Q & A with Carl Hiaasen

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By Sue Corbett -- Publishers Weekly, 1/29/2009

Carl Hiaasen’s latest novel, Scat (Knopf, Jan.), takes readers into the Florida Everglades, where crooked developers want to drill oil in a swamp called home by an endangered Florida panther. Luckily for the cat, this is Hiaasen territory, so there are people looking out for its interests, including a millionaire eco-warrior named Twilly Spree.  

Carl Hiaasen.  Photo: Tim Chapman.

In some cases I actually have to understate the truth. You have to keep in mind that most of audience for these books is outside of Florida and you don’t want them to think you are completely out of your mind.

You championed the cause of tiny burrowing owls in Hoot. Why the panther now? 

I’ve always wanted to write about panthers. Every since I was a kid, the panther was this mystical swamp creatures nobody ever saw. In all the tromping around in the boonies I did, I never even found a track. But I always try to capture that excitement of seeing animals in the wild in my novels because kids have a natural interest. Whenever we drive through Yellowstone, or even something really hokey like Lion Country Safari, that’s the big attraction. Kids dig seeing wild animals. It could be a possum and my son will squeal. We’re constantly stopping along A1A [Florida’s coastal highway] to lift gopher tortoises to safety. I’ll even stop to move a snake.

Ye gods. What kind of snakes are you willing to pick up? 

Oh, anything. Blue racers, corn snakes, ring-neck. I don’t take them home anymore. I had to give up my snake-breeding operation shortly after I got married. It wasn’t the snakes that bothered my wife; it was their food—rats. And somebody would always have to drive to Key Largo to get the rats and bring them back home. She felt that this was more than her duty. 

Okay, but there are no panthers crossing A1A. The only ones you’ve seen have been in captivity? 

No, I have seen one in the wild with David Maehr, a wildlife biologist and a pioneer in Florida panther research. He let me go with them when they were radio-tagging panthers to study the range of their habitat. The one I saw was in a tree. The only one I ever saw on my own was along the side of Card Sound Road, driving back to Miami from the Keys one night. It was crouched by the road, probably protecting some roadkill and as soon as he got in my headlights, he leapt into the woods. It took my breath away. That’s the only one I’ve ever seen somebody didn’t lead me to but there are 18 million people in Florida and 17.9999 million have never laid eyes on a panther and never will so I feel incredibly lucky.

Are there really only 100 panthers left? 

Something like that, but that’s phenomenal compared to what it was. We’ve destroyed their habitat and killed a lot of them with car strikes. That’s by far the leading cause of death. But they kill each other, too. They have to fight for territory because there is no habitat left. I didn’t know any of this going into writing the book. Everything I know I learned from hanging around with David. I would call him while I was writing Scat to ask, ‘Is this what a panther would do?’ or ‘How do you describe what scat looks like?’ which he says stinks worse than anything you can imagine. The book is dedicated to him. He was killed last fall. They were tracking black bears that they had collared and his plane crashed.

You’re not serious. 

I am. His plane went down near Sebring [Fla.]. He was a great guy. He worked for years for the wildlife commission doing panther research although most recently he had been at the University of Kentucky. His daughter is going to come to one of the first signings for Scat. He was one of my sources for years.

Some elements are products of your imagination not research, though. There really isn’t oil drilling in the Everglades, is there? 

There is! There are oil wells in the Big Cypress Swamp. The Collier family [the novel’s setting—Collier County on the southwest Florida coast—is named for Baron Collier, an original landholder] tried to sell the rights to drill there to the state for some ungodly sum of money when [Gov.] Jeb [Bush] was in office, obviously inflated because the oil was sludge quality. There’s been drilling, not on a huge scale but the idea of selling the leases to the state—whatever they’re really worth—that gave me the idea for the scheme in the book. They’re not really in it for the oil; it’s just to get the government’s money.

Bullies are a feature of all three of your novels for young readers. Are you drawing on any personal experience? 

I think almost every kid has some personal experience with bullies. I was always the smallest kid on the bus because I was a year younger than my classmates [Hiaasen skipped from kindergarten to second grade]. I can’t say I was ever pummeled but I was intimidated. I learned early that having a sense of humor could be a disarming quality. If you could make the bullies laugh they’d go pick on someone else. I think I developed a sense of humor as a defense mechanism. Even in high school, I wrote a newsletter that was fairly irreverent and earned me a reputation as a smart ass. That was such a kick to be told, ‘I laughed my ass off at your newsletter.’ It was the kind of feedback that made me think this writing thing might not be such a bad gig.

I had great fear while reading Scat that Nick’s father, a National Guardsman deployed to Iraq, would be dead by the end of the book. The saddest part of the story was Nick’s first visit to Walter Reed Hospital to visit his father when he returns. Have you been there yourself? 

No, I haven’t. I read the whole Washington Post series [the Post won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for its series exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center], and what struck me was that I just have not seen or read hardly anything about the impact of this war on kids. You see stories about post-traumatic stress, and about those who have been killed, but it’s not just the families who have lost Mom or Dad. There are thousands who have come home with devastating injuries and every one of those veterans has a family that’s been profoundly affected by that, and probably kids who didn’t understand what the war was about to begin with.

Why did you choose to have Nick’s father be a member of the National Guard? 

I wanted him to be a guardsman because most of those folks joined when it was understood that the guard was a domestic peacekeeping and security force. They were not expecting to be sent overseas. This guy [Nick’s father] has come home changed forever. My novels are always set in the here and now and I wanted to deal with that.

You are still writing your weekly column for the Miami Herald, but would you say that it’s a sideline to writing books now? Do you think the era of the newspaper has ended? 

You have to wonder where it’s headed. It’s hard to find any bright light. We know people crave information but they’re getting most of it from the Internet and no one’s found a business model where an Internet version of a newspaper can make anything close to what the print version did because the ad rates are so different. So how do you pay for the resources necessary to gather all that information if you have to sell ads so cheap? If you have an all-online newspaper how are you going to pay editors? I don’t see how it’s going to work. I think it would be tragic if the Herald stops publishing. It’s been a vigilant watchdog over corruption in Miami for 100 years. I think the mistake newspapers made was trying to be other things, to be too much like TV. Investigative reporting is something nobody else can do. Bloggers can’t do that. This is an age when we need more journalism like that, not less.  

Kids are not reading newspapers, though. Don’t you find it ironic that you’ve had all this written-word success with kids’ books?  

It’s amazing. The young adult sector of the publishing business was the only sector that showed an increase last year. Every other sector was flat or down. Kids’ books sold better than the year before. It goes to show you that parents will stop spending money on themselves before they stop buying books for their kids. That said, I would never have believed this 10 years ago. It would have never have occurred to me that with iPods and Wii and Xboxes and all the other distractions kids have that there would be this be tremendous market for the kind of books I write. I think it shows you kids are insatiable in the same way I was when I was a kid. If you can tap into that you’ll have readers for life. The challenge for newspapers is to get them hooked the same way. I grew up reading the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News. That’s where the passion I had for writing came from. But I pass a lot of driveways in the mornings these days that have no newspapers in them. People may say, ‘If my kid’s reading the New York Times online who cares if it isn’t in the driveway?’ But if the New York Times exists only online it’s not going to be the same newspaper a year or two from now. So how do newspapers get and keep young readers? Because I know they are out there.  

Final question—how’s the golf game?

I’ve been slacking off because I’ve been working. After writing all day I hit on the range for an hour and that’s therapy, but it’s really hard to get four hours away to play a round. Last time I played it was pretty gruesome. I’ve redeveloped the shank.