[MUSIC]
CARL HIAASEN: I suspected that, as in all English classes, that a lot of the interpretation is subjective. And I think whether you're Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Stephen King or Tom Clancy--whoever you are-- your job is to tell an entertaining story. And not every sentence is freighted with deep meaning. There are some things you do just to move the story along. Yeah, I can remember a few years ago, many years ago, there was an article about my books that was published in something I think called "The Journal of Popular Culture" or something like that, which is a legitimate publication. And actually it was a great piece of writing, and the guy had analyzed all my books up to that point, and analyzed them far more deeply than I had while I was writing them. And he found similarities and recurring themes. And some of it actually stopped to make me think, now maybe I'm doing this subconsciously. But it certainly wasn't any part of a deliberate game plan. And the thing that I enjoyed about the piece was that he certainly understood that the main goal was a satirical rendering of an event or of a place-- in my case, south Florida where I live and work-- and that the goal was entertainment in the sense that it was satire. And some people who read satire don't get it and others do. And so that was pleasing. But then he had come up with an interesting thing that I didn't even know I was doing. He claimed that in every one of my books there was always-- and he found some symbolism-- there's a floater. Now in forensic terms, a floater is a victim of a homicide, a dead body, that's found in water, whether it's a canal or the Atlantic Ocean or a lake. But he said that in all my books up to that point there had been a floater. And I didn't even know I was doing it. And I remember at the time, I had read the paper, and I was about 3/4 of the way through a novel called "Native Tongue," had no floater in it. So I panicked. And I said, now I don't want to wreck this guy's theory. And I certainly want to be consistent with my other novels. So I fiddled around and came up with a very legitimate reason to put a floater in the book. And I stuck one right in there. And it fit in fine with the plot. But I thought, well at least now he's going to be consistent because I didn't want to screw up this whole paper. And I didn't know I was doing it before. In the book I'm working on now, let me think, there's no floater in it, but I'll probably have one by the end of the manuscript just because now I feel obliged to fulfill that guy's theory. The paper was so well written, it was so good, that I thought, this guy understands my work. And I certainly don't understand it, so I'd better go with what he says.