By David Ryan
Reading a crime novel set in Florida hardly qualifies as an alert. In both fiction and reality, the Sunshine State and criminals, particularly dimwitted ones, go hand-in-hand.
South Florida – Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and the Florida Keys – seems to accumulate a majority of the storylines. Tampa and Florida’s Gulf Coast catch a few.
Yet Orlando, even with its multitude of obvious theme park foils and unsuspecting tourists, tends to escape the glare, a fact that sealed my decision to plop my first crime novel, Dead Odds, in the middle of The City Beautiful.
Authors and reporters from all over pick on Orlando about its identity. And why not? It’s easy. Orlando is a tourist destination. It’s the state’s concrete jungle, no sand in sight. It’s people living and working around a bevy of theme parks.
All true. Except that doesn’t capture the essence of the city or area. Plus, Central Florida can easily stack up its weird criminals against the ones south of Lake Okeechobee and west of Lakeland. There’s no shortage of morons on a mission.
What Is Orlando?
According to Visit Orlando, the city’s official tourism association, 72 million people visited Orlando in 2017. But did they?
It may come as a surprise, but Walt Disney World is not located in Orlando. Neither are the area’s other theme parks. The Magic Kingdom, crown jewel of the Disney empire, sits a dozen miles southwest of the city, and Disney property straddles two counties.
When locals take their vacations and tell others where they live, a typical response is, “Oh, I just visited Orlando.” They really mean they stayed at a hotel/time share/resort and spent up to a week going to theme parks — or Cape Canaveral, where NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin are neighbors — all around Central Florida.
They probably didn’t drive through Orlando’s modest downtown or its defining neighborhoods: College Park, Baldwin Park, Colonialtown, Thornton Park, Conway, the Milk District, Parramore, or even posh neighbor Winter Park.
That okay. We get it. Nationally, Orlando is synonymous with Mickey Mouse ears, Harry Potter rides at Universal Studios, killer whale shows at SeaWorld, and selfies from Gatorland.
Here’s a secret: That’s not Orlando.
The real Orlando is an anomaly in the middle of the Interstate-4 corridor, which stretches from Tampa to Daytona Beach. It’s a liberal city in a conservative state. In fact, it’s considered one of the gay-friendliest cities in the country, one of the reasons why the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse nightclub profoundly affected so many here.
Orlando grows more diverse each year, a trend reflected in local restaurants, farmers markets, and weekend festivals and celebrations at Lake Eola and other downtown-area parks.
Winters, when locals wear long-sleeved shirts to work and church, pass too fast. Most of the year, the area is sweat-filled, especially in July and August.
There aren’t any beaches in Orlando, but there’s plenty of water. Lakes, natural springs and rivers abound.
That said, all that concrete attracts no shortage of angry afternoon thunderstorms. Traffic sucks, and almost every major driving artery in the area has a construction project underway, especially the largest one, I-4.
Local politicians help the area live up to its national reputation as a friendly place with ongoing urban sprawl. Few elected bodies vote down business and residential developments. As a result, there’s no end in sight to construction.
Crime Writing and Florida
There’s also the criminal element, to which Florida has been linked, in reality and in fiction, for decades. In fact, two quality Twitter accounts, @_FloridaMan and @FloriDuh, publicize news stories that begin the same way: “A man in Florida . . .” and continue with details of a bizarre, horrific, or hysterical criminal behavior. (We won’t get into all the nature- , reptile- and animal-based stories that spring up. You’ll have to Google iguanas, Burmese pythons and alligators on your own.)
Many credit John D. MacDonald, author of the renowned Travis McGee series in the 1950s and ’60s, as the father of Florida-based crime novels, and Harry Crews produced a collection of books set in both Georgia and Florida. Elmore Leonard’s publishing career spanned from 1953 to 2011, and his stories and characters were no strangers to Florida.
It took until the Miami Vice era for the ties of surreptitiousness and the Sunshine State to gain strength, mostly, I believe, from two writers who honed their craft at The Miami Herald.
First is Edna Buchanan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose articles about murder and mayhem in Miami-Dade County during the cocaine-washed 1980s drew national acclaim. The New Yorker profiled her, publicizing some of her famous opening sentences, such as: “Gary Robinson died hungry.” (Mr. Robinson was killed by a security guard at a fast-food chicken restaurant after he slugged a cashier when she broke the news to him that they were out of fried chicken, instead offering him chicken nuggets.)
The second is Carl Hiaasen, a columnist who alternately slams local and state politicians for their morally and fiscally corrupt ways and bemoans the chewing up of Florida’s natural state of being for the sake of strip-malls and high-rise condominium developments. Hiaasen’s wit and incisiveness continues to keep readers entertained and incensed.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Buchanan and Hiaasen migrated from journalism to crime-fiction careers, and both made a mark. Hiaasen, who also writes young adult novels, published his latest crime novel, Razor Girl, in 2016. Buchanan’s most recent book, “A Dark and Lonely Place,” landed in 2011. A number of their novels are best-sellers.
Many others followed their trails, setting their own crime stories in the warm winters and humid summers of Florida. In no particular order: James W. Hall, Dave Barry (another Miami Herald alum), Les Standiford, Jonathon King, Randy Wayne White, James Grippando, James Swain, Elaine Viets, Jeff Lindsay, Tim Dorsey, Jeffery Hess, Alex Segura, and Nancy Cohen (her books are cozies). Combined, these authors detail characters and crimes throughout the state — and mostly in South, West, and Southwest Florida.
Ace Atkins placed his acclaimed novel “White Shadow” in Tampa, and Lori Roy’s latest crime story takes place in the Florida Panhandle, another under-appreciated area for nefarious activities both real and fictional.
More recently, Steph Post set her Judah Cannon series in a variety of made-up small cities in Florida, tapping into the fact that the state is more Southern than outsiders believe. And Micki Browning put her Mer Cavallo series in South Florida.
Orlando escaped again.
Navigating from Journalism to Fiction
In an early draft of “Dead Odds,” a fair number of scenes were set in other parts of Florida, primarily Boynton Beach and Vero Beach. Boynton Beach is a small, mostly blue-collar city between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Vero Beach is further north, about halfway between West Palm and Orlando.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Boynton Beach, not as much in Vero Beach. When I finished those early drafts and realized the story was too long, I had to consolidate locations and set the book where the crime takes place: Orlando.
The manuscript represented a significant personal journey from journalism’s methods and techniques to fiction’s norms. It wasn’t until the first draft was complete that I realized how much I didn’t know. The draft came in at 220,000 words, and that wasn’t close to being the worst issue. What lay ahead was an MFA the hard way.
A number of author conferences, including a trip to ThrillerFest (with its CraftFest), were helped. I needed guidance, and I wrote out multiple long lists of improvements to make.
Steve Berry’s pop-up seminar about storytelling, which he taught one morning at the University of Central Florida, opened my eyes to writing as engineering. It’s no stretch to say those three hours made my book possible.
I listened to advice that anyone offered. Much of it I followed, except from an author who encouraged all wannabe crime novelists to invent the location of their stories.
I liked the idea of Orlando too much, even if the rest of the crime-writing world didn’t.
David Ryan’s debut novel, “Dead Odds,” is the story of FBI agent Conrad Keane’s chase to find out why his estranged younger brother died during a seemingly random altercation outside an Orlando bar. He is a former newspaper reporter and editor whose assignments included guiding a breaking news team through coverage of the Casey Anthony murder investigation. He and his wife live in Orlando.
To learn more about Dead Odds, click on the cover below:
