Basket Case
by Carl Hiaasen
Charles Dickens fans who come to twentieth (and twenty-first) century fiction must feel ambivalent about Hiaasen. He has the Dickens gift for making the reader see vividly the scene he writes about, and by virtue of his background in journalism he shares with Dickens the research skills that make a work like Oliver Twist so immediately appealing. He doesn't shy from telling ugly truths and making unpopular arguments, either.
What's more, Hiaasen ties his characters, his settings and his plots to special places: He lays the geography and politics of South Florida out for the reader as plainly as Dickens did the map of England, with a focus on Greater Miami as clear as Dickens' focus on London. Some parts he loves and describes lovingly; others he abhors.
Hiaasen's previous novels have portrayed drug dealers, fools in high office, mistreated wildlife, bribetakers, idiots in both the technical and extended senses, people who can't catch a break, and people who have caught all kinds of breaks but have not yet been caught doing it. Taking one thing with another, you can't help comparing the two writers.
Unlike Dickens, distressingly unlike Dickens, Hiaasen is free to describe scenes that might have driven people in the nineteenth century to desperate measures such as burning his works. Or his house. Grisly deaths, billion-dollar thefts, graphic sex with consent and without, maimings, lethal road rage, these are all in the picture he builds. It's enough to give the Dickensians brain fever.
Basket Case displays Hiaasen's raised consciousness of the power of money but lacks the exuberance of earlier works such as Native Tongue. He has turned from the mainstream novel of dismemberment and peculation to the murder mystery. It's no loss to the crime genre, but also no gain to readers who have come to relish Hiaasen's well-crafted scenes of cascading loopiness.
Jack Tagger, a reporter who mortally offended his publisher, now grinds out obituaries for a Florida paper. He gets hooked by conflicting stories about the death of musician Jimmy Stoma and talks his editor out of the time and resources he'll need to investigate it. Dubious about the bona fides of Stoma's young widow, he becomes entangled with her bodyguard and her producer. There's a puzzling disappearance, the manifestation of a 90-year-old retired obituary writer, a chase (airboat vs. bass boat), a kidnapping, a small mystery about Jack's father's death, a disinterment, and so forth. (Even a book that isn't Hiaasen's highwater mark prompts phrasing like "a disinterment and so forth.")
I think by choosing to write in the genre Hiaasen ruled out some of his best material. I'll reread Stormy Weather with pleasure, but this one goes to the bottom of the stack.
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Basket Case