Serge A. Storms
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Serge A. Storms is the main fictional character in most of Tim Dorsey's novels (and appears in all of them to date). His name is a pun on storm surge.
In most of Dorsey's books, Storms is in his mid-forties in age. He is described as tall and thin, but muscular, with dark hair shot through with gray. His father was a Cuban American jai alai player who was more popular for his unpredictability than his skill at the sport; he died when he hurled a pelota that rebounded and struck him forcefully in the head.
Serge has been diagnosed with a variety of mental illnesses, and has been prescribed a "cocktail" of drugs to keep him stable. These are effective, but he often refuses to take them, since he dislikes their effects. Free from the drugs' influence, he quickly becomes manic and obsessive about trivial things; he frequently acts as an extremely eccentric tour guide for whoever happens to be handy. Despite his psychological disorders, Serge is for the most part a charismatic, likeable person (he can be viewed as a somewhat more liberal version of Joseph Heller's Yossarian). When an event or person offends his extremely strong (and subjective) sense of justice, however, he can quickly fly into a homicidal rage; he has committed a string of murders for which the police pursue him as a serial killer.
All aspects of the history of Florida, whether political, ecological, or sociological, are of intense interest to Serge. He is often seized with a sudden urge to visit landmarks, although their significance is frequently personal or related to popular culture, rather than historical. Serge usually documents such visits with copious amounts of photographs and keeps a box full of Florida-related memorabilia. Serge also has a varied taste in music, ranging from modern urban to the Beatles and Stones, all of which can be described as very tasteful and fitting to his personality.
Serge's methods of killing people are frequently quite inventive, and often provide a highly improbable— but technically possible— escape route. As an example, in Triggerfish Twist Storms ties up a man in a garden shed so that he can stand but not walk. Placing a hula hoop around the man's waist, Serge soaks the surrounding ground with gasoline and connects a floodlight (with the glass removed) to a motion sensor. Thus, the trap is set: if the man stops twirling the hoop, the motion sensor will activate the floodlight, igniting the gasoline. If the man can maintain the hula hoop's motion for several hours, the gasoline will evaporate, and he will eventually be rescued. (Needless to say, the victim fails to display the necessary endurance and perishes in the ensuing conflagration.)
As the series progresses, however, Serge seems to begin to abandon these overly intricate methods. In Torpedo Juice, he kills a petty mugger by forcing him to swallow a handful of bullets, then subjecting him to a MRI (leaving police to marvel at a corpse featuring numerous exit wounds but no visible entry wounds). Later in the same novel, however, Serge kills a boorish drunk via the relatively mundane method of kicking him to death. Still later, he fills an obnoxious man's scuba tank with nitrous oxide, leading to his death during Serge's underwater wedding (fittingly enough, to the strains of Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb).
In the books Florida Roadkill and Triggerfish Twist, Serge's companions are a cold-hearted stripper named Sharon Rhodes and an idiotic drug addict named Seymore "Coleman" Bunsen. (Both of these characters appear to die in Roadkill; Coleman, however, returns in Torpedo Juice.) For many of the intervening novels, Serge tolerates the company of Lenny Lipowicz, who is a stoner much like Coleman but slightly (and only slightly) more intelligent.
Serge might age in real time. In Triggerfish Twist, Serge has turned 35. Nine books later, in Hurricane Punch, he's 44. Being 44 causes him to go through a midlife crisis, causing him to have a religious awakening, and to go on a come back killing spree.
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| Tim Dorsey |
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| Novels: Florida Roadkill (1999) | Hammerhead Ranch Motel (2000) | Orange Crush (2001) | Triggerfish Twist (2002) The Stingray Shuffle (2003) | Cadillac Beach (2004) | Torpedo Juice (2005) | The Big Bamboo (2006) |
| Characters: Serge A. Storms - Detective Mahoney - Johnny Vegas |
