In 1986, the year John D. MacDonald died, Carl Hiaasen published his first solo novel. The following year, Tim Dorsey took a reporting job with the Tampa Tribune, from which he retired in 1999 to write fiction full time.
No one writing about modern-day Florida can avoid writing about crime, and no one writing about Florida crime can avoid the shadows of MacDonald and Hiaasen. Born a decade after Hiaasen, though, Dorsey didn’t grow up wearing flowers in his head. He came of age during the sour dawn of Morning in America. While Hiaasen has never really seemed to believe in the despair he claims to feel, Dorsey has no such difficulty. While he shares his predecessors’ anger at the despoilers of everything decent and admirable in Florida and America, he harbors none of their residual shreds of hope that the despoilers might be stopped, or even slowed down. His series spokesman, Serge Storms, sums up Dorsey’s worldview: “‘That’s what I keep trying to tell everyone. Life makes no sense! The world is a madhouse! Once you accept that, you can start being happy. Expect logic and fairness, and it’s nothing but a heartbreak.’”
While he has created some periodically reappearing characters, Hiassen never chose to take on a series. His protagonists have mostly been outsiders, ejected from law enforcement or journalism and making a go of it on their own while retaining a few necessary contacts within the establishment – usually cops or editors.
MacDonald’s Travis McGee operates further outside. He’s able to do so partly because he owns his own dwelling, a houseboat won in a poker game, and partly because he takes on cases that provide him with often hefty paydays. If he needs help from within the straight world, his friend Meyer, a prominent economist, can usually hook him up.
From his first novel on, Dorsey committed himself to a series character. Serge Storms is often called an “anti-hero,” but he’s more accurately described as a highly ethical and imaginative obsessive-compulsive psychotic serial killer. A creature of impulse, he pursues a wild variety of trails in search of Florida historical sites, from which he collects various memorabilia. His whereabouts prove unpredictable to law enforcement, and his finances remain mysterious, though he occasionally scores large, ill-gotten sums from drug dealers and other nefarious sorts. His sidekick throughout most of the series is Coleman, loyal but only accidentally effectual, due to his perpetually stoned and drunk condition.
In early books in the series, Serge’s diatribes tended to derive from the author’s reporting career and concentrate on serious social and economic flaws. For example, in Florida Roadkill a revolting minor character, whose major plot function is to serve as the victim of an even worse woman, is described thus: “Wilbur’s job was to deny insurance claims filed with the Family First Health Maintenance Organization (‘We’re here because we care’). As Family First’s top claims denial supervisor, Wilbur handled the really difficult patients, the ones who demanded the company fulfill its policies.” Dorsey delivers his view of HMOs as legalized protection rackets, who make their profits by denying protection, with deadpan good cheer. His summary of Max Minimum, whose job is to threaten retirement park residents with eviction in order to extort bogus fees and unnecessary repair charges from them, is less jolly: “The retiree was being cannibalized by the new American, an untested, ungrateful, wet-behind-the-ears, fast-buck shit-ass like Minimum, who didn’t know what had gone into the country under his feet and wouldn’t care if he found out.”
Dorsey will certainly not be everyone’s cup of bile. He’s a film buff, and his books are filled with allusions to sometimes obscure Hollywood productions from the 30s and 40s. More significantly, he’s adopted the montage and the flashback from film technique, and uses them sometimes to excess. Flashbacks work more easily in film than on the page, because film can convey a great deal more necessary information without exposition than can written narrative. Dorsey tries manfully to emulate film, sometimes embedding three or four flashbacks within each other, which sometimes requires an awful lot of work from the reader to keep the timelines straight.
Dorsey has another penchant that may irritate some readers as much as it does me. He’s evidently a devotee of what are called “classic” cars of various years, makes and models, contemptuous of other makes and models the car culture has found wanting. He appears to believe that a character’s choice of vehicle speaks volumes about his nature. He frequently identifies characters not by name or physical description but by telling the reader that such and such a vehicle is arriving or departing a scene. Since I scarcely remember what kind of vehicle I currently own, having always bought whatever one that would get me reliably from here to there, I keep having to leaf back to see who’s driving what, which gets annoying.
But the real reward for at least this reader in Dorsey’s books comes not from the convoluted, post-modern plots or the mostly one-dimensional characters, but from Dorsey’s gift for comic dialog that often contains deadly accurate snapshots of modern culture. The books are full of dialog as fast and startling and funny as that in the great Marx Brothers films, full of the humor generated by people talking at cross-purposes. One example:
“‘And another thing that pisses me off,’ said Serge. ‘Ticket companies. Like when you go to buy your Skynyrd tickets online, they make you re-type some made-up security word that’s written all crazy, like you’re trying to read a newspaper through a motel-door peephole, and I can never figure out the fucking thing. Does that say “Quittle shnatzume”? And then I get one of the letters wrong and they give me another chance. “Xydolak prunsassi,” and I get that wrong. “Btsabi glohelf,” “Menrtracu Twatinger.” And by the time I type it right, the only remaining seats are in the top row, and then I destroy another keyboard.’
Coleman was wearing a felt jester’s hat, and the bells jingled as he chugged a beer bong. ‘I hear they’ll soon have pot vending machines in Colorado.’
‘Coleman?’
‘What.’
‘I was talking to you.’
‘Right, we’re having a conversation. You said something and then I said something.’
‘No,’ said Serge. ‘What you said had absolutely nothing to do with what I just said. In a conversation, it at least has to be vaguely related.’
‘Really?’ Coleman wiped foam from his mouth. ‘That would explain a lot.’
‘Like if I was at a black-tie charity ball with canapes and spinach dip, and I bring up the ticket bullshit to a socialite in a strapless gown with an apple martini, she’d volley back a cultured response about her favoririte Skynyrd concert or motel peepholes or that she once employed a lotion boy of unknown origin named Mentracu Twatinger.’
‘That’s why they’re so rich.’
‘The whole key to social climbing is not having spinach in your teeth.’ Serge killed the rest of his coffee. ‘See, the beauty of a good conversation is that it may wander all over the place, and after numerous chess-move segues’ – Serge made a gentle curving motion with his right hand – ‘then you can work the conversation back around to the pot machines. Let’s try again.’
‘Okay,’ said Coleman. ‘Fuck ticket companies.’
‘That’s better,’ said Serge.
‘I heard they make us type the weird security words because robots were buying up all the best tickets.’
‘And what’s with that convenience charge?’ said Serge. ‘It’s so big you’d expect the president of the ticket company to fly in and hand deliver them himself.’
‘Except I’ve never seen robots watching a concert.’
‘Because they’re all sitting in the front row,’ said Serge. ‘My thinking is if the robots have figured that out, then bad seats for Beyonce are the least of our problems.’
‘And God forbid if they get to the pot machines,’ said Coleman.
‘Now, this is a conversation,”‘ said Serge.
‘How far is it to Colorado?’” (Shark Skin Suite)
While Dorsey is usually (and mindlessly) characterized by his publisher and by reviewers as some kind of Wild and Crazy Guy, his humor, like most great humor, is essentially conservative. He views the past with reverence for its accomplishments and creations, the present with jaundiced skepticism about its purportedly Revolutionary Improvements. For example:
“Technology has just passed our survival instinct, and the country is spinning on a stationary existential axis of make-believe importance. We text about a Tweet of a YouTube video posted on Facebook with a clip of Glee about not texting that we just texted about. Instead of actual life, we’re now living an air-guitar version of life.” (Tiger Shrimp Tango) For another example:
(A psychiatrist interviews a police detective who dresses and speaks as if he were Spillane’s Mike Hammer) –
“The doctor clicked open a pen. ‘So you’re only occasionally living in this noir fantasy world?’
‘I prefer to think of it as an alternate lifestyle,’ said Mahoney. ‘Society hasn’t caught up.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Today it’s a sickness, tomorrow you get a pride parade. I’ve started working on my float.’” (Hurricane Punch) For a third:
“They left their car at the restaurant and darted through traffic into the giant new bookstore in town, Barnes & Borders . . . . Serge led Coleman over to the health section and the display of books at the end of an aisle. The Sugar-Busters Diet, The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, Ten Days to a New You, Rediscover the Old You, Yoga a Go-Go, Natural Remedies That Can Kill You, Burn Fat Through Exercise, Prescription for Peak Performance, The Peak Performance Myth, Declare War on Love Handles, Surrender to Success, The Low-Expectations Revolution, Calcium Crackdown, Strong Colon for Public Speakers, Take a Pass on Bypass, Cooking Right 4 Unwanted Guests, The Complete Menopause Vacation Planner, Eat All You Want and Ignore Everyone, Time Out for a Breakdown, 101 Desserts for Multiple Personalities, and Eliminate Stress Through Hysterical Screaming.
‘Look at how these are shelved. What a mess!’ Serge began aligning books.
A customer mistook him for an employee.
‘Can you help me find the self-help books?’
‘No.’ (Triggerfish Twist)
Since his first novel, Dorsey has produced at least one each year, and their manic energy hasn’t noticeably diminished. Serge, though, could be said to have mellowed somewhat. In recent books, he’s seemed to find dreaming up outlandish methods for killing social excrescences an unwelcome distraction from his life mission of recapturing Florida’s rapidly disappearing history. Oh, he keeps his hand in (sometimes literally), and Dorsey in his own voice hasn’t become much more forgiving of the country’s apparent direction:
Senior member of a law firm to a jury consultant who has fallen down on his job:
“‘Your research should have shown that half the poor people in this country hate the other half! Just listen to talk radio for five seconds!’
A timid hand went up. ‘Why do they hate each other?’
‘Because it’s how rich politicians get elected these days! Don’t you understand the whole divide-and-blame game? “Pay no attention to my campaign donors, lobbyists and gerrymandered voting districts that have rigged the system. All your problems are really caused by that other poor asshole standing next to you, getting a free ride and hating Christmas”‘” (Shark Skin Suite).
Though the tide of sleaze and corruption and greed appears to have terminally breached every moral levee, Dorsey can’t seem to stop remarking its inexorable progress, pointing it out with the humor that grows from telling the truth in the plainest language. He just can’t quit reporting the truth, though only fiction has allowed him to tell it as he sees it. I hope he never does quit.
