Yday: listened to fab podcast of @craigtimes and @Carl_Hiaasen & thought: September is Suicide Prevention Month! How often have I been close to the edge & backed away thanks to rererereads of peerless CH +, erm, Philip Morris (deffo slower than, erm, OK, delete alts)? 1/n

Started thread w key quotes of the peerless CH. TIL that Twitter, while claiming to save my unsent tweets (had more, so much more to say about the Hiaasen oeuvre), had done a Hadley on Hemingway on this Thread In Progress 2/n

Highlights of this excellent podcast: Hiaasen's research for Chemo's weed whacker prosthetic (quoted in the original TIP, cusses, Twitter, cusses), CH on Stranahan and Yancy and Skink, sorry Samaritans you're out of your league 3/n

Asked my sister (whose selfless part in looking after our mother includes rererewatching Now Voyager) if she'd read CH, & she said No, but some of her students had (she teaches 2nd grade). I sketched out the premises of Skinny Dip & Razor Girl, must reads when things are BAD 4/n

And said the word that encapsulates Hiaasen is condign. Bad things happen to bad people. REALLY bad things. It's glorious. IRL, one reason you end up close to the edge is that there are OTOH VERY bad people & OTOH people who don't want to get involved. 5/n

In Hiaasenworld, there are VERY bad people and people who get involved (do they ever). NB quite a lot of the VBP are racist morons, if you're close to the edge you need a kind of feel-good that helplines seldom provide. 6/n

Suicide Prevention Month somehow calls to mind National Brotherhood Week, but hey. The great thing about owing a debt to Carl Hiaasen is it's easily repaid by NOT GOING TO FLORIDA. Thereby dodging 6-inch flying cockroaches ("Palmetto bugs") and banana spiders. So good. 7/7