![]() As far as shill pieces go, you could do worse. The whole of Gopnik’s essay works to establish the bare essentials of the history of Florida crime fiction, then uses the second half to place Carl Hiaasen’s newest novel, Bad Monkey, into the established context. Where I take exception to Gopnik’s outlining of the Florida crime fiction family tree (Australian pine? Gumbo limbo?) is the suggestion that this brand of literature starts with MacDonald and ends (dissipates?) with Hiaasen. In short, I’m all in on Florida glare as its own pocket of genre. This speaks to Tony Montana, soaked in gore, aiming his pistol in the middle of Ocean Drive.įlorida glare not only evokes atmosphere much in the same way “noir” does, it also speaks to what the poet Nick Vagnoni refers to as “the brazen weirdness” of Florida. Hall’s debut novel, Under the Cover of Daylight, published in the 1980s, a decade that also saw monumental “Florida glare” novels from the likes of Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, Edna Buchanan, Thomas Sanchez, and Carl Hiaasen. This speaks to the thematic resonance of James W. ![]() This speaks to the age-old maxim about Florida: a sunny place for shady people. To quote from Gopnik, “Where in the noir tradition crimes took place, melodramatically, at night, here they take place, matter-of-factly, in the middle of the day.” ![]() As a designation with which to describe a brand of crime fiction, Florida glare is brilliant - pun not intended, but neither avoided. A Pink Floyd album cover in reverse darkness shooting in, brightness beaming out. noir, Gopnik posits, has since been transmuted as the fiction of Florida glare. He’s the kind of character Chandler would have created had he lived on Biscayne Bay instead of Bunker Hill. He’s meditative, eco-conscious, lives on a houseboat, and echoes Marlowe with equal doses cynicism and altruism. His Travis McGee is Chandler’s Marlowe with a suntan. MacDonald adores atmosphere like Chandler does, revels in detail and description, is a master craftsman of dialogue. Gopnik draws the expected line from the postwar Los Angeles model - shadows and neon, puddles in alleys, duplicitous dames threatening to bring the whole operation down - to the sun-soaked ‘60s of South Florida crime, beginning with John D. And when you talk about Florida crime fiction, the waters here run deep. What most caught my eye however, was Adam Gopnik’s “In the Back Cabana: The Rise and Rise of Florida Crime Fiction.” I’m from Florida, you see, and I get thrilled to the gills when someone looks to make sense of our literary heritage. It had killer fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie, and Ed Park, an excerpted Cormac McCarthy screenplay, and a Hammett reprint, as well as true crime stories by George Pelecanos and Joyce Carol Oates. IF YOU MISSED IT when it came out, The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue was subtitled “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and themed as such.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |