There is just something about Florida writers. When you are suffering from a third-degree cabin fever attack in Maine, there is nothing more comforting than a novel about palm trees, sand and shootings.

It started for me with Carl Hiassen, the Miami Herald columnist who captures the insanity of the Sunshine State better than anyone else seems to.

His classics (“Strip Tease,” “Skinny Dip,” etc.) introduced me to the genre and sent me to the works of Tim Dorsey (“Hammerhead Ranch Motel”) and of course John McDonald’s classic Travis McGee series. But the best of the lot could be Randy Wayne White.

White has created his own alternative Florida universe in his dozen novels that feature Marion Ford. Don’t laugh at the name. Remember, John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison.

Ford is a reformed assassin (He can still kill you in 57 different ways and they all hurt) who lives his life as a mild-mannered marine biologist in a stilt house in fictional Dinkins Bay. Naturally, his past keeps seeping through the story, causing adventures from Florida to South America.

Since Ford may or may not have had a child with the wife of a South American dictator, the stories just keep coming.

He is always involved with some superwoman, just off the pro golf tour or freshly escaped from a South American dictator.

The series is so well written that I am convinced there really is a Dinkins Bay and the characters really live there. I look for the marina on my annual visits to Florida.

His sidekick, the overeducated and heavily medicated Tomlinson, lives on a sailboat off the marina and may have killed some of Ford friends in a terrorist bombing incident decades earlier. Ford may be ordered to kill Tomlinson some day, to close the books on the bombing. This, somehow, does not put a strain on the friendship.

Dinkins Bay is obviously a combination of Sanibel and Captiva, two idyllic island off Fort Myers in Florida. I plan to move there just as soon as I win a lottery or two. To rent a room on the island will set you back $300 a day or more. To buy, well, you would need a lottery or two.

White is not just popular with the detective crowd (which includes me) anymore but is now catching on with the mainstream as well. The last effort, “Tampa Burn,” got to 157 on the USA TODAY Best Seller list. His latest, “Dead of Night” was released this month and tops my Amazon.com “wish list.”

Like Hiassen, White is a reformed newspaper columnist and fishing guide who started writing for men’s adventure magazines. Working for Outside Magazine, he survived a jungle survival school and a shark hunt in Nicaragua. He also claims that he was stabbed by a terrorist in Columbia and aided the Muriel boatlift from Cuba in 1980.

A taste of all of these adventures is offered in the Ford novels. The first one, according to the author, took all of nine days to write.

In “Sanibel Flats,” Ford must return to South America to rescue a child. In “Captiva,” Ford works to save Florida’s fishing industry from excessive legislation. In “Twelve Mile Limit,” he seeks three missing deep-sea divers off the coast of Mexico.

You have to love White. He loves baseball, which he played in an over-40 league until very recently. He traveled through Cuba on a baseball team that included my favorite Red Sox player of all time, one Bill “Spaceman” Lee.

And to top it all off, White has opened a sports bar on my favorite island, called Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar and Grille. Through a combination of events, mostly involving a severe lack of money, I was forced to flee the Sunshine State this week without visiting.

The rum bar will be first on the list for next year.

Maybe Ford and Tomlinson will show up.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.