The Case of the Florida Mystery Writer

The victim died of lead poisoning--a dozen bullets from a submachine gun. The sheet-covered body sped off in a coroner's truck. It was 1988, the tail end of Florida's so-called Cocaine Cowboy War. The war was mainly waged in the Miami area, but not entirely. A drug gang had driven up the Tamiami Trail and blitz-attacked a home in north Sarasota, spraying the interior with automatic fire and instantly killing someone inside whom they were apparently upset with.

As far back as high school, I had always wanted to be a novelist—more specifically, a Florida mystery writer. I had grown up on the east coast in a small town about an hour north of Miami called Riviera Beach, and my plans were to get a job at a newspaper and build up the writing muscles until I was ready for a full-length work. I’d always thought I would work for the Palm Beach Post or some other paper in that area, but then a scholarship took me out of state to Auburn University in Alabama. Little did I know that this was the beginning of a serendipitous chain of events, like a ricocheting bullet, that would take me to my destiny in Sarasota. Even less did I know of Sarasota’s rich literary heritage, which would end up cementing my foundation and launching my career as a mystery writer.

It started after graduation when I became a cub reporter at a tiny newspaper in Montgomery. The publisher soon became the editor of the Tampa Tribune, and he recruited me to return to my home state. My first assignment: work out of a small bureau in a strip mall near the airport and cover Sarasota County.

So here I was, back in the sunshine of my childhood, standing with my press pass on the front lawn of a house in Sarasota.

I smiled at the crime tape, living my dream. There were just a few police officers left at the scene of the shootout, and I was chatting with a sergeant.

He suddenly stopped with a look of concern at the dwindling law enforcement presence, and said something like, “We don’t have enough firepower.”

“What?” I said.

“They could come back,” he said. “We don’t have enough firepower.”

“Oh.” I looked over my shoulder and gauged the sprinting distance to my car. “Well, that’s good to know.”

I had always heard that Sarasota was rich with culture, but not this kind. From all the reports, the city’s closest thing to a crime wave was when Pee-wee Herman got arrested in the X-rated movie theater. But it was a refreshing change, since my first assignment had been to cover a weird vulture migration in Englewood.

Given my aspirations, at that very moment standing on that lawn, I knew I had come to the right place.

So I toiled along, living in a clapboard duplex deep in an orange grove off Proctor Road near the Interstate. (Remember when there was open land west of I-75? The field where I lived is now a hundred homes with screened-in pools and a big cement wall around the place.) I filed stories on car accidents and council meetings and near constant brush fires in North Port and a push to make the downtown core a less depressing place by getting rid of the vacant lots full of weeds and broken glass (try to imagine that now standing outside the condominiums and restaurants).

But a drug shoot-out was the exception that proved the rule. Sarasota was delightfully quiet, which meant there wasn’t always breaking news for a reporter. That’s where the “evergreen” feature stories came in—timeless articles you could write in advance on uneventful days and drop into the paper as space required. So I logged company miles driving all over the county, writing about Myakka River State Park, Selby Gardens, every possible angle on John Ringling, a world-class butterfly collection and the “killer, swooping turtles” at Snook Haven. I did a first-hand account of hunting for massive prehistoric shark teeth in the Venice surf, buying a professional basket and everything, but I could only come up with teeth the size of my own. Little did I know how well this material would serve me in my next career (file that thought).