{"id":8406,"date":"2020-02-26T07:06:46","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T12:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8406"},"modified":"2020-02-26T07:08:35","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T12:08:35","slug":"naked-came-the-florida-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8406","title":{"rendered":"****Naked Came the Florida Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Tim Dorsey \u2013 \u201c\u02bbDon\u2019t shoot guns into the hurricane.\u2019 Elsewhere this would go without saying, but Floridians need to be told,\u201d this antic crime novel begins, as Dorsey takes the familiar Florida man<\/a> premise to absurd heights (or is it depths?). His hero, the aptly named Serge A. Storms, who has no discernible occupation, has plotted a picaresque adventure for himself and his dim friend, Coleman. Serge will drive them around Florida in his 50-year-old gold Plymouth Satellite, visiting the graves of past Florida luminaries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enlightening Coleman along their route, Dorsey\/Serge painlessly and idiosyncratically covers Florida\u2019s history, sociology, meteorology, and biology. Before long, you know quite a bit more about this quirky state than you did on page one. Florida with its extreme weather, its swarms of insects, its snakes and gators, its cultural hodgepodge, its tony suburbs and ramshackle sugar cane towns lend themselves perfectly to Serge\u2019s non-stop snarky commentary<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several other plot threads, past and present, weave\nthroughout. First is the story of the deadly 1928 hurricane that created a\nmassive storm surge\u2014not in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, where you\u2019d\nexpect, but in Lake Okeechobee\u2014that killed some 2500 people. Pertinent to\nDorsey\u2019s tale, a rich sugar baron\u2019s fortune in gold coins was lost in the\ncalamity. The fate of the gold is one of the riches of this tall tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the novel is devoted to Serge and Coleman\u2019s\nadventures and clearly channels Serge\u2019s manic psyche. His mind is like a\nrambunctious puppy, dashing here and there, nibbling this and that. At times the\ntwo men launch into a jag of childishness, racing and chasing each other,\nfinger-painting murals for their motel walls, dressing as clowns, and generally\nacting up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to reconcile that light-hearted Serge with the man who plans (elaborately, of course) and carries out four diabolical murders. His victims aren\u2019t blameless, but the gruesome methods by which they die almost put me off the book. But I hung in there, and I\u2019m glad. Dorsey was a reporter and editor for the Tampa Tribune<\/em> for twelve years and has twenty-two previous novels. The Boston Globe <\/em>calls him \u201ccompulsively irreverent and shockingly funny.\u201d A trip with his man Serge is most definitely a wild ride. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Order from Amazon here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tim Dorsey \u2013 \u201c\u02bbDon\u2019t shoot guns into the hurricane.\u2019 Elsewhere this would go without saying, but Floridians need to be told,\u201d this antic crime novel begins, as Dorsey takes the familiar Florida man premise to absurd heights (or is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****Naked Came the Florida Man - Guaranteed, this is one of the wackiest books you\u2019ll read this year. \u201cA Florida man\u201d signals a wildly absurd story will follow, and author Tim Dorsey has given you fair warning!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,272,52,40,126,60],"tags":[1710,1712,1711],"class_list":["post-8406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure","category-comedy","category-crime","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-storytelling","tag-florida","tag-naked-came-the-florida-man","tag-tim-dorsey"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/rifle-shooting.jpg?fit=700%2C636&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2bA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8406"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8410,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8406\/revisions\/8410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}