Carl Hiaasen

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Carl Hiaasen [pronounced "hiya-sun"] (born March 12, 1953) is an American journalist and novelist.

Born and raised in Plantation, Florida (near Fort Lauderdale) of Norwegian [1] heritage, Carl was the first of four children and the son of a lawyer, Odel, and teacher, Patricia. He married Connie Lyford just after high-school graduation and entered Emory University in 1970, where he contributed numerous satiric pieces to the school newspaper, The Emory Wheel. In 1972 he transferred to the University of Florida, graduating in 1974 with a degree in journalism. Hiaasen divorced Lyford in 1996 and remarried in 1999 to Fenia Clizer, a restaurant manager and oddly a real estate agent in the formerly pristine undeveloped Florida Keys. He has one son from his first marriage and another from his second.

After two years as a reporter for Cocoa Today out of Cocoa, Florida, he joined the Miami Herald in 1976, where he still (as of 2006) works. From 1979 he turned to investigative journalism, concentrating on construction and property development, exposing schemes to destroy Florida's natural beauty for the sake of profit; several of his novels have plots based around such schemes. Since 1985 he has had a column in the Herald; it initially ran thrice weekly, but it now appears once a week.

In the 1980s he embarked on a career as a novelist. He co-wrote three thrillers with fellow-journalist Bill Montalbano: Powder Burn (1981), Trap Line (1981), and A Death in China (1986). After Montalbano became a foreign correspondent, Hiaasen wrote his first book, Tourist Season (1986), introducing many of his distinctive styles and themes.

Hiaasen's fiction mirrors his concerns as a journalist and Floridian. His novels have been classified as "environmental thrillers" and are usually found on the crime shelves in bookshops, although they can just as well be read as mainstream reflections of contemporary life.

Hiaasen's Florida is a hive of greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, apathetic retirees, intellectually challenged tourists, hard-luck redneck cooters, and militant ecoteurs. It is the same Florida of John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee, but aged another 20 years and viewed with a more satiric or sardonic eye.