Carl Hiaasen talks about new hurdles for book tours

‘Wrecker” is Carl Hiaasen’s seventh book for young readers, his 28th book overall. But his current book tour for “Wrecker” included a first.

Three of Hiaasen’s author appearances with students were canceled because of questions about his books.

Hiaasen is no stranger to controversy. He wrote for the Miami Herald for 45 years, much of that time as a hard-hitting columnist on politics, the environment and other contentious issues.

But his novels, for adults and for kids, have been beloved bestsellers that combine crime, comedy, satire and Hiaasen’s own passions, such as the Florida environment.

The real name of the 15-year-old title character of “Wrecker” is Valdez Jones VIII. He’s an eighth-generation native of Key West, descended from Bahamian salvage divers. The book is set in 2021 as Wrecker deals with his fractured family, a mysterious girl he sees in the old Key West cemetery, a gang of smugglers, a community crusade against giant cruise ships and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hiaasen, who retired from the Herald in 2021, talked to this reporter via Zoom.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been on a book tour for “Wrecker,” and some of your events with kids were canceled. Why?

I did several group student visits, and a couple were canceled. One was a school board district in Georgia, one in Virginia and one in North Carolina.

For one of them, they were afraid the pro-vaccine message in the book would offend children. Really.

Then one was because I wrote a book called “Strip Tease” about 30 years ago, and somebody thought anyone who would write a book called “Strip Tease” shouldn’t be allowed to talk to children, even though I’ve been writing these books for younger readers for over 20 years.

The third one I didn’t get a reason on. Really, it could have been anything. They don’t need much of an excuse these days. Now you just have this aura of fear and anxiety by the board members, so I can’t even say if it was a specific complaint.

Now I’m hearing that when you do these events for kids, they want to see the book way in advance. It used to be if the American Library Association approved a book, everybody thought it was OK, but that’s not true anymore.

Have you ever had any of your books for young readers questioned or banned before?

No. I’ve had books taken out of the middle school library and put in the high school library. But I’ve never had an event canceled.

I did get a letter once that one of my books for adults had been banned in the Texas prison system. It was “Double Whammy.” It’s about bass fishing.

You kind of wonder how that would imperil the moral judgment of somebody who’s already sitting in prison.

Then in Waco, one of the school librarians got upset about “Hoot” (his first book for young readers), said it had profanity in it. When they pinned her down it was the word “butt.” Like, I think one of the characters says somebody fell on his butt. That was the profanity she was objecting to.

Do you think you might get blowback in Florida?

Well, the Moms for Liberty got their start here. Then they set up branches or franchises or whatever you’d call it all over.

I don’t think they can use the vaccine stuff as an excuse, but I think they might use the backstory about the Ku Klux Klan hanging Manuel Cabeza in Key West in 1921.

It really happened. Until I got into the research, I didn’t know the KKK controlled that island for several years in the 1920s, and then they vanished, or at least they put their robes away. That was new to me, and I imagined what it had to be like to be a young person and learn that about one of your relatives, however distant the relative might be. (One of Wrecker’s friends learns a relative participated in the lynching.)

The guy is buried in the Key West cemetery. Finally, a few years ago, they put up a proper headstone for him because the guy was a veteran. He’d fought overseas, then come back to live in Key West.

The real reason [people might want to keep “Wrecker” out of schools] is they don’t want to remind anyone that white people were hanging people. This guy was from Spain, but he was living with a mixed race woman, and that was scandalous. He’d been beaten, then they dragged him behind a car and hanged him.

That doesn’t really go with that laid-back image of Key West.

The Klan was very active then. Per capita, there were more racial hangings in Florida than in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas. Florida was not as populated at the time, but per capita.

Now that’s something that should have been taught in schools. Someone might say, oh my god, these are disturbing stories. Yeah, it’s history. Lots of history can be disturbing.

Will you keep writing books for kids?

I love writing for kids. Kids are so much smarter than I was at that age. They ask the best questions. I’m fairly cynical, but I come away from it with a feeling of hope. They get issues, they ask you about the environment, about overdevelopment. A lot of them have an innate love of nature.

They’re real fans. They read closely, they ask good questions. Makes you feel lucky as a writer.