Nature and poetry
Miami is a relatively new city by Western standards, but what can we say about Key West, which wasn't really attached to the mainland until the Overseas Highway was completed in 1938? Its island character - which cannot help but persist, given the number of bridges that must be crossed to reach it - and the great reputation for tolerance that envelops its natives, still appeal to intellectuals. The trail was blazed by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), who discovered the area through his marriage and was offered its famous home by one of his wife's uncles. It is said that the writer completed most of his major novels here, including En avoir ou pas (To Have or Not to Have), which depicts the inhabitants of Key West, as well as Pour qui sonne le glas (For Whom the Bell Tolls), L'Adieu aux armes (A Farewell to Arms)... Today, the magnificent colonial mansion is a must-see, especially as it is still possible to meet the descendants of the writer's cats, who are easily recognized by their physical peculiarity: a larger-than-normal number of "fingers". Among insiders, these polydactyl felines are known as "Hemingway cats".
Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, some fifteen years after he had deserted Key West following his divorce, so he never crossed paths with Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who began to settle on the peninsula at the dawn of the 1940s, although they did meet later, in Hemingway's new home in Cuba. What the novelist and playwright have in common, however, is that they were interviewed by Miami's most famous journalist, Helen Muir, who loved her adopted city so much that in 1953 she dedicated to it a book that is still a classic, Miami, U.S.A. Tennessee Williams remained faithful to the peninsula until his death, but his modest bungalow cannot be visited. However, as we stroll down Duval Street, we can dream that it was here, in a simple hotel during his first visits, that he sketched out the plot ofA Streetcar Named Desire , which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, a distinction he shared with Donald Rodney Justice (1925-2004), who won it (in the poetry category) in 1980. Although he published 13 collections, all of them acclaimed, he does not appear to have been translated into our language.
If Hemingway was the patriarch of Key West, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was undoubtedly the matriarch of the Everglades, the national park that surrounds Miami like the most beautiful of jewels. Born in Minneapolis in 1890, she arrived at the age of 25 in what was then a small town of just a few thousand souls. After a disastrous marriage, she joined her father, who ran the newspaper that was to become the Miami Herald. From articles to battles - the young woman lacks neither temerity nor outspokenness - in the early 1940s she is led to take an interest in the Everglades, the swampy area whose political will to drain it her father had already denounced. With the book she wrote - The Everglades: River of Grass - she gave the national park its nickname, and engraved her own in marble. Indeed, until her death in 1998 - at the honorable age of 108! - Marjorie Stoneman Douglas remained committed to the protection of nature, and to the cause of women. Journalist Michael Grünwald, born in 1970, took up the ecological torch with another equally important work: The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. However, the natural park has also inspired novelists, such as Karen Russell, whose Swamplandia is published in French by Albin Michel, and cartoonists, such as Steve Gerber (1947-2008), who created his monster The Man-Thing in the swamps, whose adventures were published by Marvel Comics and brought to the screen in 2005.
City and thrillers
According to many authors - most of whom were born in another American state - you don't have to go to the swamp to find monsters: Miami is full of them. The first to launch this wave of noir novels was perhaps John D. MacDonald (1916-1986). He was, in any case, extremely prolific since no less than 21 volumes were devoted to his private detective, Travis McGee, between 1964 and 1984! Gallimard translated them in the mythical Série Noire and some titles, such asLa Mariée est trop mort, are still available. MacDonald's afficionados can also turn to the rest of his production(A Valda for Cinderella, Strip-tilt, In the Feathers...) although it explores other horizons. As for him, it is a policeman that Charles Willeford chose to direct but he could not give a fifth adventure to Joke Moseley because he was mowed down by death in 1988, at the age of 69, before he could finish it. It is not too late to discover at least the first opus still published by Rivages-Noir : Miami Blues. For his part, Elmore Leonard, born in 1925 in New Orleans and died in Detroit in 2013, was not an author of series, he had no less a vivid imagination sharpened by the events that continue to plague America. Stick (which became The Miami Vigilante in the movies under the eye of Burt Reynolds) is the best known of his Miami novels, but it is also possible to find the city in Maximum Bob, Pronto, Beirut-Miami..
The generations born after the war continue happily in the vein of the black novel, but do not hesitate to add a political touch, even an ounce of impertinence. Thus, Les Standiford, who was born in 1945 in Ohio and began his career with an ecological thriller(Pandemonium), denounces the links between politicians and the mafia in Miami in a series that took as its hero a building contractor(Johnny Deal, Johnny Deal dans la tourmente, Une Rose pour Johnny Deal, chez Rivages). With Miami Purity (also Rivages), Vicki Hendricks also dwells on the dark side of the city, not without humor as she imagines a night owl who kills her lover with a radio cassette and decides to make herself forgotten by getting hired in a dry cleaner's. Humor again in three contemporary writers - Dave Barry(Big Trouble, Pocket), Carl Hiaasen(Fishtail, Presse People, Mauvais coucheur, 10-18) and Tim Dorsey(Torpedo Juice, Florida roadkill, Rivages) - who compete with each other in imagination to shake up their readers, with fear or laughter.
