Crazy From the Heat : In Mystery Novelist Carl Hiaasen’s Florida, Crocodiles Eat Tourists, Eco-Terrorists Kidnap the Orange Bowl Queen, and Mickey Mouse is Filthy Vermin.

We’re sitting in this roadside fish-and-conch shack off Route 1 in North Key Largo, and the conversation has shifted from literature and the craft of writing to a subject closer to home: one of South Florida’s meaner cocaine dealers who, it seems, was born with no arms. Hands, yes. But no arms. His name? * “Flipper,” Carl Hiaasen says. * That’s enough, Carl. Stop it. Right now. * Hiaasen knows the effect this story is having. In his 15 years as a reporter and a columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has heard and seen his fair share of the mondo bizarro. Yet he never would have believed this story if he hadn’t actually beheld the poor wretch sitting at a bar with a baleful, murderous look in his eyes and a cool drink clasped between his fingers.

“Probably a thalidomide baby grown up,” Hiaasen continues. “And my friend keeps telling me this story about how this guy just got out of jail. I say, ‘For what?’ He says, ‘For stabbing a guy.’ And I say, ‘Come on. He’s disabled.’ And he says, ‘No, he got into a bar fight, reached down for his knife and ran into the other guy with it.’

“They send him off to jail, and then he goes on this work-release program where he can be near his family--and still deal his cocaine. But his work-release job is with this road gang. See, they stick these little flags in his hands. . . .”

Stop it, Carl! Stop it!

“I’m not kidding. I swear to you. This is true. All true. My friend told me they sent the guy back to jail. He’d been in another fight. So there it is, the world’s first thalidomide coke dealer. I wouldn’t put that in a book, because it’s just too sick. But it’s all true.”

It’s difficult to know which is harder to believe: that the story is true or that Hiaasen wouldn’t put it in one of his books. Because when he’s not turning out acerbic columns twice a week for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen (pronounced HIGH-uh-sen ) writes dark, mordantly funny crime novels in which the bizarre and the crazed are as much a part of the landscape as the Florida sunshine. His first three--”Tourist Season,” “Double Whammy” and “Skin Tight”--have generated thousands of loyal Hiaasen readers, stretching far beyond the Herald’s circulation area.

His fourth novel, “Native Tongue,” published in September, is Hiaasen’s first book for the blue-chip publishing house Alfred A. Knopf Inc., which has been enthusiastically pitching the novel as the author’s best yet, and it might well be. Already on the bestseller lists, it is certainly as funny, tautly plotted and as passionately opposed to the greed and avarice eating away at Hiaasen’s native state as his previous books. In this “rowdy, rollicking cartoon strip,” wrote Linda Wolfe in her New York Times Book Review article, “the events move so swiftly that you can miss an amputation or some other brutal act of sadism by blinking.”

Most of the action in “Native Tongue” takes place in the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a theme park built in North Key Largo by a mob snitch hiding out under an assumed name, “on the theory,” Hiaasen writes, “that South Florida was a place where just about any dirtbag would blend in with the existing riffraff.” It is this particular dirtbag’s ambition to make the park South Florida’s answer to Walt Disney World up north in Orlando.

Hiaasen writes: “The most powerful of powerful civic leaders clung to the myth that Mickey Mouse was responsible for killing the family tourist trade in South Florida, strangling the peninsula so that all southbound station wagons stopped in Orlando. . . . The Mouse’s sprawling, self-contained empire sucked tourists’ pockets inside out; they came, they spent until there was nothing left to spend, they went home happy. To lifelong Floridians, it was a dream come true, fleecing a snowbird in such a way that he came back for more.”

You can infer from this passage that Hiaasen isn’t too popular with the Florida chamber of commerce. And, likely, not with the Mouse people at Disney World either. “Like I care,” Hiaasen has said.

Amazing things start to happen at Amazing Kingdom because of a cheesy PR gimmick in which two rodents have their tongues dyed blue and are passed off as an endangered species the park is keeping in captivity to save from extinction. Two small-time burglars are hired by the head of a conservation club--a gray-haired old lady who packs a gun--to swipe the critters so they can be returned to their natural habitat. And from there, it just gets weirder and more complicated.

Throughout, Hiaasen manages to pile on the comedy without easy or gratuitous contrivance. He does so while writing caustic, Brueghelesque character studies such as this sketch of one of the novel’s bad guys: “Pedro Luz was a black-haired, pinheaded giant of a young man who had been fired by the Miami police for stealing cash and cocaine from drug dealers, then pushing them out of a Beechcraft high over the Everglades. Pedro Luz’s conviction had been overturned by an appeals court, and the charges ultimately dropped when the government’s key witness failed to appear for the new trial. The witness’s absence was later explained when bits and pieces of his body were found in a shrimper’s net off Key West, although there was no evidence linking this sad turn of events to Pedro Luz himself.”

This stuff reads so easily that if you didn’t know any better, you would think writing it was easy. It isn’t. And anyone who’s tried to grapple with making it plausible, making it entertaining and making a point at the same time, knows it isn’t.

For comparisons, one immediately thinks of the usual suspects: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, MacDonald (Ross and John D.), Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas and other masters in the American pantheon of crime writers. But Hiaasen also has ties to another hallowed American literary tradition, one that goes back about a century or so to Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, two crusading newspapermen who, like Hiaasen, wrote iconoclastic, irony-soaked fiction that both tickled and bit. Hiaasen’s columns, which provide a tighter focus and strike with even greater ferocity than his novels, are reminiscent in their taut pacing and laser-like intensity to those of Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko.

From a March, 1991, piece about the Miami Seaquarium’s plans to include a water slide and other gimmicks to bring in more tourists: “So the place needs a coat of paint and maybe a couple new fish tanks. But a wave machine? The Seaquarium sits on Biscayne Bay, for God’s sake. If some goofball wants waves, let him walk into the water and make his own. . . . Whoever thought of the water slide ought to be slathered in snapper guts and dangled headfirst in the shark moat. That I would pay to see.”

What’s bracing to Hiaasen’s fans--and, one suspects, a little scary to developers and politicians--is that he isn’t just popping off for effect. As Gene Weingarten, a former Herald colleague who is now an editor for the Washington Post’s Style section, says: “Most city columnists are paid handsomely to have two or three outrageous opinions a week, which leads to a prepackaged recipe of outrage for its own sake. Carl’s triumph as a columnist is that he writes with a dry sense of outrage that’s genuine.”

Besides giving him the chance to blow off steam, the column also offers Hiaasen a chance to find fresh ideas--or variations thereof--for his fiction. Says New York-based columnist Pete Hamill: “If you think of the columns as drawings and the novels as paintings, they make up an absolutely coherent and consistent world view. And it’s the world view that separates Carl, I think, from the rest of the pack.”

IN PERSON, HIAASEN SEEMS--AT FIRST, anyway--like a more sanguine fellow than his writings would suggest. His angular Norwegian features, rangy physique and slightly lopsided grin suggest a Fran Tarkenton with the edges sanded smooth. In fact, it’s not hard imagining him having played pro football. A wide receiver, maybe, though not the kind of speed merchant you use on third-and-longs. He’d be one of those cagey, glue-fingered types who run impeccably grooved patterns and somehow know where the ball’s going to land before the quarterback lets fly.

His loose and limber demeanor throws off minimal tension. Which was probably why, during his 1976-to-1985 stint as a reporter, he was often put in the role of “good cop” interviewer to somebody else’s “bad cop” reporter. In fact, “he was great at dealing with cops, especially DEA agents,” says Herald reporter Jeff Leen. “Those guys never want to talk to anybody about anything, especially reporters. But Carl could get them going the way nobody else could.”

“He’s a fantastic interviewer,” says Jim Savage, chief of the Herald’s investigative unit. “I can remember the series we did on drug smuggling in Key West, and he got Boog Powell, the former ballplayer who leases boats down there, to admit that if it weren’t for smuggling, he’d go out of business. Now that’s a helluva quote to get out of someone, and it’s harder to do than you think.”

Savage also cites Hiaasen’s active involvement in a 1982 investigation of a planned development in the previously unspoiled North Key Largo region. The series stopped the development and was, in Savage’s words, “one of the most successful investigations we’ve ever done.”

Yet for all his good-guy composure, all you have to do is get Hiaasen talking or writing about developers, dope dealers and various other forms of what he likes to call “human sludge” and what they’re doing to the physical and emotional terrain of his home turf, and he is no longer an easygoing fellow. He is at war.

You can feel the bile rising in his soul on a morning drive out to the Keys. Miami’s Overtown section, where blacks rioted in 1980, drifts into view while we roll along Interstate 836, prompting Hiaasen’s rueful reflections about the festering sore that is black-Latino relations in Miami. “Every night on television, you see Cubans arriving on rafts, welcomed with open arms, and on the same newscast, you see Haitians interdicted at sea and turned back. You can explain all the immigration laws you want to, but what it looks like is racism.”

The farther away from the city we go, the more bulldozers we see; also half-finished housing developments, all of which, for some reason, resemble Howard Johnson restaurants lumped together like mold formations. Maybe it’s because everything looks stagnant in this stifling humidity, but Greater Miami doesn’t look like the booming metropolis everyone thought it was in the 1980s.

It may be, Hiaasen says, because banks who loaded up on surplus cash poured it haphazardly into “projects where there’s no demand for housing, no demand for retail space. And what you have are dozens and I mean doz-- . . . hundreds of empty shopping centers broke or going broke, apartments that can’t be filled, townhouses that can’t be sold.

“But the bottom line to all this destruction and waste,” he says, his voice rising, “is the environment, which suffers every time you put up a new apartment complex, every time you build a highway to somewhere people aren’t going.”

And yet, he says, people are coming to Florida to live at an estimated net gain of about 1,000 a day--”a suicidal rate of growth,” Hiaasen says. “There are people coming here to escape either bad weather or bad economy up north. Why? We have no industry! We don’t produce anything except handguns. We are the gun-smuggling capital of the Free World. It’s like having a community whose sole industry is cancer. It’s not healthy growth, but growth for the sake of growth.”

There are many who would challenge such assertions, notably Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez, who recalls “going nuclear” in 1987 over Hiaasen’s claims on a nationally televised news show that there wasn’t anything wrong with rampant development in Florida that a hurricane couldn’t fix.

Since then, Suarez says, he’s read two of Hiaasen’s novels and found them and many of his columns “brilliant. And I support much of what he says about the environment. But I think sometimes he is guilty of overstating things.” Of Hiaasen’s effect on the area’s civic boosters, Suarez says, after a long pause, “I imagine he probably is stuck in their craw.”

About the only thing that gives him hope, Hiaasen says, is that Florida voters have started demanding that their politicians be ecologically minded. But that is not enough. It is Hiaasen’s dream that someday the rate of growth will be reversed, that people will actually be leaving Florida at the rate of 1,000 per day. “I’m doing my part,” he says, smiling crookedly, “to make it happen.”

If you doubt this, try reading Hiaasen’s four novels in succession. Start with “Tourist Season,” with its gruesome details of tourists being fed to alligators by environmental terrorists and a chamber of commerce poobah stuffed in a suitcase, strangled by a toy alligator. Then gnaw on “Double Whammy,” with its depictions of big-time sportfishing in central Florida and the lengths these “sportsmen” will pursue to nab a “big ‘un”--from illegally stocking their fishing holes to gutting and stringing up anybody who gets in their way. Then there’s “Skin Tight,” with its villainous, high-priced, incompetent plastic surgeon who can bribe whole commissions into covering up his crimes. The book also features one of Hiaasen’s most memorable creations, a 6-foot-9 hit man nicknamed Chemo, whose face was scarred in a bizarre electrolysis accident: The dermatologist experienced a seizure during the operation. The result, Hiaasen writes, left Chemo looking as if “somebody had glued Rice Krispies to every square centimeter of his face.” Chemo strangled the dermatologist.

All this may sound exaggerated. Yet, as Hiaasen has pointed out, Florida has always been a place where scoundrels and wastrels have found asylum. “The whole engine of the economy here has been greed and exploitation,” he says. “Take a beautiful place, and, if there’s water, you drain it. If there’s land, you chop it up into lots and figure out how high you can drive up the prices.”

“Even when Miami was this sleepy resort town that was closed half the year, there was strange and exotic stuff going on,” says Herald police reporter Edna Buchanan. “I think it’s because there’s no place left to run for people who come down here to escape something, whether it’s the weather or the law. Maybe that’s why they go crazy around here. Because they find there’s no place left to go. This is the jumping-off point.”

Buchanan should know. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her idiosyncratic reporting of Miami’s idiosyncratic crime scene. Despite the area’s long history of sleaze, slime and somewhat gothic violence, it’s only been in the last decade or so--with, of course, no little help from the “Miami Vice” TV series--that South Florida has achieved the kind of dubious status as leading literary scene of the crime once shared by New York and Los Angeles.

“Miami Vice” is gone now, as is much of the frothing hype it engendered. But the Florida crime novel continues to be written by people such as Hiaasen, John Katzenbach (“In the Heat of the Summer”), James W. Hall (“Bones of Coral”) and Elmore Leonard (“La Brava”).

In books like these, writes Herald book editor Debbie Sontag, “social satire is more important than who-done-it; absurdity defuses grit, sociopaths sprout like tropical weeds. And the setting crawls all over the plot, insisting, like a big-bellied, cigar-smoking tourism promoter, that South Florida is no mere backdrop.”

John D. MacDonald and Charles Willeford, both deceased, are the patron saints of this regional subgenre. MacDonald, the incurable romantic famed for creating handsome knight-errant Travis McGee, often used his novels as platforms to voice his concerns over what developers were doing to Florida. Willeford, the inscrutable pessimist, noted for creating toothless, dissolute detective Hoke Moseley, made the landscape of South Florida a surrealistic mural populated by blithe psychopaths and dreamers driven mad or bitter by the humidity and decadence.

Many of the writers who have worked the same territory as MacDonald and Willeford carry resonances of both writers in their books. But Hiaasen, with his environmentalist’s zeal and his reportorial eye for grotesquerie, may be the most perfect synthesis of the two.

Tony Hillerman, whose detective stories set on the Navajo reservations of New Mexico and Arizona have contributed to the regionalization of the crime-novel genre, wrote in his review of “Tourist Season” that Hiaasen is after something “different . . . from Willeford. He substitutes a kind of zaniness for Mr. Willeford’s black humor. He injects a half-jigger of parody into otherwise plain truth.”

AS A CHILD, THERE WERE THREE THINGS Carl Hiaasen liked doing better than anything: reading stories, writing stories and hunting for snakes.

He was born in 1953, in Fort Lauderdale. Both his grandfather and father were lawyers. The grandfather, who is alive and well at 97, was born just after the family migrated from Norway to North Dakota. Hiaasen figures it was the far Midwestern chill that prompted his granddad in 1922 to head to Florida, where he established Fort Lauderdale’s first law firm.

If either Carl’s father or grandfather were ever disappointed that he didn’t follow them into law, they never showed it. (As it happens, Hiaasen’s wife, Connie, a onetime surgical nurse, is now studying law.) In fact, Hiaasen’s father, who died 15 years ago, did everything he could to encourage his son’s love for words, which surfaced when 4-year-old Carl developed the habit of reading aloud the Herald sports page every morning at the breakfast table.

“My dad even got me a typewriter for my sixth birthday, bless his heart,” Hiaasen recalls. “That’s how I taught myself to type.” He developed a taste for narrative writing from books, leaping from the Hardy Boys to Jack London. Later, it wasn’t that far a jump to John D. MacDonald. In fact, it could be argued that Hiaasen’s books are boys adventure novels informed by a Restoration playwright’s expansive sense of human absurdity. Women who otherwise enjoy reading Hiaasen point out this boys-romance mind-set as the possible reason he behind his characterizations of women as beautiful bimbos or gorgeous good sports.

For all his reading, Hiaasen was no indoor kid. He spent a lot of time along the fringes of Florida’s Everglades, gazing at alligators, fishing for sea bass and hunting water mocassins. Then the big trucks began chewing away at the terrain, laying down concrete and generally ruining Hiaasen’s childhood. As he and his friends grew into adolescence, their play would include such acts of rebellion as hijacking land-survey stakes. It was fun. It was also futile.

Hiaasen carried on his battles in print. At Plantation High, he put out a satirical publication, “More Trash,” which the school’s grown-ups didn’t find terribly funny. He attended Emory University in Atlanta. While there, he helped ghostwrite a doctor’s novel drawn loosely from the doctor’s experiences. The book was published, sold to the movies--and was only recently adapted and released under the title, “Doc Hollywood.”

He transferred to the University of Florida in 1972 to take advantage of the school’s journalism program. (His son Scott, 20, is now a journalism major.) After graduating in 1974, Hiaasen worked for Cocoa Today (now Florida Today), a daily paper based near Cape Canaveral. Two years later, he finally achieved his dream of working for the Herald, where his rise from general-assignment reporter to investigative reporter to columnist was almost seamless and somewhat ballistic. It’s hard to find anyone on the Herald staff who begrudges Hiaasen’s success. All they do is shake their heads over how easy he makes it seem. “I like Carl,” Weingarten says. “But I also hate him, because anyone that good-looking who can write that well shouldn’t be so damned successful, too.”

After writing news stories that always had unhappy endings, Hiaasen developed a hankering to write his own stories with his own endings. And his own kind of revenge. “If I want a crooked county commissioner to get hit by a truck in Chapter 17, I’ll write about him getting hit by a truck, and I feel great after writing that scene. It purges.”

After collaborating on three taut thrillers with fellow reporter William Montalbano (now The Times’ Rome Bureau chief), Hiaasen decided, in 1985, to write his own novel. The result, “Tourist Season,” remains probably the most personal of Hiaasen’s novels thus far. Its villain (or hero, depending on your point of view) is Skip Wiley, iconoclastic columnist for a Miami daily, whose anger over the rape of Florida’s land pushes him far over the edge. He forms a terrorist group that murders a few tourists, tosses snakes onto a cruise ship and plots to kidnap the Orange Bowl queen and kill her in a ritual sacrifice. The idea (and see if this doesn’t sound familiar) is to frighten prospective residents away from Florida.

Wiley’s foil is Brian Keyes, a former reporter turned private investigator, who, though sympathetic to Wiley’s basic concerns, is too compassionate, too aware of the gray areas in human behavior, to buy into Wiley’s ferociously Manichaean view of the world. Hiaasen says you wouldn’t be wrong if you figured that he is equal parts Keyes and Wiley; that no matter how worked up he gets about things, there’s another side that reminds him that nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

“Not too many people have pointed that out,” he says. “What they usually ask me is when I’m bringing Wiley back.” He shrugs. Poor Wiley ended up sacrificing himself instead of the Orange Bowl queen.

NO MATTER WHAT HIAAsen says about his maintaining balance, you sometimes wonder how anyone who writes the kind of satire that, at its fiercest, can strip paint off a diesel, can be as disciplined, as controlled, as normal as he seems.

He manages, for instance, to maintain a tight working schedule away from the newsroom, writing his fiction on nights and weekends in his suburban Lauderdale home. If anything drives him cuckoo, it’s “this goddamn pink wallpaper in my office. I think it was the girl’s room when the previous owners lived here, and there’s all this Laura Ashley wallpaper around me.”

He wishes his schedule gave him more time to read for pleasure. Not only does he like to read writers in his own genre, but he also mentions Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harry Crews and William Faulkner. “Reading those people always makes me humble. I feel like I have a long ways to go, and it makes me want to work even harder to be better than I am.”

It’s sentiments like this that make you wonder about this guy even more. Humility? Surely someone who has chased as many demons as Hiaasen must have a few loose threads somewhere. It can’t be all good-guy modesty and manly honor. Right?

Well, actually, it is. He drinks nothing stronger than an occasional beer and spends most of his R&R; time fishing. “He’s exactly what he seems,” Buchanan says, though she isn’t alone in wondering what he would do if he didn’t have a formal outlet for his spleen venting.

“If anything, it’s the stability of his life that gives him ground from which he could measure the lunacy he writes about,” says Hamill. “If he were as loony as the guys he creates, they would look banal in print.”

Still, at this point in his so-far-so-smooth career, one wonders how long he can carry on full-throttle as both columnist and novelist. Hiaasen has been asking himself the same thing lately. If his life gets too wound up, one of those vocations may have to go--and it might very well be the Herald gig. “It’s hard for me to even think about because my heart is in the newsroom and always will be, corny as that sounds,” he says. “I grew up reading the Herald. It was where all my heroes worked. It’s like my second home.”

And there’s still his ongoing, two-front war against the concrete mixers, bulldozers and various crimes against the Florida terrain. Hiaasen often wonders, though, whether the war may already be lost.

The fragile ecosystem of Florida’s unprotected wilderness is critically, perhaps mortally, wounded. Just recently, it was discovered that some panthers, which are Florida’s state land mammal and already on the edge of extinction, were afflicted with mercury poisoning--the same malady that rendered the largemouth bass, Florida’s state fish, unfit for human consumption.

It must make Hiaasen sometimes wish for the days when he and friend Clyde Ingalls harassed developers in their beloved Everglades. Ingalls was one of Hiaasen’s best friends in high school. He committed suicide in his senior year at Plantation High partly because, as Hiaasen recalls, “he was so depressed about Vietnam, about what was being done to the land, about everything.”

Hiaasen dedicated “Double Whammy” to the memory of Ingalls. In that book, Skink, one of Hiaasen’s most memorable supporting characters, makes his first appearance. Skink, who returns in “Native Tongue,” is a huge one-eyed hermit who makes his home in the swamps, shoots at airplanes, lives off road kill and reads the classics by the light of an abandoned Plymouth. In his previous life, Skink was an idealistic Florida governor who vanished after his reforms were ground to dust by greedy land grabbers and corrupt officials. He furtively carries on his fight from the swamps, where he and the mosquitoes coexist in Thoreau-like bliss.

Many have tried to figure out who was the inspiration for Skink; even former Florida governor and now U.S. Sen. Bob Graham was convinced that Skink was based on him. Hiaasen says he wasn’t; Skink is, Hiaasen imagines, what his friend Ingalls would have become if he hadn’t died: “not the running-for-governor part,” Hiaasen says, “but in his uncompromising way of looking at the world.”

It may be, as fellow mystery writer Rex Burns has written, that Hiaasen is helping bring to life “an Age of Satire in American literature (through) the lowly stable of genre fiction.” But that accomplishment probably wouldn’t feel as good to Hiaasen as reeling in a stupid, corrupt land despoiler and mounting him on his wall--in memory of Clyde.