I lived in Florida for six years. Before I got there, Carl Hiaasen acquainted me with the haphazard charms of the Sunshine State. More precisely, he sketched out just how much craziness resided on that over-baked peninsula.

As was the case with many of the authors whose wares I first sampled in the nineteen-nineties, I arrived at Hiaasen because of the movies. With some regularity, I bought novels that the entertainment press informed me were being adapted in high-profile films. I liked having the comparison at the ready when it came time to deliver my movie review, even if most of those exercises in criticism were mostly being delivered to friends over the phone or this new-fangled communication method called electronic mail.

Hiaasen’s 1993 novel, Strip Tease, was being made in a movie that borrowed the name but oddly omitted the space. Striptease was preemptively famous — or maybe a little infamous — because the lead role, a stripper named Erin Grant, had been bestowed upon Demi Moore, who got a dump truck full of money backed up to her house in exhange from the promise of doffing her top. As intended, that built some buzz around the project. Thankfully, enough of the chatter took pains to insist to the potentially interested that Hiaasen’s novel was quite good.

The movie proved to be a bust at the box office — and pretty lousy — but the appreciative assessments of the novel were spot on. Strip Tease is sharp, funny, slyly insightful, and plotted with purposeful expertise. It reads like a classic Elmore Leonard crime novel with a loonier edge. It’s hard to scrape together grander praise.

I return to Hiaasen’s novels from time to time after that, always engaged and amused. And, almost with fail, my perception of his native Florida was solidified with every page. I was certain the state was colorful, off-kilter, and many a little dangerous, if only because just enough people there operated as if  the very concept of consequences didn’t cross the border from neighboring states. Hiaasen’s investigative takedown of the Disney corporation, Team Rodent, compounds this thesis while showing off his reporter’s chops from his formative days at Cocoa Today and his longtime day job at the Miami Herald.

If the creative vision of Hiaasen didn’t quite match up with my personal experience in Florida, it’s probably for the best. But maybe his bracing assessment of his fellow well-tanned citizens helped me properly prepare for my days there, recalibrating the strangely sensational into comparative acceptable following my time tracing the exploits of those characters bounding across the page.

Previous entries in this series can be found by clicking on the “My Writers” tag.