Remembering Tim Dorsey – There Was No One Like Him

Tim Dorsey and one of his Florida author dress shirts. (Chris O'Meara, AP)

It feels wrong to let 2023 roll over into a new year without acknowledging the passing last month of novelist Tim Dorsey. I started writing this post four weeks ago, right after Tim died following a brief health battle. But describing Tim isn’t easy — and never was.

There was no one like him.

He fancied two established authors as heroes: Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. That’s a clue to understanding Tim’s personality.

He was purpose-driven and rarely took his eye off the long-term prize, which for him was being a rollicking full-time author and all that encompassed: writing, rewriting, plotting, promoting, selling, meeting readers, and entertaining anyone in front of him.

Reporter, Editor, Author

I got to know him in the newsroom of The Alabama Journal, where we both cut our journalism teeth. He covered cops and courts. I covered sports, including events at his alma mater, Auburn. But he was clear about his career goal of writing novels.

Few of us realized Tim had already written a first novel. The manuscript was in his home office somewhere, shelved. He was already working on his next one.

The Journal, an afternoon paper when such entities existed, had a small staff that embraced happy hours and parties. Tim was always front and center. It’s not fair to call him the life of the party, but he was the heartbeat. He was smart and anxious and funny and obsessed and talented and willing to dive head-first into any story our dynamic managing editor wanted. Nothing about him was routine.

The parties were memorable at Winter Place in Montgomery.

First, Tim and his housemate, Michael Sznajderman, lived in a historic Montgomery home called Winter Place. Constructed of stone and block, it had old, dark wood floors and odd rooms, nooks, crannies and entrances. In short, a perfect place for parties. Tim and Michael threw fantastically wild parties.

This was when Miami Vice and all that show and culture encompassed was popular. Use your imagination, double that, and that’s what a party was like at Winter Place.

Second, I’d led a boring, mostly sheltered life throughout school, including college, and these parties were the highlight of my non-work life. I still tell stories about them. Anyone who worked in The Journal’s newsroom does, too.

Red Sox fan Tim Dorsey shows off a front-page story from The Alabama Journal.

Those days are long-gone. The paper folded in 1993, a few years after winning a Pulitzer Prize. I left after 18 months for a job at the Orlando Sentinel. Tim followed the Journal’s managing editor to the Tampa Tribune in 1987 as a general assignment reporter.

Introducing Serge Storms

A chronic bad back removed him from the grind of daily reporting, so he started editing. Eventually, he worked from home. In bed. On his back. It was in that position he wrote the first novel starring Serge A. Storms as his protagonist. Florida Roadkill debuted in 1999 as the first of 26 novels starring Serge and his drug-addled sidekick, Coleman.

Tim later said he dashed into the book world by sending the manuscript to a publisher, bypassing agent queries, with a short pitch letter: “I’ve written a book I think you’ll want to publish.”

“I didn’t know it then, but I heard later you weren’t supposed to query like that,” he said. “But that’s the way I felt.”

His prose, as always, worked.

Tim was a metro editor when he left the Tribune in 1999 as his dream of being a full-time author came true. We stayed in touch as email pals over the years, and a few times I’d see him at a book signing when he had a gig around Orlando.

When I started the serious work of my first novel, I called him for advice. Among his comments: “If you can, create a character in your book you can put on a t-shirt.”

He revealed how he and his wife were running a small Serge Storms merchandise business out of their garage, which had bins full of hats and shirts. “It’s not nothing,” he said.

Tim Dorsey on the Road

In 2014, I served on a planning committee for the Adult Literacy League in Orlando, a non-profit that promotes and teaches reading and writing skills for adults. The group holds an annual fundraiser, Reading Between the Wines, at which an established author talks for an hour, meets fans and readers, and sells a few books.

Tim, who by then had multiple best-selling Serge novels in print, graciously agreed to headline the 2015 event. Wearing his trademark loud Hawaiian shirt, he rolled up that evening in an old, blue four-door Cadillac. He said he’d be staying the night at a small, non-descript hotel nearby in a room just big enough to sit and write. He no longer had to lie on his back.

When he went on stage that night at the Orlando Science Center, he started the way he always started reader events: he took a picture of the audience. No selfie, just the people who came to listen to him. He posted all these photos on his Facebook page, another thrill for all who showed up.

Dorsey Live and In Person

Then came the presentation — presentation in quotes. The agreed-upon format for the event was for him to deliver a 20- to 30-minute talk, followed by 15 minutes of questions from the paying audience. But again, this was Tim. He talked for five minutes and then turned to the schtick he preferred: answering questions.

The former political reporter liked to turn public appearances into press conferences, where he showed he’d learned from the best. When someone asked questions he couldn’t answer or didn’t want to, he changed the subject because he had a funnier story to tell.

Oh, he would talk about his star protagonist, Serge, an obsessed and psychopathic serial killer and Serge’s sidekick, marijuana-loving Coleman.

And he would have a yarn about how he decided to kill off characters in his book through yet another strange method. No guns and knives for Serge. Creativity kills, you know.

Public appearances for him were pseudo comedy routines.

He showed up that spring driving an old four-door Cadillac, his official tour-mobile. He had a trunk filled with books, shirts, caps, and other Serge- and Florida-based swag.

That night, he ran out of books to sign. So, he trekked across the street to the garage, pulled more books from the trunk, and sold those.

Afterward, he said, “You know who Serge is, right?”

I said, “There’s an awful lot of you in him. Except for the killing part.”

“See, you know me,” he said.

You Couldn’t Make Up Tim Dorsey

In the years after, Tim dug harder into his career. He traveled Florida and the Southeast on self-coordinated book tours after a book release, driving from town to town with a trunkful of books and swag.

You couldn’t make this guy up. Tim’s humor and humanity are what I’ll miss most. But he was so much more, especially to those who knew him better.

All of us feel awful knowing that Tim’s death adds to other sorrow. Tim’s surviving daughters lost their mother in a hit-and-run accident in 2021.

Personally, I’m comforted that Tim lived his dream. He loved his books and his characters and the readers who loved them the same way. He loved telling stories on the page and in person.

What a nice legacy.