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The MacDonald Prophecy
Every new Sarasota resident should be required to do two things before he or she can claim a homestead exemption: Visit the Florida House to get rid of any nasty Northern attachment to St. Augustine grass, and then read John D. MacDonald’s Condominium to get a leg up on Florida’s real estate schemers and the hellishness of living through a hurricane.
I finally got around to reading Condominium a few months ago, on what turned out to be the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication. There were no local celebrations, so we’ll do a little celebrating here.
In case you’re not yet familiar with MacDonald, he moved to Siesta Key in the late 1940s and wrote dozens of novels, including the Travis McGee detective series. He inspired writers such as Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, who called him “a master storyteller.” Many of MacDonald’s books were made into movies, including The Executioners, which became Cape Fear, and the 1984 film A Flash of Green, shot locally.
Condominium is the story of Florida retirees living in the new Gulf Sands condominiums on Fiddler Key (MacDonald’s alias for Siesta). We meet Marty Liss, a shady developer, and his associates, who are trying to save their hides as the real estate market collapses. Meanwhile, off the coast of Africa, a hurricane is brewing and no one is taking the threat seriously. Gulf Sands is on precarious ground in more ways than one.
Condominium was so prescient about today’s real estate collapse (minus the hurricane, thankfully) that I thought maybe MacDonald was our local version of Nostradamus. Not quite. But he was the “first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty,” wrote Carl Hiaasen in a preface to a 1990s version of MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-by.
The real estate booms and busts, the con men and the beauty are all part of Florida’s DNA. When Condominium was published in 1977, it made a big splash in Sarasota, says Kerry Kirschner, a former Sarasota mayor who’s now head of the Argus Foundation.
Every new Sarasota resident should be required to do two things before he or she can claim a homestead exemption: Visit the Florida House to get rid of any nasty Northern attachment to St. Augustine grass, and then read John D. MacDonald’s Condominium to get a leg up on Florida’s real estate schemers and the hellishness of living through a hurricane.
I finally got around to reading Condominium a few months ago, on what turned out to be the 30th anniversary of the book’s publication. There were no local celebrations, so we’ll do a little celebrating here.
In case you’re not yet familiar with MacDonald, he moved to Siesta Key in the late 1940s and wrote dozens of novels, including the Travis McGee detective series. He inspired writers such as Carl Hiaasen and Stephen King, who called him “a master storyteller.” Many of MacDonald’s books were made into movies, including The Executioners, which became Cape Fear, and the 1984 film A Flash of Green, shot locally.
Condominium is the story of Florida retirees living in the new Gulf Sands condominiums on Fiddler Key (MacDonald’s alias for Siesta). We meet Marty Liss, a shady developer, and his associates, who are trying to save their hides as the real estate market collapses. Meanwhile, off the coast of Africa, a hurricane is brewing and no one is taking the threat seriously. Gulf Sands is on precarious ground in more ways than one.
Condominium was so prescient about today’s real estate collapse (minus the hurricane, thankfully) that I thought maybe MacDonald was our local version of Nostradamus. Not quite. But he was the “first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty,” wrote Carl Hiaasen in a preface to a 1990s version of MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-by.
The real estate booms and busts, the con men and the beauty are all part of Florida’s DNA. When Condominium was published in 1977, it made a big splash in Sarasota, says Kerry Kirschner, a former Sarasota mayor who’s now head of the Argus Foundation.