Tourist Season Quotes

“It’s pretty tough to keep the lid on mass murder,” remarked the Miami police chief. “God knows we’ve tried.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Cab Mulcahy was a patient man, especially for a managing editor. He had been in newspapers his entire adult life and almost nothing could provoke him. Whenever the worst kind of madness gripped the newsroom, Mulcahy would emerge to take charge, instantly imposing a rational and temperate mood.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Wiley’s behavior had lately become so odd that younger reporters who once sought his counsel were now fearful of his ravings, and they avoided him.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“The center of social life was the swimming pool. Not much swimming took place, but there was a lot of serious floating, wading, and talking—by far the most competitive of all condominium sports.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“for it, but the sonofabitch couldn’t”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“What gets headlines? Murder, mayhem, and madness—the cardinal M’s of the newsroom. That’s what terrifies the travel agents of the world. That’s what rates congressional hearings and crime commissions. And that’s what frightens off bozo Shriner conventions. It’s a damn shame, I grant you that. It’s a shame I simply couldn’t stand up at the next county commission meeting and ask our noble public servants to please stop destroying the planet. It’s a shame that the people who poisoned this paradise won’t just apologize and pack their U-Hauls and head back North to the smog and the blizzards. But it’s a proven fact they won’t leave until somebody lights a fire under ‘em.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“all the way back to the marina the three of them sat on the luggage to keep the dead midget inside.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“That’s no midget,” the water skier said. “That’s a real person.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“The legs weren't hacked off with an ax, which is the most efficient way,' said Dr. Allen, pausing to choose his words. 'It appears from the wounds that Sparky's legs might have been removed by a large animal. They might actually have been... twisted off.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“For years Harper had run his own successful public-relations firm, staging predictable dumb stunts like putting a snow machine on the beach in January or mailing a ripe Florida orange to every human being in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This was in the boom days of Miami and, in a way, Sparky Harper had been a proud pioneer of the shameless, witless boosterism that made Florida grow.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“As a reporter, Brian Keyes had come to know B.D. Harper fairly well. There was nothing not to like; there simply was nothing much at all.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“So with the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, in 1980 Sparky Harper invited fifty travel writers from all newspapers all across North America to come to Miami during Orange Bowl Week and sail the Friendship Cruise. Of course, 1980 was the year of the Liberty City Riots and the Mariel Boatlift, so only nine travel writers showed up, several of them carrying guns for protection.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Bernal believed discipline was essential for revolution. Wiley, of course, believed just the opposite.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“You know what this is? A test, that's what. That slippery, hot-blooded weasel is trying to push me as far as he can. He thinks I'm not tough enough. He wants mucho macho. He wants machetes and machine pistols and nightscopes. He wants us to dress in fatigues and crawl through minefields and bite the necks off live chickens. That's his idea of revolution. No subtlety, no wit, no goddamn style.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Sparky Harper and the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce adored travel writers because travel writers never wrote stories about street crime, water pollution, fish kills, beach erosion, refugees, AIDS epidemics, nuclear accidents, cocaine smugglers, gun-runners, or race riots. Once in a while, a daring travel writer would mention one of these subjects in passing, but strictly in the context of a minor setback from which South Florida was pluckily rebounding.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Dr. Joe Allen had autopsied 3,712 murder victims during his long career as the Dade County coroner, so he had seen more indescribable carnage than perhaps any other human being in the whole United States. Throughout the years Joe Allen had charted South Florida's progress by what lay dead on his steel tables, and he was long past the point of ever being shocked or nauseated. He performed meticulous surgery, kept precise files, and compiled priceless morbidity data which earned him a national reputation. For example, it was Dr. Allen who had determined that Greater Miami had more mutilation-homicides per capita than any other American city, a fact he attributed to the terrific climate. In warm weather, Allen noted, there were no outdoor elements to deter a lunatic from spending six, seven, eight hours hacking away on a victim; try that in Buffalo, and you’d freeze your ass off. After Dr. Allen had presented his findings to a big pathologists' convention, several other Sun Belt coroners had conducted their own studies and confirmed what became known as the Allen Mutilation Theorem.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“also want you to go to an internist. Courtney says the mental degeneration has occurred so rapidly that it could be pathological. A tumor or something.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“I took all your columns from the last four months,” Mulcahy said, “and I gave them to Dr. Courtney, the psychiatrist. ” “Jesus! He’s a wacko, Cab. The guy has a thing for animals. I’ve heard this from seven or eight sources. Ducks and geese, stuff like that.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Sit down, Skip. I’m not finished.” Mulcahy stood up, brandishing the stack of columns. “You know what makes me sad? You’re such a damn good writer, too good to be turning out shit like this. Something’s happened the last few months. You’ve been slipping away. I think you’re sick.” Wiley winced. “Sick?”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Skip, that’s one of about forty things on my list. It isn’t funny anymore. You’re fucking up on a regular basis. You miss deadlines, you libel people, you invent ludicrous facts and put them in the paper. I’ve got a lawyer downstairs who does nothing but fight off litigation against your column. We’ve had to print seven retractions in the last four months—that’s a new record, by the way. No other managing editor in the history of this newspaper can make that claim.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Cab Mulcahy poured the coffee. Skip Wiley drank.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Mr. B. D. Harper’s death was a milestone. It may have seemed an atrocity to you; to us, it was poetry. Contrary to what you’d like to believe, this was not the act of a sick person, but the raging of a powerful new underclass. Mr. Harper’s death was not a painful one, but it was unusual, and we trust that it got your attention. Soon we start playing for keeps. Wait for number three! El Fuego, Comandante, Las Noches de Diciembre”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Come on, Al, this wasn’t a knife in the ribs. It was the ritual murder of a prominent citizen. How did Harper get into those silly clothes? Who smeared suntan oil all over him? Who stuffed a goddamn toy alligator down his throat? Who sawed his legs off? Are you telling me that some two-bit auto burglar concocted this whole thing?”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“I mean, you’ve got thirty detectives working on this murder, right? You must have had a list of suspects.” “Not on this one.” “So what we’re talking about is blind luck. Some Beach cop nails the guy for running a traffic light and, bingo, there’s Mr. Sparky Harper’s missing automobile.” “Luck was only part of it,” Garcia said sourly. Keyes said, “You caught Cabal in the victim’s car, but what else?”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Still doing divorces?” Al Garcia asked. “Here and there.” Keyes hated to admit it, but that’s what covered the rent: he’d gotten damn good at staking out nooner motels with his three-hundred-millimeter Nikon. That was another reason for Al García’s affability. Last year he had hired Brian Keyes to get the goods on his new son-in-law. García despised the kid, and was on the verge of outright murdering him when he called Keyes for help. Keyes had done a hell of a job, too. Tracked the little stud to a VD clinic in Homestead. García’s daughter wasn’t thrilled by the news, but Al was. The divorce went through in four weeks, a new Dade County record. Now Brian Keyes had a friend for life.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“No fooling, Keyes thought. He had arrived in Miami in 1979 from a small newspaper in suburban Baltimore. There was nothing original about why he’d left for Florida—a better job, no snow, plenty of sunshine. On his first day at the Miami Sun, Keyes had been assigned the desk next to Skip Wiley—the newsroom equivalent of Parris Island. Keyes covered cops for a while, then courts, then local politics.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“But I got some great buy on this Oldsmobile. You can’t believe it.” “Probably not.” “I got it from a black guy.” “For?” “Two hundred bucks.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Keyes opened his briefcase. “You a lawyer, Mr. Keyes?” “Nope. I’m an investigator. I was hired by your lawyers to help you.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“Ernesto Cabal, alias Little Ernie, alias No-Way José, was sitting disconsolately on the crapper when the trusty opened the cell for Brian Keyes.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season

“private investigator. Which he actually was. So the turtle-eyed sergeant ignored him.”
― Carl Hiaasen, Tourist Season