A Little Letter from Jack Saunders to a Local Paper About Mystery Writers–Who’s in, who’s out and Why
or What it means to be a Florida Writer
Jerome Stern
Read All Over
Tallahassee Democrat
Dear Jerry Stern:
You listed mystery writers who have used Florida extensively, and asked if you’d left anybody out.
T. J. MacGregor writes crime novels set in South Florida. There’s a new one on the stands now.
Cherokee Paul McDonald is an ex-cop from Broward County who has written a couple d novels set in Ft. Lauderdale.
Evan Hurlter set a couple of his crime novels over on the west coast.
Tom Pace wrote three crime novels set in Boynton, Ft. Pierce, and Sebring. Two of the titles were Fisherman’s Luck and Afternoon of a Loser. I don’t remember the third one.
Geoffrey Norman wrote a crime novel set in Destin and another one set in Escambb County and Panama City. Midnight Water and Sweetwater Ranch.
Jim McLendon, from Starke, wrote Deathwork and Eddie Macon’s Run. Not crime novels, per se, but close enough.
Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax is science flction, but it has a couple of murders in it, and a conspiracy to defraud. It’s set in Key West.
Allison Drake has written a series of crime novels set on Tango Key. Tango Key, Fevered, Black Moon.
John Leslie has written three paperback mysteries that were very good. Blood on the Keys, Killer in Paradise and Bounty Hunter Blues.
By the way, Travis McGee didn’t live in a houseboat off Ft. Lauderdale. His houseboat was docked at ship F18 in the Bahia Mar marina.
And Charles Willeford wasn’t a mystery writer. He was a satirist and fantast in the tradition of Borges, Milan Kundera, and Italo Calvino. Working in the idiom paperback original mystery, which was the genre he was able to get published in.
Just as I am a satirist and fantast working in the idiom unpublished, or underpublished writer. Cult writer.
Enclosed find a description of the books in my stack, which, as you will see, is up to 60 volumes now.
Oh yeah, I finished MANIFEST DESTINY. It’s 61 finished and No. 62 in progress. AT LIBERTY.
President Eisenhower called a book At Ease: Stories I tell to my Friends. I call mine AT LIBERTY: STORIES TOLD TO A HOLE IN THE GROUND.
Midas has ass’s ears. The truth will out.
Here’s how I defined a Florida writer in BLOCKHEAD:
Florida writer: A writer who lives in and writes about his native region, like Faulkner in Mississippi or Thoreau in New England. Ail genius is local, tied to a particular place. And time. But a Florida writer is also a writer New York disdains to publish as too regional, or local. Of limited appeal. A Florida writer accepts this, and writes about his postage stamp of native soil anyway. The lighthouse invites the storm,
Malcolm Lowry said. The Florida writer invites rejection by New York. Ail literature is world literature. Except the doorstops churned out by New York and its handmaiden, television. Is you is or is you ain’t. The music is on the horn–play n or throw it away. A Florida writer doesn’t make a living writing. He lives on what he makes. He makes do. He lives on grits and grunts, a musette bag full of rice and a song in his heart. See yardbird.
Every time the book editor of a Florida paper does a column on what is the Florida novel?’ or ‘What is a Florida writer?’ and leaves a writer out, leaves his or her books out, if they’re about Florida, or set in Florida, that writer is a Florida writer by my definition. Those books are Florida novels.
If they’re self-published, or published by an underground press, because New York rejected them as uncommercial, particularly if they’re part of a series of related unpublished books, like Thoreau wrote, or underpublished books, like all of Faulkner’s books were before Malcolm Cowley took him up and revived his reputation, and then he won the Nobel Prize, that writer is certainly a Florida writer, those books are certainly Florida novels.
I have just finished writing three related novels about being a Florida writer. BLOCKHEAD, FOLK HERO, MANIFEST DESTINY. Together, they are called Cult Writer. I’d already used the title FLORIDA WRITER. And the title CRACKER.
And the titles HACK WRITER, EVIL GENIUS, WORKING WRITER, and TYPEWRITING COLOSSUS.
If those books were in print you’d see what I was driving at. Or maybe not. You don’t see from the ones that are: Screed. Common Sense, Full Plate, Blue Darter, Lost Writings, Evil Genius, Open Book, and Forty.
Maybe that’s another defining feature. A book editor doesn’t see it when it up and slaps him side the head.
I bet there are people in Tallahassee this morning laughing to themselves, and each other, saying,
“Jerry Stern wrote another column about the Florida writer and left Jack Saunders out. He wrote about the Florida novel and didn’t mention Screed or Evil Genius.”
I’m laughing here. Like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. “I’m walking, here.” A movie about the dream of making it big in New York, by selling your ass, and then retiring to Florida.
I dreamed a different dream. Then put the foundation under it. One Florida novel at a time.
You don’t include me in your survey, I include you in my flyer. It’s beautiful how it all works out.
