Credit: Courtesy of Dennis Mitch Maley

If you know Sarasota and Manatee counties, then you’ll likely recognize some of the spots mentioned in Dennis Mitch Maley’s new novel, “Fish Kill”–the people, too, with names changed to protect the, um, innocent. Whatever your perspective, Maley’s storytelling flair and larger-than-life characters will power you right through to the end and keep you guessing about whodunnit (yes, there’s a murder).

Maley is kind of a larger-than-life character himself. A tall, tanned, shave-headed guy, he has ice blue eyes, a huge white smile, and charisma for days. When he arrives for our interview at a South St. Pete Starbucks in a white Mustang convertible (top down, of course), he looks like he could step into the lead of one of those TV crime shows based on Carl Hiaasen’s novels.

His book fits nicely into the pantheon of only-in-Florida yarns told by Hiaasen and other journalists-turned-novelists, such as Tim Dorsey and Paul Wilborn. Maley, 50, is the editor of the online newspaper The Bradenton Times. While he’s written three other novels, “Fish Kill” is his first foray into the world he reports on every day.

“Everybody was always asking, ‘When are you going to write your Florida politics book?’” he says. “And I was always like, I swim in a sewer all day long. I’m not gonna fill my swimming pool at home with sewer water. But [the politics] finally got so absurd where I was like, okay, this is to the point now where it could just be humor. And I love injecting humor in my columns and stuff, and I was like, all right, I would like to write a funny book that people could laugh at and it’s lighter.”

Which “Fish Kill” definitely is. And raunchy, too. There’s a politico whose handlers control him via remote-controlled buttplug. A buxom commissioner who gets caught on camera getting humped by a sheriff’s deputy. A sanctimonious reverend who suffers a scatalogical tsunami.

All of that is completely fictional, Maley insists, as are the main locales (Mullet County instead of Manatee, LeGrotto instead of Palmetto). That said, many of the characters have counterparts in real life who can be easily tracked down via internet search. I wondered whether he’d gotten any pushback from people asking, “Is that supposed to be me?”

Not yet, he answered. “The book just came out.”

“I think when you combine suspect genetics and an affinity for inebriates with the stubborn heat and humidity, it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Dennis Mitch Maley

With any luck, he’ll avoid the fate of one of his characters, Micky Pesch. The rabble-rousing owner of the DeSoto Gazette, his pro-environment stances get him in big trouble with the political powers that be. Micky, a long-haired hippie-esque millionaire, is a composite, says Maley, with the demeanor of a reporter he once worked with and the financial wherewithal of his current boss, Bradenton Times publisher Joe McClash.

A 22-year Manatee County Commissioner and a moderate Republican, McClash founded The Bradenton Times as a newsletter three years before he was voted out in a close race against a pro-development candidate. He invited Maley to be the editor in 2010 after reading his work in Creative Loafing’s erstwhile Sarasota edition, where he wrote primarily about the arts, and his guest editorials about state policies.

The protagonist of “Fish Kill,” Shelton Hamner, is—surprise!—a journalist, who at the outset has been fired by his employer, The Weekly Planet. (Yes, that was the onetime name of Creative Loafing.) Shelton’s fireable offense? “Riding” the 16th-century bronze statue “Zeus Abducting Europa” outside the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota during a food and wine fest.

This did happen to Maley while he was covering the Forks and Corks Festival for CL, though he didn’t get fired for it. There’s a photo in the book to prove it, taken by a man who inspired my favorite character in the novel, photojournalist “Dr.” Ringo Khan. Talk about larger than life: That’s Ringo for sure, a huge Falstaffian creature variously compared to a rhinoceros and an elephant, whose photographic exploits help Shelton take down the bad guys. (The inspiration for Ringo, says Maley, was “the late, great Brian David Braun.”)

Shelton gets re-enlisted into the news business by Lars Olson, editor of Pesch’s DeSoto Gazette, who wants him to investigate a mysterious death. There’s another parallel here: Lars is a former Navy man, and Maley was Army. But the author’s entry into a military career was anything but routine.

“I was the heavyweight champion of the Army for years.”

A native of Pottstown, PA, he grew up near Muhammad Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake. “We’d go watch the champ train when I was a little kid. And so I got into boxing and got recruited out of college [Shippensburg University] to go into the army’s World Class Athlete Program,” a training regimen for the Olympics.

A shoulder injury short-circuited his boxing career. That led, ironically, to his first byline—in Boxing World Magazine, for which he began writing during college. But even though people kept encouraging him after his injury to stay in sportswriting or broadcasting, he resisted.

“I said to people, I don’t really like sports.”

Though “Fish Kill” is fictional, the plot deals with many issues Maley has written about for the Times, like wetland protection, the outsized influence of developers, and the power of PACS in the election of county commissioners. It was, in fact, an election that inspired the book—the 2024 flip of Manatee County Commission by all grassroots candidates.

Does he ever worry about blurring the line between reporting and fiction?

“No,” he responds. “I think the story rhymes.” It’s “clearly inspired” by things he’s seen or written about, but it’s emphatically not a work of journalism (though speeches at hearings and campaign events early in the book do read like transcripts written by a reporter who’s all too familiar with such blather).

What will ring especially true for anyone who’s lived here for a while is Maley’s feel for quintessential Florida moments — like when one character cuts open his hush puppies “to let them cool,” or when another asks, “Are you gonna invite me inside or do I have to stand here like I’m selling solar panels door-to-door?” Or when Shelton confronts his neighbors about their back-yard fireworks and gets the elegant reply, “What do you want us to do, light fuckin’ sparklers like a bunch of fuckin’ pansies?”

So will this be Maley’s last novel to dip into the world of Mullet County?

“No, I think I found a home here. I became so invested in these characters that I think my books will be a continuation of this series. I’ve already started fleshing out the next one, which will be set north of the river in Palmetto (LeGrotto in the book).”

Florida: Fertile territory for novelists and journalists alike.

“That’s what I say when I talk to people at home in Pennsylvania. I’m like, it’s wilder than they depict in movies… White people aren’t supposed to be here, first of all. We don’t have the blood for it. And I think when you combine suspect genetics and an affinity for inebriates with the stubborn heat and humidity, it’s a recipe for disaster.”

And the perfect recipe for a good read.

Mitch Maley will sign copies of “Fish Kill” at the Kerouac House in St. Petersburg on Saturday, May 30.