Once he had unleashed the full scope of his spleen he realised that
Once he had unleashed the full scope of his spleen, he realised that there was no going back to the purported objectivity of serious reporting. The books, he says more than once during our conversation, were a kind of psychotherapy for him. “The novels were always, to my mind, something I did on the side, just to work out these demons Then you end up profiting from it. And, in my own defence, the one way I would rationalise it is that it does get the gospel out.”We are talking Old Testament, I think. Hiaasen relishes the iniquity of his enemies – he once described the Disney Corporation as “an agent of pure wickedness” – and cherishes their punishment.
These are novels in which the unrighteous are smitten, and smitten with a divine ingenuity. When I ask Hiaasen whether he had ever visited his wrath on the ungodly more directly, he denies it. “My characters have done certain things that I wish I would have done, and I can say that they’ve done certain things that I know have been done in real life. But most of what I do is venting; the legal outlets are always preferable.”He is an unusual mixture of courteous decorum and sudden spasms of verbal violence, a man who can talk about “cussing” one moment (when describing the children’s book he’s writing) and then describe how he “just wanted to tee off on the fuckers”, when recalling his treatment of white supremacists in his novel Lucky You.The disgust you glimpse at these moments is not a marketing ploy or a literary device – it’s the real thing, and there’s nothing wishy-washy about its expression. Hiaasen has witnessed an execution by electric chair and experienced the nightmares that follow, but his objection to the death penalty is practical, not moral. “Ted Bundy cost the State of Florida $5m and 10 or 11 years just to try the sorry son of a bitch, and it would have been cheaper to stick him in a cell and forget about him,” he explains, while making it clear that if execution was cost-effective and 100 per cent foolproof, he wouldn’t have much of a problem with it.Basket Case – in which the indignation has temporarily shifted from ecological vandalism to the degradation of American journalism – strikes me as a mellower book than some of its predecessors; vanilla mayhem rather than any wilder flavours.
Hiaasen puts this down partly to the fact that he was writing for the first time in the first person, but he acknowledges that his novels – unlike the columns he writes – are a place where everything can be guaranteed to turn out right. “One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is that you can make the good guys get what they deserve and the bad guys are always going to get what they deserve. It doesn’t happen often enough in real life.”His humour, he agrees, is an analgesic and there are limits to its therapeutic effectiveness. The other clipping tucked inside Basket Case, somewhere around the section detailing a night-time chase on Lake Okeechobee, is a report on a brother and sister from the same area, who were recently discovered living with their 13 children and grandchildren and the corpse of their dead infant in a coffin in the living room.It’s another corroboration of Hiaasen’s theory that Florida is a hot-spot for human derangement.