tourist season and strip tease carl hiaasen

Though Hiaasen has roots in the rock world – his pals Jimmy Buffett, Roger McGuinn and Warren Zevon all gave him tips for the book – it’s Jack who intrigues him. Along the way he tangles with a would-be record producer who “couldn’t get into the Grammys with an AK-47” and the spoiled newspaper heir, one Race Maggad III, whom he calls “Master Race.” When the star’s widow seems less than devastated and the remaining Slut Puppies are picked off one by one, Jack can’t help but investigate. It’s about an ex-investigative reporter, Jack Tagger, who, consigned to writing obituaries, gets suspicious when a rock star (the former lead singer for a group called the Slut Puppies) ends up drowned in the Caribbean. His latest yarn, “Basket Case,” is a little less gnarly than the Lobster Boy saga, but that’s not saying much. “How can you put that in a book?,” Hiaasen shrugged. The man she hired was the Human Blockhead, who could hammer nails up his shnoz but was less effective at murder-for-hire – which is why he and Madame Lobster are presently doing time. “He and his wife had a falling out and she went and hired another circus guy to get rid of him.” “He was a circus guy with little hands like lobsters,” Hiaasen explained.

While O.J.’s always good for copy, Hiaasen says, some Florida tales are too twisted for fiction. “What do you do with an autographed picture of yourself and O.J.?” he mused. The former murder defendant holds court at Miami’s South Beach, Hiaasen says, signing autographs and posing for pictures. More recently, the orange juice state has been home to O.J. “During the Civil War, fugitives and deserters ran to Florida.” “Florida just attracts outlaws – it always has,” said Hiaasen (pronounced Hi-ya-sun). “The idea of keeping a big lizard around to beat someone with appealed to me,” said Hiaasen, blue eyes twinkling.Īt The Post’s offices in New York this week, the lean, soft-spoken Florida native talked frankly about the state he loves – and its penchant for attracting the screw-ups who’ve inspired “Strip Tease,” “Tourist Season” and his other bestsellers. When a hurricane knocked out the freezer, “Claw,” as his friend called the icy beast, went bad, but not before Hiaasen had himself a story. Turns out, a fishing-guide friend of Hiaasen’s once kept a defunct lizard on ice on the chance that it might come in handy. Case in point: the frozen lizard with which the hero of “Basket Case” – Hiaasen’s ninth and newest novel – bludgeons a burglar.

“Usually the weirdest stuff in my books is the stuff I’ve purloined from real life,” said the longtime Miami Herald columnist and author. In Carl Hiaasen’s Florida, strippers wrestle in creamed corn, dolphins goose tourists and a guy keeps a large dead lizard in his freezer.

Tourist season and strip tease carl hiaasen