A Stripped Down Tease

It happens to a lot of writers: their slightest work gets made into a movie and becomes their best known book. (Name a Jerzy Kozinski book other than "Being There"? Most people wouldn't have come up with the prize-winning early works.) So most people have heard of Carl Hiaasen through "Strip Tease", even if they didn't see the movie (perhaps being as sick of Demi Moore as I am). And it's a damn shame because Hiaasen is one funny, dangerous guy, whose sloppy grin covers up a truly subversive attitude. Or is it just that we don't mind laughing about crass spoilers of the environment getting horribly murdered?
Not that there's as much of that in "Strip Tease" as Hiaasen's side-splitting and "murder in my heart for the developers" early works like "Double Whammy" or "Tourist Season". For once, the throbbing hurt Florida writers get from watching their paradise get carved up and sold on sticks is absent. What takes its place is a much more standard "good, strong woman degraded by weak scummy men" sort of anger, but we've heard that one a lot and it doesn't seem to be as deep in Hiaasen's soul as the rape of Everglades and Florida lifestyle.
And there are no spectacular, hilarious killings and maimings. There is nothing in "Strip Tease" to match Chemo getting his hand hacked off by a barracuda and replacing it with a weedeater head so he can be a better bouncer and vandalize Jaguars. If that sentence doesn't make you want to read Hiaasen, you may as well quit reading right now. Where is something as warped at the villain starting to have conversations with the hacked off pitbull head that's clamped onto his upper arm? Or the ex-governor living off road kill?
Which is not to say that "Strip Tease" isn't a good read. We like the young mother who turns to stripping to support her daughter (who her vile ex-hubby is using as a shill to steal wheelchairs from hospitals) and instinctively feel that she deserves better than being portrayed by the silicon-tumescent Demi. We admire the camaraderie of her fellow strippers and the devoted, hulking black bouncer who takes their side. And we don't want her to get dribbled over by the besotted, horny politician that ended up being Burt Reynolds. But there just isn't the danger to be skirted, there just aren't the bizarro villains broadcasting haywired evil. And there is no grand scam that reveals itself. Nothing like the Cuban revolutionary, burned out Miami Dolphin's star (hopefully to get the Samuel Jackson treatment some day), and psychotic environmentalist hijacking a float to carry off the Orange Bowl queen to feed to gators while singing "Sympathy for the Devil".
I liked "Strip Tease". It's hard not to like Carl Hiaasen or his books. But then, I'd already read his other ones. And if any of what I've mentioned above makes you want to read them, too, then my work is done. Thank me later.