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In This Section

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The Voice of Music City Music writer Craig Havighurst chronicles the birth and near-death of the Opry’s radio home

Gilligan's Island In her first novel, a pioneer of gender studies explores the isolation of love

 

 

In This Issue

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Episode 120

The View From the Equator Vanderbilt organizes a landmark show of a leading Ecuadorian artist

The Voice of Music City Music writer Craig Havighurst chronicles the birth and near-death of the Opry’s radio home

Gilligan's Island In her first novel, a pioneer of gender studies explores the isolation of love

Death to Damages Nursing home industry looking to lawmakers to protect shareholders from residents’ lawsuits

Outlawing the Poor Nashville’s new class war pits the down-and-out against up-and-comers and their powerful allies

A Very, Very, Very Fine House It’s all in the family at Tandy Wilson and Anne Kostroski’s restaurant—and on Sundays, it’s family style

 

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by Michael Ray Taylor

Take a character and a prose style strongly reminiscent—if not totally derivative—of Hunter S. Thompson at his wigged-out best, set both amid the decadent and depraved sunscape of southern Florida, shake vigorously, add a colorful paper umbrella, and you have the recipe for most Florida crime fiction since the death of John D. McDonald.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Hiaasen perfected the Gonzo mix with Tourist Season and the raucous novels that followed it. Elmore Leonard, James W. Hall and Randy Wayne White have all offered reasonable facsimiles. Over the past decade, the rising star of Florida crime fiction, Tim Dorsey, has taken the standard recipe and done it one better: He makes every character—reluctant hero or murderous psychopath, sweet old lady or coked-out stripper—into some version of Dr. Gonzo. The result is a hilarious stream of absurd behavior that makes the near-complete absence of a traditional crime plot not only forgivable but beside the point. Dorsey simply sets up his little Hunter S. Thompsons like a rack of billiard balls, then smacks them all into motion. The result is not so much a plot as a rapid-fire collision of expanding, dialogue-driven story lines, all of which more or less bounce around and fall into neat little holes by book’s end.

As in Dorsey’s previous nine novels, the cue ball that sets the characters of Atomic Lobster (William Morrow, 352 pp., $24.95) scattering is Serge A. Storms, a vigilante and Florida history buff so Thompsonesque that it’s hard to decide whether he is more like Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam or Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Serge and his substance-abusing sidekick, Coleman, have set out to protect mild-mannered Jim Davenport—the novel’s straight man—from a redneck killer, just released from prison, who blames the clueless suburbanite for all his ills. Meanwhile, a group of old ladies has found cruise ships cheaper and more fun than Tampa retirement homes, eventually getting mixed up in an oceanic smuggling ring.

At the center of Dorsey’s brand of drug-loving, authority-defying prose resides a soul on fire over the corruption and hypocrisy of a corporate, consumer-driven society. There is no corner of America more emblematic of consumerism and selfishness than the real estate developments and tourist traps of 21^st century Florida, and the venue provides Dorsey with a backdrop that allows, beneath the constant cheap yucks and a lot of extremely bad behavior, an actual, even noble, message to emerge. “It’s the decline of the Florida shopping experience,” Serge laments while racing to kidnap a shopping center mugger for a vigilante experience involving a coin-operated baseball pitching machine. “Old ladies get mugged, no more S&H Green Stamps.”

Dorsey appears 7 p.m. Feb. 25 at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.