Play It Again, Carl

Journalist-turned-novelist Carl Hiaasen has carved a nice niche for himself. The world never seems to get enough of his witty and socially biting crime fiction satirizing his Florida base. With a theatrical adaptation of his 1997 novel, Lucky You, set to make its international premiere in Edinburgh, followed by a run at the Oxford Playhouse, the London Times offers up a large-ish feature about Hiaasen’s life and work. As the piece recalls,

Hiaasen joined The Miami Herald in 1976, when he was just 23, and was soon working as an investigative reporter, the job he says he loved the most. At that time, cocaine was being moved into Miami by the planeload, and the Colombian “Cocaine Cowboys” terrorised the city, turning the once sleepy resort into America’s murder capital. His first solo novel, Tourist Season, was published in 1986. (Before that, he wrote three conventional thrillers about Miami and the cocaine wars with William Montalbano.) He has kept up an intense pace ever since: 10 more adult novels, two children’s books and two nonfiction titles--The Downhill Lie, about a return to golfing in his fifties; and Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World, a stinging diatribe against the Walt Disney Company, which he called “an agent of pure wickedness”. He has also written weekly columns for The Miami Herald since 1985, two collections of which have been published, Kick Ass (1999) and Paradise Screwed (2001). Hiaasen would be nothing without newspapers. He loves and believes in them and rails against hapless, shortsighted publishers, including his own.

People who know Hiaasen well say his relentless drive is fuelled in part by fears that he may not have time to say all he wants. He is shadowed by the early deaths of his father, who died at 50, and one of his closest friends, the musician Warren Zevon, whose best-known song was [“]Werewolves of London[”], and who died in 2003 at the age of 56. Hiaasen has two children, a son from his first marriage who has followed in his footsteps and is now an investigative reporter on The Miami Herald, and a young son from his second marriage.

Among the best parts of that Times piece is its look back at the film adaptation of his 1993 novel, Strip Tease, and its account of how Lucky You was staged. Says Hiaasen:

“Somehow, they preserved the anarchy and madness of the novel, but within a much more, frankly, sophisticated structure than I had been working in.”

“Carl had initial concerns about an adaptation,” admits the producer Katharine Doré. But she and fellow producer Jon Plowman, head of comedy at the BBC until 2007, director and co-writer Matthew Francis, one-time artistic director of the Greenwich Theatre, and co-writer Denis Calandra, a theatre professor at the University of South Florida, pressed on for the very reasons Hollywood has had problems with Hiaasen’s work. Doré says Lucky You “offered a crazy plot played out by a bunch of outlandish characters with a central theme of stupidity and greed, informed by Carl’s unique social satire”. The story features two of Hiaasen’s most splendidly deranged, bottom-feeding villains: Bodean “Bode” Gazzer, a lobster thief, and his sidekick Chub, who makes a living forging handicapped-parking permits.

“It was inevitable that the poacher and the counterfeiter would bond,” Hiaasen writes, “sharing as they did a blanket contempt for government, taxes, homosexuals, immigrants, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work.”

You’ll find the Times’ full profile of Hiassen here. And click here to watch Hiaasen talk about the theatrical version of Lucky You.