, Oddjob, Tilly, Bond and others take a charter jet to fly over Fort Knox and check everything is as per the detailed map he had displayed at the meeting. In fact this is a plot device to allow Bond to scrawl a very long detailed account of the plan, roll it into a tight tube, write a warning message on the outside, that anyone taking this document to Felix Leiter at the Pinkerton Agency in new York will get a reward of $5,000 on the spot, and sellotape it to the underside of the toilet seat.

For the rest of the flight, and then for the next few days, Bond is in an agony of uncertainty, not knowing whether the message will be found at all, whether it will be acted on, or whether it’ll be found by Goldfinger’s people and he can expect a bullet in the neck at any point.

D-Day

In the event, on D-Day, the poison is put into the drinking water, news gets out and Goldfinger and his team man the rescue train into stricken zone posing as medical emergency team. As it enters Fort Knox they see cars which have crashed, people fallen across their lawns and washing lines, prone bodies everywhere, even with pinkish foam at the lips. Bond’s heart sinks. My God he is responsible for the deaths of 60,000 people; he should have murdered Goldfinger before this, even at the cost of his own life, done anything. (Bond is prone to a lot of self-doubt and worry and even guilt, throughout the books.)

The bluff

But it’s an immense con trick. A maroon warning flare is shot into the sky and thousands of people, including a lot of US Army troops spring to their feet and begin a terrific firefight with Goldfinger’s people and the assembled crooks. Bond jumps off the cab of the train which he had been viewing everything from, along with Tilly but they’re immediately pursued by Oddjob who has been tasked with keeping tabs on Bond throughout. Tilly turns to run back to Pussy but is immediately killed by Oddjob using his steel-rimmed bowler hat, and then throws himself into a flying karate kick at Bond, knocking him to the floor. He is moving in for what will no doubt be the kill when the train starts to pull out and Oddjob runs and jumps on to it. At that very moment Bond’s old pal Felix Leiter emerges with half a dozen soldiers and a bazooka which Bond seizes and fires at the escaping train, damaging the rear engine but not the front one and it steams over a river bridge and is gone.

Bond walks back down the track and looks down at the poor, huddled rags of the dead Tilly.

On the plane

Days later, after a full debriefing over the phone to M, then the FBI and then an embarrassing 15 minutes of thanks from the President himself (!), after a lot of joshing and ragging with Leiter, Bond is dropped at the BOAC terminal outside New York, checks in his bag etc but is then told he has to have a vaccination jab (!). No sooner is he injected than he passes out. When he awakes it is tied by the wrists and arms to the seat of an airliner which is airbound and next to the ever-vigilant Oddjob. Goldfinger comes strolling down the aisle: ‘Well, Mr Bond, I underestimated you’ etc.

Bond asks to be served Bourbon and ice to free his hands. To his surprise the coaster the drink arrives on has a message from Pussy reading ‘I’m on your side’. This gives him the courage for a desperate plan. He pretends to drowse and nod of and slowly Oddjob eases his supervision so that, with a sudden lunge, Bond leans across him and stabs the dagger concealed in the heel of his trick shoe, through the perspex window. It shatters and all hell breaks loose, the cabin depressurising, the plane going into a nose dive and Oddjob, sitting next to the window, is very gruesomely sucked into it and then squeezed through it like toothpaste.

When the plane has levelled out Bond undoes his seat belt and encounters Goldfinger in the aisle, for once in his life going into a complete berserker frenzy and strangling him to death in a hard-fought physical battle. He takes Goldfinger’s gun into the cabin of frightened pilots, gets the radio, establishes they don’t have enough fuel to get to any dry land, and contacts a radio ship in the north Atlantic, asking it to put out a flare landing path (?). It does this and an hour later the airliner hits the choppy sea, almost immediately breaks up, Bond and Pussy just having time to escape through an emergency exit with a life raft. The plane, with its cargo of $5 billion, and the crew, breaks up and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.

An hour later, picked up by the crew of the radio ship, Bond and Pussy are clean and in spare clothes. Pussy comes into his cabin wearing only a fisherman’s sweater. Get into bed, he orders, and she is meek and compliant. She explains she was a lesbian all her life because she was raped and abused by an uncle in the Deep South. Bond explains that all she needs is TLC (it is interesting that he has to explain that this stands for Tender Loving Care) and he commences his version of it by slipping his hand up over her flat belly to feel the curve of her breast and its hard nipple, then kissing her hard.

Lesbianism and lameness

Thus the novel ends on the ‘curing’ of Pussy’s lesbianism. Obviously, this is insulting to real life lesbians, then again Pussy is as realistic a character as Goldfinger, ie the entire thing is a preposterous fantasy. Nevertheless, even in its own terms, I think it is a shallow, lame ending.

You could possibly draw a graph showing the number of hours Bond puts into a relationship before he sleeps with a woman, in each of the novels. Thus Casino Royale invests a huge amount of time and energy in the relationship with Vesper Lynd which, unfortunately, ends up so tragically. We are in the company of Solitaire, Gala Brand or Tatiana Romanova for long stretches of their respective novels and we get to know them and share Bond’s thoughts and developing feeling for them over many chapters, before he gets anywhere near taking them to bed.

Goldfinger feels like the first novel which reflects the ‘easy-lay’ philosophy of the movies. Bond’s whirlwind romance with Jill Masterton feels shallow and porny, the way that, just five minutes after Bond bursts into her hotel bedroom to find her wearing only pants and bra, she is looking at him with need in her eyes, and offers to do anything for him – this insults, I think, both the reader and Bond as a character, when he is at his best and most feeling.

But the way a supposedly confirmed, hardened, man-hating lesbian crime leader like Pussy can – over the course of just half a dozen casual bantering exchanges in rooms full of other mobsters or Goldfinger and his gang – abruptly realise that Bond is ‘the first real man’ she’s met in her life, and therefore end up presenting herself on a plate for Bond and the reader’s pleasure, seems to me a forced and superficial ending to this book.

This is the first Bond novel which failed to convince me, even on its own pulp, comic-book level. For me the realistic descriptions of Jamaica, of meals and showers and scenery and settings, the prosaic details of Bond’s day-to-day living, along with a lot of his thought processes, in the earlier books, outweighed the silliness of the plots. This is the first one where the balance shifted and the preposterous, cartoon, wish-fulfilment elements outweighed the interesting and good descriptions.

And the ‘curing’ of Pussy stands as a fitting emblem of this tipping-over into the absurd.

Comments

Timeframe

The novel is divided into three distinct sections, taking a supposed saying of Goldfinger’s as an organising principle: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action’ – and so the three parts are named Happenstance, Coincidence and Enemy Action, as Bond encounters Goldfinger three times, with mounting antagonism.

None of this is earth-shattering, but I admire Fleming’s restless drive to vary the format and structure of his fictions: sure, the fundamental narrative arc remains remarkably samey (baddie, girl, fight), but that makes it all the more interesting to note the themes and variations he plays on it.

Food

Du Pont treats Bond to the most delicious meal he’s ever eaten (p.22): fresh stone crabs with melted butter and thick toast, washed down with two pints of pink champagne (Pommery 1950) served in silver tankards.
Next day for lunch Bond and Du Pont have shrimp cocktail, native snapper with tartare sauce, roast prime ribs of beef au jus, and pineapple surprise. (p.32)

Personification

A new element enters Fleming’s writing in this book, the use of personification ie giving inanimate objects intention and agency. As Colonel Smithers warms up to deliver his lecture about gold,

Bond felt boredom gathering in the corners of the room. (p.50)

In general Fleming’s style is blunt and factual. I think it works best this way though, of course, he has been criticised for this as for just about everything else in the books. For example, back in London after the Mexico trip, Bond is on night duty:

Bond stood at the open window of the seventh-floor office of the tall building in Regent’s Park that is the headquarters of the Secret Service. London lay asleep under a full moon that rode over the town through a shoal of herring-bone clouds. Big Ben sounded three. One of the telephones rang in the dark room. (p.40)

Admittedly this passage personifies London, but in a traditional way most readers don’t register. What counts is the diminuendo towards the short factual sentences, which mimic Bond’s cold, calculating decisive actions, when he is on his mettle. Compared with all that, the half dozen personifications in Goldfinger strike a new, almost Dickensian, note.

Bond got slowly out of the car and stood looking at the house. Its blank, well-washed eyes stared back at him. The house had a background noise, a heavy rhythmic pant like a huge animal with a rather quick pulse… The quiet watchful facade of the house seemed to be waiting for Bond to do something, make some offensive move to which there would be a quick reply… The silence, helped by the slow iron tick of a massively decorated grandfather clock, gathered and crept nearer. (pp.96-97

Bond facts

M wears a stiff white collar and a loosely-tied spotted bow tie (p.46).

The Secret Service employs 2,000 staff (p.54).

For the first time Bond drives a Service Aston Martin DB III. For the first time in the series there are gadgets: the front and back lights can change colour and appearance; reinforced steel bumpers in case of ramming; a long-barreled Colt .45 in a secret compartment; and plenty of concealed space (p.62).

Bond is bored so he is working on a book to be titled Stay Alive! about all the known methods of unarmed combat from around the world (p.42) though, interestingly, he is sickened by some of the things he reads, especially in the Russian manuals.

Credit

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming was published in 1959 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 1961 Pan paperback, 1964 edition (price: 3/6).

Other thrillers from 1959

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 15, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Sex, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1959, bullion, canasta, Felix Leiter, Fort Knox, gold, Goldfinger, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Jill Masterton, Kent, M, MI6, Miami, novel, Oddjob, Pussy Galore, Reculver, Secret Service, Spy novel, Tilly Masterton

Posted by Simon on May 15, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/goldfinger-ian-fleming/

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