Tim Dorsey at Murder on the Beach 2/10/2015

    Tim Dorsey was in Delray Beach on Tuesday to promote his newest Serge Storms novel, Shark Skin Suite. As always, Dorsey was introduced by Murder on the Beach's Joanne Sinchuk, who recently graced the cover of Where to Retire magazine. Sinchuk began by listing the authors who will be appearing at Murder on the Beach in the near future. When she mentioned Stuart Woods Dorsey laughed so hard he nearly spit his coffee on guests sitting in the front row. 
     "Stuart Woods is such a wonderful human being," Dorsey said..
     "He's much better now that he's married for the fifth time," Sinchuk replied.
     Apparently Woods has a reputation for being cantankerous.
     Dorsey always shares tales from the road—he averages 105.2 appearances a year—from the people he meets to the research he gets to do while driving across the state. "So many funny things happen during the course of a tour," he said. He's met people so enamored with his Florida-phile protagonist they've gotten tattoos of book covers and various Serge-isms, something that Dorsey acknowledges is an honor. "I don't have the sales," he said. "But Grisham doesn't have the tattoos."  

    During the Q&A Dorsey was asked how he finds the quaint, back road places that Serge frequents. "When I go into an area," Dorsey said, "I map it the way a cat maps a house or NASA mapped the moon." 
    He was also asked how long he has to be off his meds before Serge comes out. He responded with a story from a past book tour, during which he was asked to speak at a fundraiser. As he was addressing a large auditorium Dorsey had to do his best to contain a violent case of the giggles. One of the event organizers was standing at the back of the room, the audience turned away from her, trying to signal the author to put the microphone closer to his face. Unbeknownst to her, though, she was using the international hand signal for performing fellatio on a man, her hand going back and forth in front of her mouth while wrapped around an invisible microphone.
     "My literary goal is to get my dignity back," Dorsey said at the end of the story.

    I've attended at least one Dorsey reading for the last six novels and often find myself annoyed by people who ask questions I've heard countless times. If I've heard someone ask, "Who would you like to see play Serge in a movie?" dozens of times I can imagine how many times Dorsey has heard it. He always handles the questions with diplomacy, though. His go-to reply has always been, "If someone wants to turn my books into movies I don't care who plays Serge." Or something to that effect.
     On Tuesday Dorsey took a different approach to the question. "Normally I avoid answering that question," he admitted. "But, although he's too old to play the character now, I would think Christopher Walken, mainly because I would like to see him deliver one of Serge's death monologues."
     Shark Skin Suite has a much different vibe than his previous novels. Half of the book is every bit a Serge novel, while the other half is written much like a legal thriller. In each of Dorsey's books the author estimates that Serge appears on only forty percent of the pages, thanks to the many plot threads going on. But forty percent is enough for the character not to go stale or seem too contrived.
     "Serge is like super-hot sauce in a bowl of chili," Dorsey said. "It may be just a drop but it feels like it's everywhere."

            —Ed Irvin