A number of movies have also been filmed on the island including “The Rose Tattoo,” “Operation Petticoat,” and “License to Kill.”īeing that every hour is happy hour on the island, bar hopping in Key West is not for the faint of heart. Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, and Joyce Carol Oates all lived in Key West, and musician Jimmy Buffett, the patron saint of Duval St., has been “looking for his lost shaker of salt” for years in Key West. Ernest Hemingway made his home in Key West for over 10 years, and Tennessee Williams bought a Bahamian cottage in 1949 and listed Key West as his permanent residence until his death in 1983. Nicknamed The Conch Republic, the 3,700-acre island has long been a haven for writers and artists. While the idea of fishermen moonlighting as drug smugglers went up in smoke in the ‘70s, those types of stories make first-rate crime novels, and Key West has more stories, legends, and tall-tales than most destinations. There's something about a far-flung outpost that’s closer to Cuba (94 miles) than Miami that attracts a certain type of character.
Key West, the southernmost point in the continental U.S., is a major player in the Florida crime novel. Adam Gopnik, a critic and essayist for The New Yorker, wrote an article about the Florida crime novel entitled “In the Back of the Cabana.” Gopnik calls this regional caper genre the “ fiction of Florida glare,” and it normally involves some combination of the following: amateur sleuths, bumbling newspapermen, eco-terrorists, shady real estate tycoons, petty criminals taking their cues from films like Scarface and Pulp Fiction, and ragtag smugglers hauling white lobster (cocaine) into the States from South America and the Caribbean.