There are the Cubans who came over after Castro's revolution - many of whom are members of anti-Communist militias, with their own illicit arsenals.In the late Seventies, Castro open-ed the prisons and threw out the convicts, creating a new wave of immigrants, the Marielitos - Tony Montana, the Pacino character in Scarface was one of them. Down here there's no slow season: the climate is conducive to year-round homicide."Still, he adds, weather alone can't account for it: "I mean, California has a great climate, Arizona has a great climate; but we have disproportionately weird elements." Miami isn't just a pressure-cooker: it's also a melting- pot. It also attracts people who don't have anywhere to go - you can survive without a roof over your head. And as Hia-asen says, "Up north in the wintertime violent crime tends to slow down - in the wintertime, people are indoors. The warm winters attract the kind of people robbers like - tourists, rich people, retired people (remember Gold-en Girls? That was Miami). Another initiative, TRIP, is designed to help tourists to find their way about without looking at maps. They don't say this in the press release, but reading a map in a car is regarded as a dangerous practice in Miami - it lets people know you are new in town, and probably loaded with lots of valuable things like travellers' cheques and cameras.The actual reasons for the crime are the same as the symbolic ones For a start, there's the weather.
Some of these initiatives have scary acro-nyms such as RID (Robbery Intervention Detail) and TRAP (Tourist Robbery Abatement Program); others have more positive ones, like TOPP (Tourist Oriented Police Program) and STARS (Sunny Isles Tourists and Residents - logically it ought to be SITARS, but presumably Indian stringed instruments didn't provide quite the spin they wanted). They prefer to concentrate on the Art Deco hotels and the nascent local film industry (Schwarzenegger made True Lies here; Stallone made The Specialist).Not all their efforts to calm your fears are effective - you can decide for yourself whether it's reassuring that they put out press releases em-phasising a series of police initiatives to stop tourist-directed crime. Their brochures don't point you to the downtown coin dealers where Alec Baldwin had his fingers sliced off with a machete in Miami Blues (1990). A series of murders of European tourists a couple of years ago sent holiday bookings plummeting, and the Greater Miami Conven-tion and Visitors Bureau is still trying to forget about it. Hiaasen feels strongly that potential visitors should know about this - hence tonight's film, a brief, crime reporter's view of the city, designed not to put tourists off, but to show them what they're letting themselves in for.His stance is not popular, you would guess, with the local tourist authorities. It's unfortunately based on stuff that happens."Florida no longer has the highest murder rate in the US, but it does have the highest overall crime rate, and the highest figures for violent crime.
His comedy thrillers are eccentric confections - murders committed with stuffed marlin, serial wheelchair theft - but he plays down the extent of his invention: "It would be nice," he says, "if I could tell you that all these novelists have vivid imaginations and dream stuff up I'd love to take credit for some of the stuff in my books. Hiaasen (in the news because Demi Moore is reportedly earning $15m for starring in the film of his book Striptease) is another. It's no coincidence that Florida crime fiction is often written by journalists - Edna Buchanan is one: a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter on the Miami Herald and author of an autobiography (The Corpse Had a Fam-iliar Face), and two novels (Container Under Pressure - another Miami metaphor - and Miami, It's Murder) based on her experiences. Got it?" If that doesn't work, imagine making love to Norman Mailer - frightening, isn't it?But while Florida is a good place to let your pathetic fallacy run riot, the main reason why it attracts so much fictional crime is the vast amount of the real-life stuff floating about.
