“The only thing they complain about is they never get to beat anyone up in a fight and they want me to use their real names,” White says.Īnother staple of the Doc Ford series is the attention to detail, which comes from countless hours of research. Some of the other peripheral characters, White admits, are loosely based on friends from the marina he worked out of for 13 years. If you live in a numerical world, it’s very difficult to believe in God, or having a better afterlife or parapsychology.”
“Ford was assigned to kill Tomlinson, years back, and in a larger sense the metaphysical and the pragmatic are so at odds, and that’s a kind of death dance, too. “They are kind of locked in this death dance,” White says. “Sanibel Flats” featured the distinctive personalities of the right-brained Ford and his alter ego, the eclectic Tomlinson, who parades around in his sarong while spouting his Zen philosophies. So through one person or another, I could say anything I want.” I wanted another character to be purely intuitive, spiritual. “I wanted one character to be mathematical, linear, pragmatic about something. “I set out to write a book I wanted to write, and I liked the idea of writing about a marine biologist because I like marine biology, and as a lay person it was something I knew.
“I didn’t set out to write a mystery or a thriller,” he says. With two young sons to feed, White spent three years penning his first book while writing freelance columns for national magazines. In 1987, Tarpon Bay Marina was closed to power boat traffic as part of a federal manatee protection ordinance. White wrote his first novel out of necessity. “But I always wanted to write, so in my spare time, in what spare time I had, I wrote.” “I never did, so I really had to work at it and I just worked and worked and worked at it, and ultimately became competent. “Some people have very good fishing instincts,” White says.
Summers were spent fishing off the Carolina coast. Born in Ohio and raised in Iowa, White and his family moved to Lee County in 1972. He lives across from Sanibel in his house on Pine Island, built atop Indian mounds that date back 7,000 years. The Southwest Florida that White writes of is home. “So Ford has to make the decision whether to act on his instincts or with what little emotion he has. “He is confronted with the option of killing someone who he really wants to kill, but there is a reason why this person has behaved as he did,” White explains. In White’s latest release, “Tampa Burn,” the pragmatic Ford faces the most difficult test to his rational side yet Ñ the kidnapping of his 14-year-old son. Recurring characters evolve in each work. MacDonald’s influence comes through in White’s pacing, which White combines with the naturalist eye of a Carl Hiaasen to produce prose compelling enough to touch readers on different levels.
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