A Romp Through a Shallow Swamp

“Win Cash for Life” reads the cartoon lottery ticket on the cover of “Lucky You,” Carl Hiaasen’s latest crime farce. With his last book, “Strip Tease,” Hiaasen, a former investigative reporter for the Miami Herald who started playing the novels 10 years ago, hit the jackpot and won himself the kind of literary freedom ordinary writers can only dream of.

It’s the freedom to write funny, a freedom that comes from knowing your loyal audience is going to yuck it up with you all the way to the bank. Unfortunately, freedom in “Lucky You” also means freedom from the necessities of plot and drama and suspense that keep a thriller going.

What plot there is turns around the winning lottery ticket of one JoLayne Lucks, a black veterinary assistant with a taste for Whitney Houston, green fingernails and saving the environment.

Tom Krome, a talented white journalist lost in the swamps of feature writing, sets off from his Florida newspaper to write a story about JoLayne. But a pair of gun-loving, no-neck, white supremacists have beaten Krome to the scoop and have made off with JoLayne’s winning ticket. With little to lose (and even less motivation), Krome puts his life at stake and joins JoLayne down to the mangrove swamps of Florida Bay in a mad chase for the money.

Having dispensed with the plot, Hiaasen is free to pad out the chase with a Brueghel’s Dozen cast of self-stigmatized religious nuts, adulterous judges, rednecks, longnecks, hooters, shooters, cooters--”cooter” being the Floridian endearment for the box turtle, 42 of which, their shells painted with the vaguely bearded features of the Apostles, track their muddy feet across these pages.

Hiaasen even has fun with his three Stooge-ish villains: an illiterate glue-sniffer, a Big Slurp of a convenience store clerk and their Napoleon, a racist too uptight to say the “n-word.” It’s lovely to sit back and chuckle with these toothless bad guys and watch Hiaasen put the “k” back in Waco and make a bunch of post-Oklahoma City militiamen so incompetently lovable.

It’s a Thurber-esque carnival of characters who believe that even if the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s a hell of a lot more livable if the examination is a take-home, open-book quiz.

At one point Krome makes “a cursory stab at sorting out his motives” for running off with JoLayne and into a firefight with a couple of unknown thugs. But that’s about as deep as it gets. When the author’s having so much fun making his characters do funny things (in between feel-good commentary on such contentious issues as interracial bonding, the draining of the Everglades, the hypocrisy of journalism and the judiciary), who has time to wonder why?

At least Hiaasen has the good grace to acknowledge the odds against the high-octane coincidences that fuel his book. An inexperienced arsonist, for instance, winds up using too much turpentine and collapsing from the fumes.

Ultimately, Hiaasen’s good humor makes “Lucky Day” endearing, if not gripping, and I can’t remember the last time I found a crime novel endearing.

String a batch of random characters up on a baling-wire-and-balsa-wood plot and hope they all come up at the weekly drawing. It’s no wonder that “Lucky You” is published by an imprint of a company called Random House. Hey, you never know!