Out of the Florida Swamps He Came to Haunt Developers : Personalities: Crime author Carl Hiaasen’s loathing for tourists, builders and the Chamber of Commerce is awesome in its purity.

The water out here is as clear as a glass of vodka, and about three fingers deep, and satirist-crime novelist Carl Hiaasen is behind the wheel of Final Edition, his 17-foot Hewes Redfisher skiff, which is blasting across the ominously shallow, coral-studded flats at approximately 7,000 m.p.h., quickly approaching liftoff velocity.

And even now, above the well-oiled whine of the Johnson 115-hp outboard, Hiaasen is ranting against the land-raping greed-heads and Chamber of Commerce shills who are destroying his beloved South Florida with planned retirement communities, aquatic theme parks and all manner of hideous and ill-advised development.

We fly past a new six-story condominium that looms in the distance, a giant white cereal box rising from what was once mangrove and seagrape.

“Carpetbaggers!” Hiaasen screams into the wind, which fills his cheeks and momentarily turns his handsome Norwegian visage into the face of an enraged chipmunk. “Sleazeballs!”

By day, Carl Hiaasen (pronounced HIGH-uh-sen) is a popular, no-holds-barred newspaper columnist at the Miami Herald, who has suggested (more than once) that there is nothing wrong with South Florida that a good hurricane couldn’t fix.

By night, he is the 38-year-old author of four gonzo crime novels set in South Florida. The books are dark, vicious and funny, and his latest, “Native Tongue,” may be his best yet.

As his reputation grows, Hiaasen is being compared to the modern masters of the crime novel, such as Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald. It is not a wildly hyperbolic leap; Hiaasen is good.

But what makes him different is his theme, which is the environment, and his style, which adheres less to tough-guy pulp and more to the satire of Mark Twain in his later, meaner years, and Ambrose Bierce, another journalist who went around the bend.

In an age when the environmental movement has been largely taken over by sanctimonious attorneys from Yale, Hiaasen remains a raging, bitter and deeply disturbed amateur. His loathing of tourists, developers and the Chamber of Commerce is awesome in its purity.

“They’ve taken everything that was perfect about Florida and destroyed it. They’ve straightened the rivers, bulldozed the beaches, drained the Everglades. That to me is immoral,” Hiaasen says. “I have no problem saying that most developers have the moral footing of drug dealers. It is the exact same thing.”

Bad things happen to bad people in Carl Hiaasen’s world. Deeply satisfying bad things. Bad people are fed to crocodiles; they are lathered in coconut tanning oil and strangled with tourist curios, thrown into tree shredders, shot by monkeys, run through with stuffed marlins, liposuctioned to death and raped by dolphins.

The bad people are flacks, egomaniacal TV personalities, developers, plastic surgeons, lawyers, hit men, crooked cops, politicians, tourists and retirees. And poodles. Really, really bad things happen to poodles with painted toes.

Today there are no crocodiles around Rodriguez Key, one of hundreds of uninhabited mangrove islands that make up the Florida Keys, and where Hiaasen’s skiff has come to rest. Today there are barracuda, which are wily, spooky, curious, torpedo-shaped visitors to the grassy flats. Needless to say, Hiaasen is trying to catch one.

As he casts his lure in front of their snouts, he talks about his books, his love for a Florida that used to be and his horror and fascination with Miami, the great despoiler.

Miami is a place where the extreme becomes acceptable, because Miami is full of extreme people. “The sleazeballs come for the same reason everyone else comes: the sun; the pretty blue water,” Hiaasen says. “I mean, if you were a car thief in Detroit, why wouldn’t you move to Miami and be a car thief here, at least during the winter?”

Humidity. Moral vertigo. Hustlers. Voodoo. Drugs. Terrorism. South Florida, from Palm Beach in the north to Key West in the south, is lush habitat for a novelist interested in the bizarre and the criminal.

“Why is Miami so weird?” He pauses. “It’s the business boosterism of the Sunbelt colliding into the Caribbean and South America, Central America, the Cubans. It was founded by hustlers. There is a pervasive and all-encompassing greed that affects everyone here,” he says.

“Drugs? The drug trade was simply the natural result of the greed. Before it was real estate. Then it was drugs. It’s easier. You didn’t need a Realtor’s license to sell drugs.”

Newcomers to South Florida quickly discover that in Miami people are not simply shot; they are as likely to be beheaded. Or blown up. Indeed, dumping a body in the Everglades is almost seen as normal.

“Here, the absurd, the bizarre, the incredible, are quickly surpassed by fact,” Hiaasen says.

Is Miami really the way he portrays it? “That’s what people always ask me. I tell them it’s worse. If that bothers them, well, maybe they won’t move down here,” Hiaasen says. “Hey, it’s nothing personal. Just leave.”

In his third book, “Skin Tight,” a TV personality remarkably similar to Geraldo Rivera dies by liposuction. Could this happen? Hiaasen, whose wife, Connie, used to work as a surgical nurse for a plastic surgeon, swears it is possible.

In “Native Tongue,” a crooked ex-cop turned theme-park security guard is drowned by an amorous porpoise. “It’s true,” Hiaasen says. “All true. They’ve got randy dolphins in the tanks! They’re goosing the tourists all the time.”

Hiaasen is a snob. He’ll admit it. As Floridians go, his roots run deep. His grandfather came to Florida from Norway via North Dakota in 1932. In Florida, saying your family came here in 1932 is like saying your people arrived on the Mayflower.

They were both lawyers, Hiaasen’s father and grandfather. Hiaasen today lives in Plantation, a suburb west of Ft. Lauderdale, in a house a few doors down from the place where he grew up.

As a child, he could ride his bicycle to the edge of the Everglades, to hunt snakes and fish. He was married at 17 and had a son, Scott, at 18. The son wants to be a reporter like Dad.

“Unfortunately, my childhood coincided with the boom years, and all the places I went as a kid are now malls and condos,” Hiaasen says. “There is really nothing left.”

This is how he got so mad.

“I always thought of my books as works that Floridians would understand. We’ve all had that common experience, of seeing a K mart where a hammock used to be, of seeing condos lining an old secret place you used to go. But I found that a lot of people all over the country have that feeling,” he says, “the exact same feeling of betrayal and horror.”