Whodunits Make a Killing on Sunny Miami’s Darker Image : Mysteries: It is a ‘stranger-than-fiction’ crime capital where vultures perched on courthouse ledges symbolize city’s sinister side.

It’s no mystery why mystery writers by the best-selling dozens have elevated Miami above Los Angeles, Chicago and New York as the crime capital of their demented dreams.

The glitz, the glamour, the molten sunsets, the Art Deco hotels flanked by swaying palms.

Corpses floating in the bay, cocaine falling from the sky, rafters bobbing in from Cuba, boat people sailing in from Haiti.

Foreign tourists in red rental cars stalked by teen-age killers, vultures riding the updrafts among the skyscrapers and perching on the courthouse ledges.

Russian circus midgets sharing a suburb with Nicaraguan revolutionaries, 6-foot-tall models in jogging bras and cutoff short-shorts roller-skating along Ocean Drive with their portfolios under their arms, past pensioners sitting on the sea wall waiting for the final sunset.

All this--plus a state-of-the-art morgue that replaced the refrigerated trailer rented from Burger King to handle the homicide overkill--feed the writers’ felonious fancies and reap a rich harvest of royalties from unimaginable weirdness and random mayhem.

The mystery is, says mystery writer Edna Buchanan, “how anyone can write fiction in a town where truth is always stranger? It’s not easy. Around here, the more unbelievable the story, the more likely it is to be true.”

Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the police beat for the Miami Herald, reporting on 5,000 violent deaths, 3,000 of them murders, before turning in her press card to create Britt Montero, tough-but-tender girl reporter, in a series of fast-paced police procedurals that vividly echo her own experiences in the city she calls “the land of the midnight gun.”

Miami is “fertile ground for writers because there’s so much weirdness here,” said novelist Paul Levine, who renounced a career as a trial lawyer with a prestigious firm to dream up defense trial lawyer Jake Lassiter, an ex-Miami Dolphin football player whose bizarre adventures have just been sold to TV. “The problem is you’ve got to tone it down,” he said. “If you re-create what’s really going on, people won’t believe it.

“Like, here’s the Chamber of Commerce, always bitching about the city’s crime image as portrayed by us writers and on TV’s ‘Miami Vice,’ and then the head of the chamber has her Uzi stolen from the night stand in her bedroom. Sure, we all have guns down here, but an Uzi, that’s a commando weapon.

“Then thieves break into the mayor’s city-owned Oldsmobile and swipe his handgun, along with the manuscript of a novel he’s writing. No doubt a crime thriller, because a few months later his home is burglarized and his wife’s jewelry taken. That’s the egalitarian thing about this wacky city. Only in Miami is the mayor just as unsafe as the rest of us poor slobs. And he’s got police protection.”

Avid mystery story reader Roy Black, Florida’s top defense lawyer who won an acquittal for William Kennedy Smith in the lurid Palm Beach rape trial, concurs that his thriller writer friends “face real problems” dealing with local color.

“I cite the classic case of the rookie cop in his second week on patrol in South Miami,” said Black, leaning back in his office swivel chair against a bookcase stacked with mysteries. “A derelict pulls something from a paper bag and tosses it to him. It’s his girlfriend’s severed head. The poor cop doesn’t know what to do, so he tosses it back. That’s too outrageous for any novel.”

Despite fact out-shocking fiction, the Florida branch of the Mystery Writers of America lists 121 members, including such best-selling authors as Dick Francis, Lawrence Sanders, James Hall and Carl Hiaasen.

“We’re only 2 years old but quickly catching up with New York and Los Angeles,” reports mystery writer Harrison Arnston, who presides over the chapter and button-holes coroners and pathologists to liven up their monthly meetings. “We got more ding-dongs to write about than they do because Florida leads the nation in violent crime.”

Arnston, who moved from Los Angeles to South Florida, agrees with Levine, Buchanan and other colleagues that Miami now is to crime fiction what Los Angeles was to Raymond Chandler and his hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe: “a metaphor for mayhem.”

The evidence certainly is compelling. Vampire chronicler Anne Rice has just moved from New Orleans to a high-rise condo overlooking Biscayne Bay, not for a better view but for a blood-thirstier venue.

Al Pacino’s remake of the movie “Scarface” re-cast Chicago prohibition mobster Al Capone as a Cuban hood rising to cocaine king in Miami’s Little Havana.

“Miami Blues,” the recently released film version of the late Charles Willeford’s psychopathic chiller, is Hollywood’s latest bow to what social historian T. D. Allman calls “this rock video of a metropolis” and what resident humorist Dave Barry caricatures as “a place where homicide is a misdemeanor and drivers use automatic weapons the way in most cities they use turn signals.”

As Joan Didion has pointed out, you don’t need to live in this “rich and wicked pastel boom town” to merchandise its malice.

National Mystery Writers president Elmore Leonard, the author of 30 novels, resides in a Detroit suburb but his fictitious felons now roam mostly between Disney World and Key West, as attested by the alligators and palm trees adorning his paperback covers.

John Lutz, winner of the Edgar, the Mystery Writers’ equivalent of an Oscar, makes his home in Webster Grove, Mo. The titles of his private eye Fred Carver capers, however, reinforce the diagnosis of those behavioral psychologists who blame Miami’s murderous madness on the weather: “Hot,” “Scorched,” “Tropical Heat.”

Off in the nation’s capital, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, former state prosecutor in Dade County, let it be known when scolding broadcasters for excessive violence that she is working on her own TV script.

Like Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe walking “the mean streets of a mean city,” Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, James M. Cain’s adulterous killers, Joseph Wambaugh’s cynical cops, and later TV’s “L.A. Law” all wove what critic James Agee called “the poetry of violence” from California’s lowlife. Marlowe, in Chandler’s Tommy-gun dialogue, spat out Los Angeles as “a hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.”

Miami, on the other hand, counters Levine, “has 20 different personalities. Like L.A. in the days of the movie moguls, this was virgin territory that suddenly became America’s biggest boom town. Except that people are not coming here from the East. They’re coming from Central and South America and the Caribbean.”

“We used to be part of the Old South,” Levine said. “Now we’re not even part of the U.S.A. We’re the real capital of Latin America. Beneath this artificial facade of palm trees and neon glitter lurks this wonderful layer of corruption. Everybody here is from someplace else. Nothing is native but the mosquitoes and the alligators.”

Chandler’s goal was to “get murder away from the upper classes, the weekend house party and the vicar’s rose garden and back to the people who are really good at it.” Under the glow of Miami’s anti-crime sodium vapor lights, the dudes running up the homicide stats are really good at being bad.

“We got it all,” boasts Buchanan. “Cocaine cowboys, serial killers, bizarre sects and sex, deposed dictators, gunrunning, money laundering, smuggling in immigrants, voodoo rites, cockfights, animal sacrifices--you name it, you’ll find it in the police lineup.”

In this stranger-than-fiction city, perpetrators unknown embezzled the tax money intended to fight crime; a “body packer” arrived at the county morgue with a dozen toy balloons inflated with heroin in his stomach, and the federal narcs parked so many limos, pickups and vans confiscated in drug busts on the roof of their headquarters that the building collapsed.

By and by, a gang of Fidel Castro’s exiled thugs bid on patrol cars at an auction, then shopped for uniforms, guns, holsters, handcuffs, badges and radios at police equipment stores. They proceeded to kidnap, rob and blow away at least five citizens before the real cops caught on.

Meanwhile, a tad farther south in Homestead, as Carl Hiaasen recounted, the police chief was addressing a neighborhood crime watch group when a 75-pound bale of cocaine floated down from the sky.

Down here crime is even suspected of abetting urban renewal: TV’s “Miami Vice” is credited with helping to re-gilt Miami Beach’s faded glories.

“This once was a sleepy resort that shut down in the off season,” said Buchanan, driving past the restored Art Deco hotels and chic outdoor cafes along South Beach. “They called it God’s waiting room because of all the senior citizens playing shuffleboard and catching rays in their deck chairs. Then ‘Miami Vice’ came along and made it all seem so with it and glamorous.”

An “open and shut case of life imitating art,” concurred ex-attorney Levine over lunch at a trendy Ocean Drive bistro. “ ‘Miami Vice’ would film along here, shooting at night over shimmering water with lots of neon and playing that music up and under. All of a sudden the place became hot and exciting and seductive. People started wearing those baggy lined suits with the sleeves pushed up. Your Euro-trash playboys began arriving, followed by the film crowd and those tall New York models whose agencies now shoot here all winter long.”

Every Friday on Florida’s opposite shore, a dozen writers, most in the mystery genre, meet in a Sarasota pub to talk shop and play liar’s poker with the serial numbers on dollar bills to see who’ll pay for the drinks at lunch. Joseph Hayes, author of “The Desperate Hours,” remembers a couple of decades back when the late John D. MacDonald, a founder of the group, “had the Florida scene all to himself in his Travis McGee novels. John really had to use his imagination. There wasn’t much going on then. People came here to get away from big-city violence.”

The prolific Stuart Kaminsky, a Friday regular, seems to be bucking Florida’s grim gravitational pull on writers with three separate series featuring Los Angeles private eye Toby Peters, a Jewish cop in Chicago and murders set in Moscow.

“However,” he almost apologizes, “one of my Toby Peters mysteries begins in Al Capone’s waterfront villa on Palm Island.” The Chicago mobster retired to Miami to practice his golf swing and watch his favorite James Cagney gangster flicks after sojourning at another island resort, Alcatraz.

Released from Attica in failing health, Willie Sutton also found rejuvenation under the Florida sun.

“He was still Willie the Actor,” says Buchanan, recalling an interview at Sutton’s Sarasota retreat. “He had dyed his hair red, and at 72 had resumed dating, was taking dancing lessons and, like everyone else, was writing a book. Crime writers flock to Florida for the same reason Willie entered banks: It’s where the action is.”

Nonetheless, Miami’s city fathers and Chamber of Commerce remain uneasy about the crime chroniclers in their midst. When 25,000 booksellers arrived in May for a convention, Hyperion, Buchanan’s publisher, rented a billboard near the airport to proclaim “Miami, It’s Murder,” her latest novel.

“As they did with ‘Miami Vice,’ the powers that be went bananas and pressured the outdoor display firm out of using the book title,” she says. “It’s easier for them to blame Miami’s reputation on writers than go after the root cause of crime.”

Ill luck hovered over the convention like the vultures who ride the air currents around the courthouse and--according to a Cuban superstition--are the souls of homicide victims. It rained for four straight days. Some of the tourists huddled over the book stalls had their wallets lifted instead of their spirits, and the conventioneers, disenchanted with the period plumbing and unpredictable elevators in the Art Deco hotels, resolved never to return.

Like the book title says, “Miami, It’s Murder.”