Book Review: 'Naked Came the Manatee'

© 1998 Fawcett/Ballantine Books

In 1996, Tom Shroder, the editor of The Miami Herald's defunct Sunday magazine Tropic, came up with a unique concept - a revival of the "serial" novel form with a decidedly loopy South Florida twist. What if, Shroder mused, someone rounded up thirteen Miami-area writers and asked them to build a novel, chapter by chapter, in thirteen consecutive issues of Tropic? It had to be set in the region, and writers had to be able to write quickly in order to meet the strict deadlines of the magazine.

A crazy idea, yes, but Shroder's challenge was accepted by a "baker's dozen" of the Gold Coast's best and more prominent writers, including humor columnist Dave Barry, ex-Herald crime beat reporter Edna Buchanan, columnist-novelist Carl Hiaasen, and their colleague Tanarive Due. The Miami Herald veterans were joined by more area literary figures, of whom Les Standiford. Elmore Leonard, Vicki Hendricks, and Paul Levine are perhaps the most famous.

The result? A mystery thriller novel parody that features three well-known fictional investigators (Buchanan's Britt Montero, Levine's Jake Lassiter, and Standiford's John Deal) team up with an elderly Miami environmentalist based on Marjory Stoneman Douglas and - indirectly - a manatee named Booger in a bizarre tale of intrigue, murder, and South Florida zaniness.

The whole concept was itself a parody of Naked Came the Stranger, a 1969 "novel" credited to Penelope Ashe but was written by 24 staff members of Newsday, a New York City-area newspaper. Like Shroder's 1996 project, Naked Came the Stranger was a sendup of popular fiction of its era, although the Newsday hoaxers intended their faux novel as a stinging criticism of  contemporary Americans' literary tastes, especially focusing on the novels of Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins.

However, Naked Came the Manatee is less cynical and has a lighter, more comedic tone, and when it was published in book form after its original run on Tropic, all the proceeds of its sales went to charity.


In South Florida, everyone wants to get a head. But not just any head. A very famous human head--severed and snugged away in a cryonic container. A head that could spark a revolution and change the course of history.

Everybody wants a piece of the noggin: rotund gangster Big Joey G., a 102-year-old environmentalist, hard-boiled Miami reporter Britt Montero, lawyer Jake Lassiter, and a would-be dictator in exile--with ex-president Jimmy Carter and a lovable manatee named Booger thrown in for good measure.

With bodies piling up it's anybody's guess what will happen from one chapter to the next, as an all-star line-up of Florida's finest writers take turns at taking this outrageously original novel to the limit--and beyond. - Back cover blurb, Naked Came the Manatee

My Take

I originally bought Naked Came the Manatee in April of 2005 as a Mother's Day gift for, natch, my late mom. She enjoyed reading Dave Barry's humor columns in the Herald, and she was then reading some of Carl Hiaasen's wrily-humored crime novels, including Skinny Dip and Strip Tease, so I figured, "Heck, she likes those books; she might like this one."

Happily, my deductive powers were on target, and Naked Came the Manatee became one of her favorite books, earning a place of honor in her bookcase instead of being relegated to the "paperback bin" in the linen closet. When Mom died in July of 2015, I decided to keep most of her books, including her stash of Hiaasen novels and Naked Came the Manatee. 

Saturday night, Coconut Grove.

It was the usual scene; thousands of people, not one of whom a normal person would call normal. 

There were the European tourists, getting off their big fume-belching buses, wearing their new jeans and their Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts, which they bought when their charter bus stopped in Orlando. They moved in chattering clots, following their flag-waving tour directors, lining up outside Planet Hollywood, checking out the wall where famous movie stars had made impressions of their hands in the cement squares, taking videos of each other putting their palms in the same exact spot where Bruce Willis once put his hand.

Eventually they'd be admitted, past the velvet rope, get an actual table, order an actual cheeseburger. This, truly, was America: eating cheeseburgers with other European tourists. 

Outside, the pulsating mutant throng was gearing up for the all-night street party, fashion bazaar, and freak show that the Grove becomes on weekend nights. Squadrons of young singles - bodies taut, hair perfect, clothes fashionable, minds empty - relentlessly roamed the CocoWalk Multi-Level Shopping and Pick-Up Complex, checking each other out, admiring themselves. Everywhere for blocks around, there were peddlers peddling, posers posing, gawkers gawking, drunks drinking, bums bumming, and hustlers hustling. Traffic had already congealed into a dense, noisy, confused mass of cruising tourist-bearing rickshaws, blatting Harleys, megawatt-booming cruise cars, and the pathetic, plaintively-honking fools who actually thought they could drive through the Grove on a Saturday night. It was just getting started. It would go on until dawn, and beyond. - Chapter One, by Dave Barry

It would be a crime, I think, to spoil the fun for you if you have not read Naked Came the Manatee by describing the book's characters, situations, and plot. After all, it is a mystery, albeit an uproariously hilarious one, which not only pokes fun at the tropes of late 20th Century crime fiction. but also lampoons the lifestyles, folkways, and mores of the Magic City and its polyglot populace.

I read some of the serialized chapters of Naked Came the Manatee when Tom Shroder published them in the long-gone (but not forgotten) Tropic Sunday supplement, but it wasn't till much later that I read the entire "novel." Mom told me a million times to read it before she became ill in early 2010. but I never had enough time on my hands: being a primary caregiver to an ailing, dying parent took up most of my time and energy. It wasn't till much later, when Mom was gone and I was left to pick up the pieces and get on with my life, that I made the time to read the tale of Booger the Manatee and the crazy South Florida himans that cross his path.

If you like crime thrillers, crazy Miami-area shenanigans, or cute marine mammals who find themselves in unlikely but comical situations, Naked Came the Manatee is the book for you. It will have you in stitches, and if you've never been to South Florida, it'll give you some idea of what the Miami area is like.

And, in any case, it's hard to resist any book with a chapter that begins with the phrase "Call me Booger."