Miami voice

Long-time Carl Hiaasen readers might’ve expected the Floridian crime writer and satirist to return to the fray in the wake of the 2000 presidential election fiasco and last year’s Anthrax scares with teeth bared, pinballing his prose off every target from Bush to Bin Laden and all points in between. Not so. His latest book Basket Case is probably his most whimsical and warm-hearted novel to date, but by Hiaasen’s standards, this means he only tears a new butthole in the newspaper and rock ‘n’ roll industries rather than the usual politico bozos of his home state.

“When I write these books I always gotta be mad about something or they’re not funny,” Hiaasen considers. “That’s what satire is, it’s all gotta come from that great gouge of outrage about something, ’cos you’re using humour as a weapon and you have to have a pretty good target for it.

“In the book it’s a much more personal agenda for Jack (Tagger, journalist), he’s gotta get his life and his career back. This is really about a guy who’s just trying to save his ass. But now he sees that the institution he loved very much, the newspaper, is shrinking around him and he’s dealing with yuppie millionaires more interested in Wall Street than readers.”

The decline of print journalism is obviously a subject close to Hiaasen’s heart (he still writes for the Miami Herald), but how much of this hankering back to an age of integrity is nostalgia and how much is actually real?

“Probably 75% nostalgia,” he admits. “But I will say this: because my first newspaper job right out of college was in 1974, one of the first stories I had to cover in our community was the resignation of Richard Nixon, who was brought down by two newspaper reporters, so I was coming into the business not with the view that every story would be Watergate, but that there was a lot of skulduggery and hanky panky, so your mission was to go out and kick ass.

“You’ve certainly had your share of corruption here in Dublin to know that this is not a disease that’s unique to America. But then as time passed in our country a lot of this great ambition ebbed away and a lot of newspapers shut down their investigations teams, closed their foreign bureaus, all that stuff . . . y’know our job is real simple – you deliver information to people who need it and deserve to have it.”

Hiaasen also has a keen nose for the rot in rock ‘n’ roll. Basket Case is peppered with a whole cast of all too credible cretins, including a wickedly spot-on caricatures of a no-mark “producer” by the name of Loreal, and a ruthlessly ambitious wannabe star called Cleo.

Researching the new novel, Hiaasen consulted with friends who’d been through the belly of the rock ‘n’ roll beast – Roger McGuinn, Michael Krumper of Artemis Records, not to mention his old buddy Warren Zevon, with whom he co-wrote a couple of songs on the Mutineer album a few years back. In fact, a song called ‘Basket Case’ is slated for inclusion on the forthcoming Zevon record.

“How we met is he came to one of my book signings in LA one time,” Carl recalls. “I had a character in a novel who likes Warren’s music, I just mentioned that in passing, had him playing some song. So I’m signing books and I look up and he goes, ‘I just came to thank you for mentioning my music in the book, it was really nice of you’. It was the nicest thing, we just started chatting and we became friends.

“And he was like a regular at this bookstore, he was one of their best customers, reads everything. Usually the more difficult and gloomy the better he likes it. He’s off reading Thomas Mann and he’s wondering why he’s not a bundle of cheer!”