An Introduction to Florida Noir
by Steve Glassman

Among the various states of the Union, our own state of Florida may well be the most paradoxical, as much from the literary as any other point of view. You frequently hear the arch comment that Florida is not a southern state, at least not with a capital S. Often this observation, commonplace though it be, is passed on with a nod and wink as though a penetrating insight has been offered.

When I first arrived here forty years ago, many claimed Florida was really a North Atlantic state. I like much of the state's population then lived in Miami, and in certain ways that claim seemed to make sense. We had seasons then, a tourist season during the winter months, and the rest of the year Miami was, if not a ghost town, at least noticeably less busy. My landlord, an old French cook–chef would be overdoing it a touch–migrated north with the snowbirds in the summer and worked in beachside restaurants during the winter. Politically, though staunchly Democratic, the state was a bit schizoid. The statehouse was dominated by panhandle Dixiecrats, but statewide offices were divided between mossyback conservative Dems from upstate and liberals from the lower east coast. It would have been hard to convince someone like Claude Pepper who was smeared in his reelection campaign to the Senate in the 1940s that Florida was a Northeast state. He had pulled a reverse migration and moved to Miami and a safe Congressional seat with a constituency of Northern liberals.

One of the things that I have always found strange about our very strange state is the lack of tropical fauna. Our shores are populated by the vegetation of the West Indies. We have gumbo limbos, cocoplums, blolly and mastic trees and so on and so forth growing all over the place, but the number of West Indian birds here is minuscule. There are a few frigate birds and the occasional bananaquit will fly over from the Bahamas. Of tropical mammals we have exactly none–unless of course we count humans as a mammal, which nowadays it seems politically incorrect to do. In that case, a huge migration of tropical mammals started in he early Sixties, peaked during the Mariel boat life in the late 70s, and continues today. These migrants have come to inhabit not only the southern portions of the peninsula but increasingly throughout the state. A recent survey showed that almost one quarter of Florida's population speak a language other than English at home.

For as obvious and synonymous with the state as that migration, it has been dwarfed by the hordes that have poured in lemming-like from the Center states. During the 1980s and 90s and continuing into the new century, almost a thousand people a day relocated to the Sunshine State. Most of them came from neither the Northeast nor points South. They arrived from the rusty frostbelt of the Midwest. They changed the face of Florida. No longer is our state known, politically, as a bastion of Democratic ideals. Now, philosophically, Florida seems to straddle a border-state line, switching between conservatism of Midwestern and Southern stripes, with a pronounced anti-Communist bent thanks the legacy of its refugee populations.

With a fomenting population in a climate ripe for ferment, Florida could be expected to produce a literature of consequence. In many ways, 1964, the year the Beatles came to our shores and the heating up of the Viet Nam War, can be regarded as the birth of the modern age. Before this date, the literature of Florida could probably be summed up by most critics in three words–Ernest, Marjorie and Zora with a few flourishes here and there, such as Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat.” The first of the Big Three figures, though frequently identified with Florida, really just happened to live in the Keys for a relatively short time, and incidentally wrote a few stories about the place, few or none of which are considered central to his work. During the lifetime of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlins and Zora Hurston, the former was considered by far the greater writer. She garnered a Pulitzer prize and a movie made from her trademark novel, The Yearling, won the Academy Award. Not surprisingly, her editor Maxwell Perkins was the most renowned in the country. Hurston, unlike Rawlins, was born poor and black and in Florida. They shared, however, a concentration on Florida places and characters. Had neither of them paid attention to our state, it's quite possible we would not now know who they are today.

I would imagine anyone reading these lines–considering where they are published--is not greatly interested in either of these writers, or perhaps even in Hemingway. I'll also hazard the guess that the year 1964 has resonance other than the appearance of the Beatles to you. It was in that year that the first of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee color-coded novels appeared. For many of us, MacDonald put Florida on the literary map. I must admit being rather late in coming to this realization. I used to call John D. MacDonald's work sub-literary. I one time said as much to Ed Hirschberg, the University of South Florida professor known as the dean of Florida crime-fiction critics. (He coined the phrase “The Miami Murder School,” which is still used to describe the literary movement of Florida crime writers.) Dr. Hirschberg was an incredibly kind and generous man, but I'm glad he didn't have a gun in his hand when I told him MacDonald's work was not up to par. He adored MacDonald and his work. He felt his novels stood on a plain with any American writer.

If you were trying to find me in the 1970s, a good place to look would have been the fiction stacks of the local library in the “M” aisle. I once wrote Mr. MacDonald that I'd read every one of his Travis McGee novels. He responded a bit skeptically, suspecting a little harmless puffery on my part, probably because there had been almost twenty books in the series at the time. I may have missed one or two, but if so, I've yet to be lucky enough to pick up a Travis McGee novel, which I still do often, that I haven't read. I would imagine many of you reading these lines can say the same thing. Strangely, I found reading any of MacDonald's work set outside of Florida difficult. Even when Travis and Meyer left the state, as in the Green Ripper which some thought one of his best, the sense of excitement that pulsated in the other books dulled a bit in my estimation. In a major way Florida made the Travis McGee books and, returning the favor, the Travis McGee series showed the way for Florida literature.

I suppose other factors were involved in the blossoming of Florida crime writing. Some would say the TV show Miami Vice had a major influence on the explosion of mystery writing that was seen in this state in the 1980s and 90s. The newspapers probably contributed their mite too, considering that crime in Florida in the last two decades of the 20 th century was so interesting that a major amusement for many was simply reading the local and state sections of the paper (and it remains so, of course.) In any case, the 1980s saw a number of high-power writers moving into MacDonald territory.

The first pretender to the MacDonald laurel, as the Travis McGee series was silenced with John D's death in 1986, was a technical writer from Detroit. This fellow claimed to sit at his desk pretending to work on the GM product line while in fact he was scribbling on a pad in the tray drawer. He started off by writing westerns. He also set mystery novels in the Detroit area. His success was mixed until he moved his characters to Florida in the 1980s. His novel Gold Coast garnered a Edgar award, I believe. The writer I am referring to, of course, is Elmore Leonard, and as much as MacDonald himself he added an impressive dimension to Florida crime writing in particular and to the genre as a whole. There is only one word for Elmore Leonard at his best, and that is classy. That he was in his fifties and had published forty or so novels before he hit it big with his Florida novels is a great accolade for our state and our state literature.

When Leonard made his breakthrough in the 80s, he made it I a big way. Another author similar in many ways to Leonard was also working Florida crime fiction in the 80s. Like Leonard he'd published a number of novels, about a dozen in his case, the only one of which that had been eminently successful (and published in hardback) was a crime novel. But it wasn't until he developed a series with a unique protagonist that he received national attention. The protagonist is Hoke Moseley, and the writer is Charles Willeford [link the word willeford to: http://www.steveglassman.com/willeford.html] Charles passed on after only four Moseley books came out, but the first inspired one of the better Florida noir movies, Miami Blue, with Fred Ward playing Hoke and Alec Baldwin in what may have been his defining role as Freddie Frenger, a “blithe psychopath.” Along about the same time, Carl Hiaasen began writing his wacked out crime-fiction tales.

Right after them, if not in first publication at least in their coming to public attention, were writers like James Hall, Les Standiford, Laurence Shames, and on and on. By the early 90s it had become apparent to the peculiarly perceptive that something unusual was going on in the field of Florida crime fiction. I must admit, though an avid consumer of the commodity, not to have been among the perceptive. The person who alerted me was Maurice O'Sullivan, a professor of English at Rollins College. He claimed the hottest crime writing in the country was being done about Florida and, generally by, Florida-based writers. Although a bit skeptical, I agreed to do a book with him about the topic. That book was received well nationally, which I think showed the level of attention our writers had achieved–I mean who cares about a book on a topic that no one cares about. In the introductory chapter in that book, I argued that the Miami Murder School wasn't really a literary movement in the sense of being characterized by distinctive philosophy or style. Again, I was wrong, but it wasn't until the second wave of Florida crime writers came along that I was made to understand this. I think probably Tim Dorsey was the man whose works tied up the various elements in the early (and later) Florida crime writers for me. There is a certain wackiness in Leonard, Willeford and Hiaasen (but missing in MacDonald) but I couldn't see a common thread until Dorsey showed it to me. From the vantage point of a decade later, I wonder how I could have missed the obvious.

As everyone who reads the newspaper (or watches TV news or whatever) in this state knows there is a certain wackiness about life in Florida. It probably is very much linked to the climate, subtropical and laid back, and also to the fact that most of us have come from someplace else looking to start over, and not be held back by those stodgy old constraints that we left behind. Oddly enough, crime writers have been mining this vein for a long time. Bill Brubaker of Florida State contributed a chapter to the first book O'Sullivan and I did that showed an incredible wealth of early mystery fiction set in the state. So where is all this going? It's going here: Florida does have and has had a vibrant “national” literature for more than a century. Literary critics, before O'Sullivan, were by and large looking in the wrong place for it. Not surprisingly, that literature reflects the interesting, not to say strange, goings-on in the Sunshine State, and finally, many of the best practitioners of the Miami Murder School have stylistic similarities–notably a florid wierdness--that link them to writers going back to the early part of the 20 th Century.

For these and other reasons, I'm very happy Michael Lister has set up this website. You never know what you'll find until you look. I look forward to seeing what will turn up on these pages in the future.

From the Introduction to North Florida Noir
by Michael Lister

It hangs beneath the continent like a handgun holstered to the bottom of a table in a double-cross, a state of mind as much as one drawn by lines. In some ways a microcosm of the country in reverse (the north part of the state resembles the south part of the country; the south, the north), Florida is, in many ways, a perverse likeness of the country it so precariously dangles from.

If Florida is a handgun, then the area I write about is its barrel, a rough, pitted barrel, its blued finish bearing traces of rust and corrosion. Mine is the backwoods Florida, more LA than Miami—that's Lower Alabama not the West Coast one. I live in and write about the Redneck Rivera, Georgia with a Florida zip code. It's an interesting, colorful, and unique place—both to live in and write about—and most tourist drive right through it or fly right over it. Don't let the sunshine fool you. There's plenty of darkness lurking beneath our spreading oaks, down our dirt roads, inside our mobile homes, beach condos, and back in our river swamps.

Film noir or black film was the name the French gave the movies coming out of America following World War II. As French film critics watched the dark, high contrast style of American crime movies, they were the first to recognize that a new movement in cinematic history was taking place, and though heavily influenced by German expressionism, American Film Noir was completely original, utterly unique.

Most often associated with film, the term "noir" is increasingly being linked to literature—and rightly so. The earliest examples of film noir were adaptations of gritty crime novels and short stories. Long before the dark side of the screen flickered to life in the smoky, postwar movie theaters of the 1940's, what might be called the noir esthetic could be found in the long since tattered pages of the pulps. Noir's true first appearance wasn't on celluloid, but paper, not on a Hollywood sound stage of the 1940's, but in the pages of Black Mask Magazine in the crime stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others of the 1920's.

Whether in literature or film, defining noir isn't easy to do—and it shouldn't be. Part of what makes noir such an engaging and enduring art form is its fluidity and adaptability. Perhaps more than anything else, noir is an ethos—one that resists defining. Clues might include bleak settings, a violent tone, tough and cynical characters, eroticism, existentialism, nihilism and of course, darkness—after all, noir means "black"—but noir is so much more, and can be far less. It's an art form of shadows and should always be partially left in them. Noir is a mind set, a sensibility, a sense of futility, desperation, and isolation.

Traditionally, noir has had its setting among urban, mostly nocturnal landscapes, dimly lit bars, seedy motels, greedy corporations, corrupt municipalities, the soulless, often nameless city that never sleeps. But dark deeds aren't just done before the backdrop of tall buildings and in their shadowed alleyways. According to Ecclesiastes , evil happens everywhere under the sun, and the greatest detective of all time said that the isolation of rural areas provides impunity for the crimes committed there, and that the lowest and vilest alleys of the largest cities do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

The mean streets of north Florida may be desolate rural highways or backwoods dirt roads, but they are no less capable of cruel indifference to criminal acts than their urban analogues. The ubiquitous slash pines remain just as silent as their concrete and steel counterparts in the asphalt jungle when witnessing the wicked and inhumane ways of humanity.