Palm Beach, Florida—across the Intracoastal Waterway to a community with a lot of billionaires, some upscale shopping and a generally monied atmosphere. What could go wrong? And of course, these politically divided days, your politics might well determine how you see Florida and Palm Beach—home to scary Trumpian right wing adherent loyalists, or your kind of people? Either way scrapes, crimes and misdemeanors ensue.
Tom Turner writes the Charlie Crawford Palm Beach Mystery Series set in the town and “where some residents are as diabolically evil as they are filthy rich. And scandal and sin lurk around every corner”—apparently.
In Palm Beach Nasty former NYPD homicide cop Charlie Crawford checks out of Manhattan for what he hopes will be the quiet life with the Palm Beach PD. But, after months of petty crimes, he’s first on scene to find a man hanging from a banyan tree with pretty Palm Beach list of suspects—a hedge-fund billionaire with a thing for young girls and a bartender with a sketchy past and a ten-out-of-ten creep factor. Right in the middle of it all is Crawford’s girlfriend, a local gallery owner shows up.
Now there are nineteen Charlie Crawford Palm Beach mysteries, so I don’t have the space to run through them all. But I can assure you that whole some long-running series often head off to new clime and pastures, Charlie Crawford stays firmly rooted in Palm Beach for all his cases. A New England transplant, author Tom Turner lives in Delray Beach and obviously is deeply attached to Florida!
I can’t possibly tell you about all of the Archibald “Archy” McNally series either. Lawrence Sanders started writing it and finished seven before he died in 1998 and Vincent Lardo took over the series and wrote another six—thirteen Palm Beach set mysteries in total.
They all feature McNally, a thirty-something lawyer at McNally & Son reduced to living in his parents’ home and running a Discreet Inquiries service. Someone once said McNally was rather like a Palm Beach version of Bertie Wooster! He is a self-described “bon vivant,” dillettant(ish) detective, and the only man in Palm Beach to wear white tie and tails to dinner at a Pizza Hut.
Anyway, the series is fun, McNally often crosses paths and swords with the Palm Beach Police Department, local undertakers and various long time loves. There’s also a cast of quite P.G.-Wodehouse-like characters surrounding McNally including the wonderfully named Binky Watrous (Wodehouse would have loved that name!), local gossip columnist Lolly Spindrift and actress Desdemona Darling.
The biggest beast of the crime writing world James Patterson has the Palm Beach Murders series. Now surprising perhaps given that Patterson writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family. And his Palm Beach Murders (2021) is good value for money—three stories in one book.
In Palm Beach Murders divorcees Christy and Martin meets and become a romantic dream. That is, until they start playing a strangely intense game of make-believe—a game that’s about to go too far. Stingrays sees a teenager go missing on a Caribbean beach, the local police are baffled. It’s up to the Stingrays, a world class team that solves the unsolvable, to unearth the truth: a truth that no one will believe.
And Nooners: Everyone who knows Tim says he’s a good guy. But the popular advertising exec has a problem: a lot of the people who know him are getting murdered. As ever Patterson is a serial collaborator and these stories feature his cowriters James O. Born, Duane Swierczynski and Tim Arnold.
And a few more Palm Beach-set crime novels….
- f/stop: A Palm Beach Crime Novel (2019) is by Frank Eberling. It’s 1974 and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has announced that over a dozen organized crime families have moved into Palm Beach County from the Northeast. New York news reporter Jacob Alexander Gardner heads to Key West to investigate and finds himself learning about Florida life, Jai Alai and organised crime.
- Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road (2023) starts with a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach. Two local women think maybe it’s their missing (run off, fled, fugitives?) husbands, but then the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.
- And there’s Susannah Marren’s Palm Beach novels—part romance, part shopping & f*cking ( as we used to call the genre!), part crime, part thriller and all within a very moneyed world. Her series starts with Palm Beach Wife (2019). Faith has fought hard for the wonderful life she has, for her loving, successful husband, for her daughter’s future. But betrayal and the backstabbing of Palm Beach’s high flying social set are never far away.
Room for a true crime? Maybe Marion Collins’s The Palm Beach Murder (2004) which describes the case of millionaire James Sullivan, the murder of his estranged wife, Georgia debutante Lita McClinton, his escape from justice from nearly fifteen years, and his eventual arrest in Thailand after years on the run from Palm Beach.
And a novel based on a true crime? Try Robert Brinks’s Murder in Palm Beach: The Homicide That Never Died (2016), closely based on an actual event in 1976: “The doorbell rings in the home of a prominent Palm Beach citizen, quickly followed by a shotgun blast that shatters a window, cracking the calm of a cool January night. Rodger Kriger falls to the floor, mortally wounded, leaving a wife and six children.”
An ambitious prosecutor pins the deed on Mitt Hecher, a hoodlum and karate expert. At Hecher’s trial, fellow jail inmates testify that he confessed. But was Hecher guilty?
Originally published in 2016 but now with a new edition (make sure you get that one!) after a new development occurred in February 2020 when the six adult children of the murder victim, all but one of whom had steadfastly insisted for decades that the man sent to prison was guilty, reversed their position and petitioned the Florida governor for a full pardon. The allegation was that the attorney who wrote the petition accused the prosecutor of framing the convicted man.
And finally. I almost ashamed to admit that Carl Hiassen has not appeared in a Crime and the City column previously. It’s not that I don’t like his writing and think his crime and corruption capers hilarious—I do. And I’ve been reading him for decades. It’s just that we never did a Crime and the City on Florida before and that’s pretty much his sole stomping ground.
So a big, “and finally” shout out to all Hiaasen’s novels but I’m choosing 2020’s Squeeze Me for this column. The mysterious disappearance of a wealthy, elderly socialite from the grounds of a Palm Beach mansion during a charity gala sets off a manhunt by the local police, egged on by the victim’s wealthy friends, all members of a social club devoted to supporting the current President of the United States, a thinly-disguised version of Trump.
Cue coverups, Florida’s legendary bad taste, corrupt politicians and a local wildlife trapper having to deal with numerous invasive Burmese pythons discovered all over Palm Beach. If you’ve never read Hiaasen this is a great place to start—a classic of his oeuvre. And also perhaps a novel that totally nails the nouveau riche vulgarity and weird politics of Palm Beach.
