Razor Girl. Book 2 of 2 Andrew Yancy series. Carl Hiaasen. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2019. 432 pages.
Stormy Weather. Book of 3 of 7 Skink series. Carl Hiaasen. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2021. 448 pages.
Florida Roadkill. Book 1 of 26 Serge Storms series. Tim Dorsey. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006.
I went for another run through some "Florida Man" fiction recently: two Carl Hiaasen titles that I found at a used bookstore (a rarity to find them on a shelf, I'm told) and a Tim Dorsey title. Dorsey passed away in November at age 62 and has been called the "Father of Florida Man Fiction." Again, they're fast, often fun, poolside or beach reads, not exactly memorable, or even distinguishable, or life-changing. More defining genre characteristics come to mind. Here are some more "Florida Man fiction" commonalities:
1. Everybody in Florida is an alcoholic, sex addict, and/or drug addict.
2. Everybody in Florida is a scammer, con artist, criminal, or liar.
3. Many, many Floridians have Daddy issues, both male and female characters.
4. One reason they're so popular among Floridians and regular visitors is that they are chock full of real-life locations or very thinly-disguised real locations with fake names. Every paragraph contains the names of local restaurants, bars, hotels/motels, highways and other landmarks. The reader can easily picture the location and feel a familiarity because they've been there.
5. Most books seem to contain at least one character who is an outspoken environmentalist, valiantly trying to sound the alarm over overdevelopment, even resorting to violence if necessary.
6. Each book contains truly inventive and violent methods of assaulting, torturing, or murdering people. It seems as if "Florida Man fiction" writers have a really sick and twisted side of their personalities that they successfully exorcise by writing.
7. Florida Man fiction authors like to name check each other and plug each other's books in their own books. It's quite a tight clique.
As formulaic as the writing is, I do have to admit that a stampeding herd of Ernest Hemingway look-alikes (Dorsey) is pure genius.
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The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling, and the MGM Publicity Machine. E.J. Fleming. McFarland & Company, 2004. 325 pages.
Think back on all the scandals you've heard of in the entertainment industry. All of them, the most disgusting and disturbing and shocking. Then consider that, no matter what rumors or stories you've heard, NOTHING compares to the real-life true scandals that occurred routinely in Hollywood under the old studio system: slander, libel, rape, perversion, drugs, alcohol, and murder. And a huge chunk of it happened at MGM studios, at the direction of studio head Louis B. Mayer and his closest aides, Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling. Mannix and Strickling were MGM's "Fixers." For three decades, when MGM stars and employees were involved in criminal activities, trapped in a sex scandal, got into an automobile accident, or caused some sort of public scene, they didn't call police or ambulances or doctors. They called Mannix or Strickling, and the fixers took over. They sent the proper "authorities" with bags of money to pay off any witnesses or injured parties in order to keep the event out of the news. In order to fix the problems, policemen, nurses, doctors, ambulance attendants, reporters, bartenders, servers, morgue attendants, medical examiners, and district attorneys were all paid by MGM to report misbehavior to the fixers and to hide it from the public.
Fleming has published numerous books about Hollywood scandals over decades, and he writes in the introduction of this book that he only published stories that he was able to corroborate with evidence. There were many more stories that he did not write because of lack of corroboration. The stories that he does include are enough to destroy any positive feelings you might have had about the "Golden Days of Hollywood" or about the legendary stars of that era. Fleming paints a picture of a Hollywood populated by closeted gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who were often forced into "lavender marriages" to conceal their truths from the public, drug addicts and alcoholics, rapists, pedophiles, bullies, and murderers. The fixers' loyalty was to the studio. It was their job to procure drugs, arrange abortions, create cover stories to explain hospital and asylum stays, pay off injured civilians, cover up suicides, assaults, rapes, and murders, and, quite probably, even to arrange murders --- all to protect the studio's investments in its stars.
In this book, you can read about the tragic lives - more tragic than any Hollywood screenwriter could possibly dream - of Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Rudolph Valentino, Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, George Reeves, Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, and Judy Garland, and many others. Their stories will forever change your perception of Hollywood.
Author Talk
The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder. Douglas Preston. Grand Central Publishing, 2023. 320 pages.
I have read most of Douglas Preston's collaborative novels written with Lincoln Child and a couple of his nonfiction works, particularly The Monster of Florence and The Lost City of the Monkey God, and I have enjoyed them. Preston is more than a novelist though; he is a journalist, often published in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Natural History, Smithsonian, and others. His deep interest in archaeology and history is evident in everything he writes. The Lost Tomb is a collection of 13 of his past articles, from 1989 forward. These are stories that have special meaning for Preston; they have inspired and shaped his novels over the years.
The stories are about mysteries that are familiar to many like Dyatlov Pass where a group of Soviet mountain climbers were mysteriously killed, the discovery of ancient Egypt's largest tomb complex in the Valley of the Kings, and the mysterious money pit of Oak Island. Several of the stories deal with ongoing archaeological debates about the peopling of the Americas. Exactly who were the First Americans and how and when did they arrive? Who were the Clovis and Folsom peoples and where did they come from? He also investigates major paleontological discoveries like Hell Creek Montana and the site of the asteroid crash that ended the Cretaceous Period and the Age of the Dinosaurs. There are even stories about two of the biggest crime events in recent Italian history, the "Monster of Florence" serial killer case in which Preston found himself inadvertently deeply involved and the murder for which American student Amanda Knox was prosecuted. Those stories leave the reader with serious doubts and questions about the Italian legal system.
Each and every story is fascinating, and each one is updated at the end. For Preston and Child fans, it's extra fun to get a glimpse of the "origin stories" of several of their novels. One can see direct lines from germination to fictionalization.
Author talk
Our Man in Tokyo: An American Ambassador and the Countdown to Pearl Harbor. Steve Kemper. Mariner Books, 2022. 448 pages.
Before reading this book, I knew very little about Japan in the decades before World War II. In the U.S., I think that we are very Eurocentric in our interest in World War II, and the Pacific too often gets short shrift. Few Americans have knowledge of much of anything leading up to Pearl Harbor or between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Our Man in Tokyo is a great step in filling that gap.
The 1930s were a chaotic decade in Japan. The completely powerless Emperor oversaw a dozen different governments (Prime Ministers and Cabinets) rise and fall. Japan was in reality a military dictatorship dominated by ultra-nationalistic, power-hungry, hardline conservative generals and admirals who called all the shots. The military and secret police controlled every aspect of Japanese government and society, all in the name of the Emperor but totally without his input or involvement. The Japanese press whipped up nationalistic Japanese fervor, touting Japanese superiority, condemning American and European interference in Japan's natural dominance of Asia and the Pacific, attacking and destroying moderate politicians, and preparing the population for war. The press was totally controlled by the military. Political assassinations, coups, and their attempts became a regular part of Japanese life. Assassins and insurrectionists proclaimed that they acted out of loyalty to the Emperor, and they were generally praised, made into heroes, and went unpunished or lightly punished.
Joseph C. Grew, a friend and college classmate of Franklin Roosevelt, was Our Man in Tokyo from 1932 to 1941, the American ambassador. He was America's point man in Asia for the decade. He grew to really know and appreciate the culture of Japan, and many moderate Japanese seemed to respect and appreciate him. He had access, knowledge, and insight that no other foreign diplomat had. He tried his best to change the collision course that Japan and the US seemed to be on, often putting himself at odds with Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other State Department higher-ups who seemed partial to China and may even have intentionally nudged the ship of state on that collision course. Author Kemper used Grew's own diaries, State Department correspondence, and first-hand Japanese accounts to paint a very detailed picture of US-Japanese relations and the state of the Japanese government at the time.
I enjoyed the book a lot and learned much. It makes a fantastic companion read with Erik Larson's book In the Garden of Beasts, about US Ambassador William E. Dodd in 1930s Berlin.
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Author Talk
Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Erica Armstrong Dunbar. 37Ink, 2017. 272 pages.
In 1789, sixteen-year old Ona Judge was one of the few enslaved people taken by President George Washington to run his official household in New York. She was Martha Washington's personal servant and seamstress, and her job was to accompany the First Lady at all times and to attend to all of her personal needs. New York represented a whole new world for her. In the city, she saw more black people than she could have even imagined, having lived her life in the insular, very heavily-majority black, world of Mount Vernon and the surrounding Virginia. She also went from the wide open spaces of the plantation where she actually managed to have alone time occasionally to the cramped executive mansion where she shared space with her fellow slaves and with paid white servants when not working, losing privacy. However, one of the greatest cultural chocks for Judge may have been exposure to both free and enslaved blacks, engaged in all sorts of positions and living varied lives. Perhaps this was inspirational to her.
Fast forward to 1796. The Washingtons were now in the temporary (until the new Federal City is completed on the Potomac) capital of Philadelphia, and Judge was one of the even fewer enslaved people from Mount Vernon chosen to serve. Public and private sentiment against slavery was much more pronounced in Philadelphia than in New York. There were even more free black people and free black institutions in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania passed a law stating that any slaves brought into the state would be automatically emancipated after six month of residence. This law forced the Washingtons to shuttle their slaves back and forth to Mount Vernon for short stays every six months. Then, Judge learned that she was to be given to Martha's granddaughter as a wedding gift. That convinced her to take action, an action that would mean permanent separation from her family still living at Mount Vernon. As the Washingtons packed for their regular trip back to Virginia, she packed to run away, slipping out the night before the family departed.
The Washingtons were dumbfounded. How could this ungrateful wench give up her privileged life to run away? They decided that she obviously didn't make the decision on her own; she was spirited away, perhaps by a lover who left her destitute on some cold northern streets. Ads were placed and rewards offered, but Judge was never returned. Although historical evidence about Judge's life are pretty slim, this book is her story. There's little mystery. The Washingtons knew exactly where she was a year after she escaped, and the story is not as dramatic as other escape stories. "Relentless" should never have been considered as a word in the title. The story of the Washingtons' personal chef, Hercules Posey, his own escape less than a year later, and life as a fugitive is probably more interesting. (See 2020's fictionalized The General's Cook by Ramin Ganeshram.) However, Never Caught is an interesting look at the intricacies and legalities of slavery as practiced by the Washingtons and in multiple states.
