L.A.’s politics of paranoia has been replaced by Florida’s black comedy of coincidences. Illustration by Leslie Herman

The bloodlines of genre fiction tend to be cleaner than those of the more self-consciously literary kind. There’s always a measure of uncertainty, in the glossier precincts, about who owes what to whom; among the three big literary Johns, who can say exactly what Updike owes to Cheever, or what either owes to O’Hara? But the line in the hardboiled, California-noir thriller that goes from Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain to Raymond Chandler, and on to Ross Macdonald and James Ellroy, runs open and unapologetically from author to author, like the dharma transmission passed from one Zen master to the next. Chandler was always glad to praise Hammett (he “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse”), and, though Macdonald became, over time, less willing to praise Chandler, it was precisely because the family relation was obvious. By now, the idea of noir, evolved from its first makers, has wrapped around the world; there are collections of Manila noir and Moscow noir, and hardbitten detectives chasing brutal sex criminals in gentle Scandinavia.

But another line of crime fiction, at the other peninsular end of the country, may have supplanted the L.A.-noir tradition as a paperback mirror of American manners—the fiction of Florida glare. In this genre, as Dave Barry, a late-arriving practitioner, puts it, a bunch of “South Florida wackos”—all heavily armed, all loquacious, all barely aware of one another’s existence—blunder through petty crime, discover themselves engaged in actual murder, and then move in unconscious unison toward the black comedy of a violent climax. This line begins in John D. MacDonald’s “color-coded” books (“The Dreadful Lemon Sky,” “Free Fall in Crimson”), of the sixties and seventies; moves through Elmore Leonard’s talky, episodic Florida novels of the eighties; engages Barry as a comic outlier; and eventually leads to Carl Hiaasen, the Miami newspaperman who has, for the past few decades, written a new crime novel practically every two years.

In MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels—several of which have been reissued with enthusiastic introductions by Hiaasen—the detective lived on a houseboat on the Intracoastal in Fort Lauderdale, but his West Coast roots were still recognizable: he was another lonely forty-something knight-errant. Forced to make a living from “salvage work,” he grew, as the series went on, ever more blissfully inclined to rumination on the state of women and the world from the houseboat deck. MacDonald had the bright idea of inventing a genuine intellectual to be McGee’s Watson, the Keynesian economist Meyer, and their back-and-forth about changing manners and morals got so dense that, in the later novels, MacDonald had to more or less slap himself awake to write the action scenes.

Yet the background was always peculiarly Floridian, from the panhandle to the Gulf of Mexico, and, over the years, Florida as a paradise despoiled became the dominant theme in MacDonald’s books. “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sings, an American truth, but in Florida, MacDonald insisted, they don’t know what they’ve got because they arrived too recently to know that it’s missing. Ambition, appetite, and an absence of memory lay waste to a once exquisitely delicate environment of wetlands and beaches. Elmore Leonard’s Miami novels broadened the purview, having been written—“LaBrava” (1983) in particular—at a time when sleaze was still South Florida’s dominant element, symbolized by the then run-down South Beach. By the time Hiaasen got writing, the sleaze and the shoddiness of Leonard’s Florida were buoyed by a permanent-seeming real-estate boom. This was the long bubble that turned South Beach into a resort for the young and hip rather than for the old and sad—and that, even after the crash of the late aughts, left many people in Florida more bemused than despairing.

Hiaasen shares MacDonald’s forensic taste for autopsying the ruin of a once beautiful place—he wants to find out exactly who has “made South Florida what it is today: Newark with palm trees.” And though his environmental indignation is MacDonald’s, the general tone is closer to Leonard’s—an amused, stoic patience with the grotesqueries of South Florida life. Take the pathologist in “Tourist Season,” one 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. . . . Several other Sun Belt coroners had conducted their own studies and confirmed what became known as the Allen Mutilation Theorem.

In the Florida novel, moralizing or minimalist, weather matters most. As one Florida crime writer suggests, in Steve Glassman’s fine study-cum-interview collection, “Florida Crime Writers,” when you have two characters together in a Florida book you really have three: a man, a woman, and the weather. Though both L.A. and Miami saw phenomenal growth in a short period—L.A. between the two world wars, Miami after the second—the overcharge of nature in Florida gives it its peculiar character. Even the names of the local teams (Dolphins, Hurricanes, Seminoles, Heat, Marlins) suggest a natural history of the place, where in Los Angeles the names (Lakers, Dodgers, Clippers, Kings) are either generic or borrowed from elsewhere: the lakes are all back in Minnesota, as the trolley cars dodged were once in Brooklyn.

More than any other genre writer today, Hiaasen offers a uniform package that doesn’t feel too tightly premeditated. It’s why the weary traveller delights at finding an as yet unread Hiaasen late at night in the airport bookstore, as he does not, quite, at the prospect of an unread Elfriede Jelinek. Hiaasen’s novels—each appears with an ironic two-word title: “Strip Tease,” “Lucky You,” “Tourist Season,” “Skinny Dip”—have no recurring detective or private eye, because that would seem false in a place so resistant to individual virtue: any knight-errant gets drowned here in a swamp, by the weight of his moral armor.

Hiaasen’s new book, “Bad Monkey” (Knopf)—which, depending on how late the hour and how delayed the flight, one can relish as the vision in pristine form or as the formula reliably executed—marginally alters the setting, from Miami to the Keys, where the line between natural charm and tawdry tourist crap seems particularly fluid. Andrew Yancy, a local cop, having beaten up his girlfriend’s husband, has been demoted to health inspector, and Hiaasen has great fun with the horribleness of what goes on in the restaurant kitchens of the Keys. (The once happily fressing hero is put off his food more or less permanently by what he learns as an inspector, and the reader gets put off, too, if only for the length of the book.)