A 15-year-old boy inadvertently gets involved in a crime ring.

It happens in Key West during the COVID pandemic.

And at the core of this adventure story is a hard look at history and racism.

This is Carl Hiaasen's latest book, "Wrecker."

I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Legendary journalist and author, Carl Hiaasen is my guest.

He's the author of multiple New York Times bestselling novels for adults, as well as bestselling and award-winning books for younger readers.

His books have been made into feature films and one is currently being made into a series for Apple TV.

The New York Times bestselling author has a new book, it is aimed at younger readers.

It's called "Wrecker."

Welcome, Carl.

It's so nice for you to spend some time here today.

Thank you.

Well, thanks for having me, Ann.

This is gonna be fun.

I can't wait to get right into "Wrecker."

Let's start with this.

The star of the show is 15yearold Valdez Jones, who goes by the name Wrecker.

So he is the seventh generation in his family.

Tell me about him.

Well, in Key West there, it's one of those places it's so unique.

People tend to stay there.

They're generations and generations going back and Key West has a rich history and Wrecker's history that his seventh generation, greatgreatgreatgreat father was, worked on a wrecking crew, which Key West was sort of famous for in the old days before steamships, a lot of merchant ships washed up on the reefs down there and there were whole crews of people that would go out in hurricanes and tropical storms to salvage the cargo.

And they got a percentage of the cargo.

And it was one of the most dangerous jobs you could have.

And Wreckers Bahamas.

And that was the most dangerous job on a wrecking crew you could have, 'cause you were diving in among all this oil and debris from a wreck.

And they didn't have scuba, they didn't have even snorkel equipment.

And you had to go down and hold your breath for a long time and chain up the cargo to have, it was very treacherous.

And he was very proud of that history, that legacy and his family.

So he wanted, and from a long family of sort of marine family, but he wanted to keep the tradition going.

So he calls himself Wrecker.

His mom isn't thrilled with it.

She wishes she'd come up with something a little more modern, but he's very proud of that.

I can't imagine anything more dangerous than free diving in that kind of water with oil and holding your breath.

But Wrecker at the beginning of this book is caught up in something.

And I'm gonna leave this to you.

Either talk around it and tell us a little, or give us a little snippet, however you wanna play this, Carl.

Well, I always, 'cause I lived for a time in and I grew up in South Florida and the Keys was one of my favorite places.

And I always thought that it would've been a cool place to grow up as a kid.

I grew up in West Broward County plantation on the edge of the Everglades, which was still pretty cool, but it wasn't the same as the Keys.

And so I'd always wanted to set a book with having a kid grow up in a place like Key West that has this history.

And Key West is, for a lot of people, it's just Margaritaville, you know, it's just laid back and very mellow and chill.

But it also has sort of a rich history of attracting scoundrels and outlaws and especially the smuggling trade because of its location, right on the southernmost point of Florida, right on the cusp of the Gulf and the Atlantic.

And so Wrecker, all he needs to grow up down there is a bicycle and a boat.

And he goes out at night and catches snapper.

You know, he goes fishing by himself, which I did a fair amount of myself.

And he's out there one night on a beautiful sunset.

And he hears this giant boat come, he hears the giant engines of what's obviously a speedboat.

And it crashes up into the flash, the very shallow waters off of Key West.

And it's all, you know, mired up there.

And there's a bunch of guys on the boat that motion Wrecker to come over and they want him to, in his little tiny boat to pull this giant Miami speedboat off.

He says he can't do it, his boat's not big enough.

He tries, it doesn't work.

And he's ready to go on his way.

He knows better than to poke his nose into this kind of situation.

And all of a sudden, one of the guys on the boat throws a beer can into wrecker's little boat.

And Wrecker looks in the beer can, and it's packed with money.

And he goes, "Why are you giving me this?

I didn't help you out.

I couldn't help you."

And he goes, "That money is for, to make sure that you didn't see us and we didn't see you.

And this never happened.

And now get outta here."

So now I won't give it any more away than that except that he doesn't know what to do.

He goes back home, he hides the money in his bedroom and just does what you do.

You just be quiet.

He didn't see anything happen.

But he knows now he's on the edge of something.

And that's where that part of the mystery starts.

Thank you.

Thank you for that and thank you for talking around it, 'cause I didn't dare to try to give any of this away.

There is this, the story is fiction, but there is a backstory, a true story, this historical component, and that has to do with the Ku Klux Klan and the lynching of a man whose name was Manuel Cabeza.

Now this is important.

Can you tell me about this story and also how did you discover it?

I had read bits and pieces, but it's interesting because with all the controversy going on about what's in and not in our textbooks, you know, I was raised in the public school system in Florida and my kids were, and my grandkids were, and I don't think there's any part of any history book that talked about just how powerful the Ku Klux Klan was for.

a period of several years in Florida in the '20s and that extended all the way to laid back Key West where the sheriff and the mayor and the entire power structure of the city were in the Klan.

And the Klan ran that island for several years.

And I didn't know that.

I'd gotten into it, I'd heard it, I was spending some time down there, researching the book.

And I spent a lot of time and a lot of the scenes of the book take place in the old Key West Cemetery on Solaris Hill.

Very famous, old, old cemetery.

And there was Manuel Cabeza was supposed to have been buried there.

And I went and I'd read some articles.

He'd been a military veteran.

He was originally from Spain, and he'd come over and he left a pretty, he had a little bar, tavern in Old Town Key West.

And he was a pretty tough character.

But his crime in the eyes of the KKK was that he was living with a woman who was not white.

And they began harassing him.

One night, they grabbed him, they took him out of his place.

They beat him very badly.

They tarred and feathered him, and they took him to the end of town and they dumped him out there.

He had several broken bones.

He got back to his apartment the next day.

He was in bad shape, but he was furious.

And he, during the struggle with the Klan members, he had, I guess taken off the hoods of a couple of them.

He was fighting and he recognized them.

He knew them and they knew him.

He went back in town the next day looking for them.

And he saw one on Duval Street, famous Duval Street in Key West.

And he shot him and there was a big standoff and a shootout.

And he was arrested and the sheriff put Marines around the jail so that, to protect him from the mob, allegedly.

And at midnight, the sheriff let everybody go home.

And they came and they got Cabeza and they tied him to the bumper of a car, drove him around Key West, beat him, and ended up hanging him on what is now out by Flagler.

And that was on Christmas morning, 1921.

That's what the city woke up to, the town of Key West.

And I'd never heard this story, but it's absolutely true.

And I thought that being Key West, I wanted a couple of the characters in my novel to have generational connections with what happened there.

Because there are people there whose family goes back.

That was only a hundred years ago, Ann, you know, I mean, it wasn't that long ago.

So there are families that have these connections and in some cases, these secrets, because after that, shortly after that was happened, the Klan was pretty much vanquished.

I mean, I'm not saying they disappeared, but they put their robes away and the whole movement sort of died very suddenly throughout Florida because of these lynchings.

But it's still the pain and the conflict that goes with learning something like that about a family member or learning, that doesn't go away through generations.

And I thought it was important in my book to have a character who had a direct connection to that event and was trying to deal with it.

It is definitely connected to the story.

And thank you for giving me the backstory on that, 'cause that's really important.

The setting of "Wrecker," as you said, is Key West.

It's during the COVID pandemic, and not that it was that long ago, but a lot of things I had forgotten about the essence of this experience.

And man, you brought it right back.

How soon after COVID or really, when did you write the story?

Well, I was down there during the pandemic for a month.

I rented a house for a month down there.

And I also, I mean, we all remember what happened in Florida and the enormous loss of life, but the Keys, the Florida Keys were hit particularly hard because they had a very small number of ICU beds, respirators, the things that, you know, were necessary so a lot of the folks who got sick had to be airlifted or taken by ambulance up to Miami and "Wrecker's" in the middle of this.

And there's a fringe of the politics.

There's people in his family, like his stepfather doesn't believe in the vaccine.

And Wrecker's very concerned, 'cause he's older, the gentleman's older and he's vulnerable and he's seen all these other people get sick and some cases die.

And there's a part of the book where he is urging his family members, please just get the vaccine because, you know, there's no hospital beds.

What are we gonna do if you get sick?

And that was a very real discussion in lots of homes and all throughout the country, especially in Florida, especially in the Keys where there was such a shortage of medical care that you needed.

And so Wrecker in his own way is coping with that.

He cares about his stepdad, his mom, as well, he's very worried about his mom because it's the vulnerability.

And at the same time he's going through what a lot of kids went through with school is that school is now suddenly remote.

And for him, for Wrecker, it's not a bad thing because he's a pretty good student, but at the end of every day, as soon as he gets, he leaves the school, he just gets in his boat and goes out fishing and hanging out and enjoying Key West.

So now he gets to work at home, it's a lot shorter trip to the dock.

So he closes up his laptop and he goes fishing.

So it wasn't the same kind of hardship for him.

And because Key West, there's a lot to do, and you're outdoors where he felt relatively safe.

You know, you're out in the water and you've got the Gulf breezes, the menace of the pandemic is not so apparent, you know, you're out there and you feel like you're invincible.

Carl, the part that you just talked about with the stepfather and the antivax part, am I correct, did you receive pushback for putting that in the book?

Yeah, when I did the, I had a tour when the book came out a couple months ago and there were a couple events canceled.

One in, I'm trying to remember, I think one was in Georgia, actually one was in Virginia and one was in North Carolina.

And these were events, they're coordinated with smaller bookstores, independent bookstores.

And that's who I felt bad about, because they depend on these author events, a lot of them you know, to help boost the bottom line.

It's a big deal for them.

And in one case they, a couple cases, they didn't give a reason.

So I don't know whether it was the vaccine angle or whether it was the mentioning of of what the KKK and the true history in the book that that upset them, I don't know.

But I know that in one case they said, "Well, we can't, it's got too much of a pro-vaccine message.

We can't expose our kids to that."

I mean, that was actually what they said because God forbid your kids should get any science between their ears.

And I felt, again, for me, I'm not a big fan of the book tour, so anything that's gonna shorten the book tour, I'm all in favor.

That's one less place I gotta go on an airplane.

But I felt bad for the stores because they do count on it.

And we did everything we could and worked with our publisher to get them signed copies of books that they could have at the stores for the kids if the kids came into the stores.

These were coordinated through schools.

This is the perfect intro now to look at book banning and book challenges.

And you're on the list.

I know that you write both adult and kids books.

With thought provoking topics, are we not giving kids enough credit?

Well, of course not.

And that's, the worst part about it is the interference between the parent and the child.

You're now telling the kid that the government is a better parent than the parent is.

We'll decide what they're gonna read and what they can read.

And you just get out of it.

That's the real abomination.

And people are pushing back on that.

And it's gotten, I mean, we are sort of a punchline, as usual.

Florida becomes a national punchline for this, this Gabia county just released a list of 1600 votes that were yanked to be reviewed among them dictionaries, several sets of encyclopedias.

I mean, and I'm still wondering whether they did this for the opposite effect, in other words, to make it so outrageous that it would become, and it is part of a court case now.

And I, out of disclosure, I'd say my publisher, Random House, Penguin Random House is very involved in the litigation against the Florida laws and which I'm very proud of, but 1600 book titles.

So I'm on there.

Two of the kids books, "Hoot" and "Flush" are on there, which I could go through there line by line, I couldn't really find out.

But I do remember when "Hoot" first came out, I got a letter from a librarian.

I wanna say Waco, Texas, but it's somewhere in Texas.

That's where a lot of the letters come from.

And they're, I always get kind of a kick out of 'em.

And she said that she was taking it out of her, this is going back 20 years.

She was making sure it was off the shelves of her school because it had the word butt in it, BUTT.

Well, one kid said to another, "I'm gonna kick your butt."

Now if you were in a school yard, you wouldn't hear that word.

You'd hear the other word.

I cleaned it up, and it was still too much for this, this poor person, this poor shriveled soul in Texas.

She just couldn't handle the word butt.

So I've had some of it before.

So two of the books are on this list, but I looked at all of this was the only, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is on this list.

And I felt like so honored, like it was a great list to be in.

I was just a little disappointed that all my books weren't on the list.

What did I do wrong in the other books that I didn't make the cut?

You're in good company.

I wanna look at parents in this book because let me say they're not great role models in "Wrecker."

Wrecker's father, who was never meant for life on the ocean, he bails on the family.

And what does he wanna do?

He wants to be the next great Jimmy Buffett.

Tell me about him.

Well, he changed his name.

He just bails out on the family when Wrecker's kind of young.

He's not a fisherman, he's not a lobster fisherman.

He just doesn't fit in on the water, but he wants people to think that.

So he is trying to cash in on the sort of the Buffett mystique, and he goes off to Nashville and he gets himself a new name, Austin Breakwater.

And he starts cutting these terrible records that are basically rip-offs of other famous records.

And he changes a few words and he changes the chords a little bit and he's playing 'em in bars.

And then he shows up again in Wrecker's life.

And he pops up in Key West and talks Wrecker into going to listen to him at a, you know, Wrecker's not old enough to go into a bar, but they have a lot of cafe.

You can sit outside, you can hear great music, you know.

And so Wrecker kind of reluctantly goes down there and he meets his dad, hasn't seen him in years, and his dad's all got, you know, the shrimp skin boots and the hat and Wrecker's like, "What is that?"

And he's, you know, this is new guy and goes, "No, I'm starting a new leaf.

I'm gonna get my career together."

And so Wrecker goes and he hears him sing.

It's pretty horrible, you know, the song.

And Wrecker says, "You're gonna get sued."

He did a song that was just like an Eagles song and he said, "Dad, you can't, the Eagles are gonna sue you."

"The Eagles aren't gonna sue me," he said, then he does a song that's like a Jimmy Buffett song.

"Jimmy's gonna," "Jimmy will never sue."

Well, The Eagles end up suing his dad over some lyrics which are too close.

So that falls, so now he's gotta completely reboot and start over again.

So Wrecker's dealing with the fact that he's not sure.

He doesn't have much of a relationship with the guy, but there's part of him that's sympathetic to this dream, this goofy dream that he's got.

But he has to keep a distance.

He's closer to his mom, who's got her own issues.

But he's a very independent kid.

He lives with his sister, who is disabled.

She was the victim of a bad car accident in Miami.

So she's in a wheelchair and Wrecker kind of helps her.

And she's really a strong character for him and she kind of keeps an eye on him, his comings and goings.

'Cause I mentioned the cemetery.

He's got this night, this side hustle at the cemetery at night.

And you're not supposed to be in the cemetery at night, but he's getting paid to clean this headstone and marker, this older gentleman whose sister's buried there and marker every day, all the iguanas in the cemetery.

There's lots of iguanas in the cemetery.

I got all kinds of video of it, which I will terrify you with.

But they live under the crypts and things in the cemetery.

But during the day they alarm around on the sun and they poop all over the headstones.

And so this guy just said to Wrecker one day, "I'll pay you good money if you can go in there at night and clean this, I don't wanna go every day and see my sister's headstone with the iguana poop all over it."

Wrecker says, "No problem."

But then that gig gets him into some issues, too, 'cause every night he has a cemetery to himself.

Who goes to a cemetery alone at night?

So he's pretty casual about it.

And then one night he's not there alone, all of a sudden he's not there alone anymore.

And that sets off some whole 'nother thing.

But yeah, so he's very, I mean he's doing all this, the island belongs to him at night.

He has really no fear.

Rides his bike everywhere.

He knows every little back alley.

He knows all the one way streets so he can get to place and it's just his place.

And then these threats come in, these outside forces that he's trying to deal with and all in the backdrop of a pandemic that nobody really knows where it's going or how bad it's going to be.

Carl, let's switch it up.

You've had books made into feature films and one of them, "Hoot," you actually had a cameo in the film.

So what was that like?

I had one line, yeah.

That goes back to, actually that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Jimmy Buffett.

He'd been a friend of mine for years and years, and his youngest daughter, Delaney had read "Hoot" when it first came out.

And she told Jimmy she thought it would make a great movie.

And he called me up and he said, "Has anybody optioned it yet?"

And I said, "No, not yet."

And this was before I had won a Newberry award or something.

And Jimmy just said, "Look, I know a guy, grew up in Lauderdale, Will Shriner, he's a great writer, he could direct it."

And so Jimmy and Frank Marshall kind of put the deal together and they were very nice to include me.

And they send me every draft of the script.

And when they're shooting a film, every day there's like five, they're always changing stuff.

So there's a lot, and I do a few margin notes and things.

And then Will one day said, "Hey, you wanna be in the movie?

I got one line."

And I said, "I don't know."

He said, "Just come."

They were shooting in Fort Lauderdale, you know, where I was born and it was this, but this movie was about these little owls.

This was right out of my childhood, these little burrowing owls that when I grew up, they were all over the place near where I lived.

And then they put in a big condominium development, just buried these poor things.

And my friends and I tried to stop it.

We couldn't, that's where the story came from.

So part of it was in Fort Lauderdale.

And so I show up at the set and they're putting like, I think a bow tie or some, anyway, and I had one line and I was supposed to walk through the door and say, "Mr. Muckle, Headquarters is on line two."

I mean, one line.

So what they didn't tell me was they had locked the door from the set side, just to mess with me.

So they say, "Action."

And I grabbed the door, of course it wouldn't open.

Now "Action.

Carl, come on.

Action."

I'm kicking the door and everything.

They just was a big, anyway, I finally got the line done and, I still have, you can't see it, it's on my corkboard.

I have my payment from the Screen Actors Guild, I didn't have to join.

I was a guest member, but it was 35 cents, I think for that one line.

But Jimmy had a pretty big role in the movie, he played Mr. Ryan, a teacher.

And then I got, my stepson at the time and one of my nieces in the classroom scenes.

It was fun, and the only problem we had was with the, sadly there weren't enough of the little owls, you know, they needed the owls to shoot the scenes.

And there these little burrowing owls, there's a bunch of them in parts of Florida.

There aren't that many in Broward anymore.

So they had to get like a couple of owls that were in a sanctuary that couldn't be released anymore.

And then they used computer generated imagery to create like a whole flock of owls.

It was kind of cool, but it was just sad that they couldn't put out a casting column, bring all these out.

They just don't exist anymore, you know.

But it was all, we had fun with it.

The kids, I still get mail from kids today and teachers who show the movie to their kids after they read the book and, you know, and it's still kind, it's nice after all these years that it still means something.

The new book is "Wrecker."

Carl Hiaasen, this has been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for spending time here today.

Thanks for having me on, Ann, I really enjoyed it.

I'm Ann Bocock, please join me on the next "Between the Covers."