Naked Came the Manatee

Naked Came the Manatee has one of the strangest origin stories in American crime fiction. Published in 1996, the novel was written one chapter at a time by thirteen different Florida authors as a serialized project for the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine. Each writer had to pick up the story where the previous one left off, no matter how strange a corner the last chapter had painted them into. The list of contributors reads like a who’s who of Florida fiction in the nineties. Carl Hiaasen, Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan, Les Standiford, Paul Levine, Brian Antoni, and others all took turns, with Elmore Leonard handling the final chapter and the duty of pulling the whole thing together.

The plot is exactly as ridiculous as the format suggests. A floating cooler containing a head, a hundred year old Cuban revolutionary, a smart manatee named Booger, and a cast of journalists, gangsters, and Miami eccentrics weave through a story that lurches from one bizarre scene to the next. The tone shifts noticeably from chapter to chapter as different writers leave their fingerprints. Hiaasen’s ecological satire, Barry’s broad comedy, Leonard’s tight dialogue, all of it is in here.

Readers looking for a tightly plotted mystery should probably go elsewhere. Naked Came the Manatee works better if you treat it as a literary stunt that happens to be a lot of fun. The proceeds went to charity, the Florida tourism board was probably horrified, and the final result is a snapshot of a particular moment in Miami crime writing that nobody could have planned in advance.