"Florida Roadkill" by Tim Dorsey

Hugely energetic, fast-paced and action-packed with a large cast of oddball characters, this book starts by relating a large number of violent deaths in a seemingly random order. There was a lot of this and I found it difficult to get interested. But after a while, I started to recognise characters I'd met before and at about the half-way mark I started to understand how things were connected.

Synopsis? Serge and Coleman are on a crime spree with coke-snorting bimbo Sharon. They get involved with a corporate criminals and hit men and cheerfully murder their way across Florida. At the same time, best-friends-since-school Sean and David are on a road trip.

In typical American fashion the prose contains a vast number of cultural references (are Americans really so obsessed with sports and with the details of the food they eat and the clothes they wear?) and seeks to add verisimilitude by the means of lists, eg "He filled it with his native-tourist gear: camera, lenses, extra film, leather-bound journal, gravity-defiant pens, water bottle, the 1939 WPA guide to Florida, coupons, maps, AM/FM radio with weather alarm, a travel-size. 25 automatic pistol and other people’s credit cards." (Ch 24) I suppose this makes the narrative more believable although given this number of murders my disbelief was never actually suspended.

The 'blurt it all out' style reminded me to some extent of Jack Kerouac's free-wheeling prose in On the Road and more so of someone on amphetamines. As well as the graphic details and the ever-more-inventive ways of killing someone, there was quite a lot of humour. This kept me going to the end, although I was already getting bored by the quarter mark (it's all so much the same).

Selected quotes:

• "Ellrod, like all Florida convenience store clerks, had the Serengeti alertness of the tastiest gazelle in the herd. He studied customers for danger." (Prologue)
• "Behind the wheel was twenty-two-year-old Johnny Vegas, bronzed, built and smelling like a whorehouse." (Prologue)
• "In every five thousand dollars of dental work there’s ten thousand dollars to be made." (Ch 3)
• "A party wasn’t really a party unless it was lubricating future revenue." (Ch 3)
• "He employed the Big Tobacco Theorem: Tell reality-defying lies with a straight face. He didn’t consider it dishonesty but low comedy." (Ch 17)
• "Roaming police computer systems was like surfing a secret Internet, except it was much, much slower and utterly disjointed." (Ch 21)

There are now 24 books in the series. I can't imagine how the energy is kept up that long. I was exhausted just by the first.

February 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God