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词条 Serge A. Storms
释义

  1. Description

  2. Age

  3. Family

  4. Companions

  5. Murder methods

  6. External links

  7. References

{{Multiple issues|{{Refimprove|date=March 2008}}{{in-universe|date=November 2010}}
}}{{Infobox character
| colour = #DEDEE2
| name = Serge A. Storms
| first = Florida Roadkill
| creator = Tim Dorsey
| alias = Jack Pimento[1]
| occupation = serial killer, amateur Florida historian
| spouse = Molly[2]
| gender = Male
| family = Pablo "Testaronda" Storms (father, deceased)[3][4]
Gloria Gonzales (mother, deceased)[4]
Sergio Gonzales (maternal grandfather, deceased)[4][5]
Ford Oelman (half-brother)[5]
| religion = Roman Catholic[6]
veneration of Don Shula[6]
his own which is to question them all[7]
}}

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. Most often described as "intense" in personality, he is a vagrant with a voracious intellect and an encyclopedic knowledge of Florida history, but prone to periods of "focus" that lead him to commit brutal - and often elaborately planned and staged - acts of violence.

Description

In most of Dorsey's books, Serge is in his mid-forties. He is described as tall and thin, but muscular, with dark hair shot through with gray.

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. Serge acts as an independent vigilante who dispenses rough, creative and immediate death penalties for low-life criminals, somewhat in the style of Death Wish (and its sequels) starring Charles Bronson.

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 numbers 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 the Rolling Stones, all of which can be described as very tasteful and fitting to his personality.

A confessed coffee addict, Serge is relentlessly upbeat and energetic. He possesses a childlike sense of excitement and is almost always outgoing and friendly, even to those he murders. He often corners people at random and spouts long, stream-of-consciousness diatribes that involve Florida trivia, social commentary and/or his bizarre sexual history.

In Orange Crush, while suffering a bout of amnesia, Serge (under an alias) takes a small job in the mail room of the Florida Legislature, and soon has worked his way up to being the Governor's press secretary, largely because he is the only employee in the Legislature's entire workforce that can compose speeches without spelling or grammar errors.

Serge has started a personal religion based on football coach Don Shula, where salvation is obtained by successfully eating the 48-ounce steak at Shula's Steakhouse.[6]

Serge appears to be partly inspired by Travis McGee, a fictional, Florida based, independent "salvage consultant" and crime-solver featured in many novels by John D. McDonald.

Age

Serge was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis.[3] He 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 comeback killing spree.

Family

Storms' great-great-grandfather came to the US in the 1880s from Cuba. He worked as a reader in a cigar factory in Ybor City, but left after his boss disproved of the material he was reading to the other workers. He then ran a bolita lottery for a local gang. The game was supposed to be fixed, and the gang killed him when he made a mistake in the scheme.[8]

Serge was named after his grandfather Sergio, a con artist who shared some of his grandson's passion for historical trivia. Sergio also seemed to share Serge's sense of ethics, as one of his last major cons involved swindling money from investor who themselves swindled the residents of a farming community in Alabama. Sergio was thought to have committed suicide when Serge was a child, but during the novel Cadillac Beach it's discovered that he is still alive. The elder Storms had a heart attack not long after his grandson's 44th birthday, and died after a short stay in hospital.[5]

Storms' father Pablo 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. This occurred when Serge was very young, and left his mother a widowed single mother. She had an affair with another jai alai player from Spain, which resulted in pregnancy. Since she could barely cope with one child, and had no support from the father (he went back to Spain), she gave up her second son for adoption.[5]

Ford Oelman is Serge's half-brother, the child given up for adoption by his mother. Oelman was raised in Alabama, and did not find out about the adoption until he was an adult. He was reunited with Sergio when the older man was in Alabama, but did not meet with Serge until after their grandfather had died. Ford moved to California with his friend Mark to fulfill his ambition of becoming a screenwriter.[5]

Companions

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 Florida Roadkill; they both return for the later novel Triggerfish Twist which takes place sometime before the events of Florida Roadkill. Coleman returns permanently in Torpedo Juice, and has been Serge's sidekick in most of the novels since.

While Coleman is presumed dead, Serge travels with Lenny Lipowicz, whom he meets in Hammerhead Ranch Motel. Lipowicz is a Don Johnson lookalike who is a stoner much like Coleman but slightly (and only slightly) more intelligent. Lenny lives with his mother and her dog, though he frequently leaves the house for days without notifying or contacting her.[8] Aside from Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Lenny has been in Cadillac Beach, and The Stingray Shuffle. He also appeared in Atomic Lobster, in which he and Coleman meet and indulge in their shared pathological fondness for marijuana. It's unknown if he will ever return as a character.

Murder methods

Serge's methods of killing people are frequently quite inventive, and often provide a highly improbable— but technically possible— escape route, which is often intended to flavor the murder with a touch of poetic justice reflecting the victim's own character flaws. For instance:

  • In Florida Roadkill:
    • Serge rigs a shotgun to a spring trap, activated by an electric solenoid, that is in turn activated by the vibrations of the Space Shuttle Columbia at nearby Cape Canaveral; the victim can survive if he manages to vibrate the motion sensor (a souvenir miniature of the shuttle at the end of a wire) at the exact pitch needed to cancel out the larger vibrations. The victim fails to do so, but, seeing the machine begin to activate, dies of a massive heart attack before the shotgun is triggered.
    • Serge sprays Fix-A-Flat (liquid tire sealant) down a would-be killer's throat, causing fatal suffocation.
    • Serge suspends a man upside down, inserts a funnel into his rectum, and pours an entire bottle of rum into the man's colon (an alcohol enema), enough to cause fatal alcohol poisoning within minutes (since the liquor is entering the man's bloodstream directly, instead of via the stomach and liver), then plugging his rectum with a bar of soap; the man's only hope for survival is to run onto the street and convince someone to give him a cleansing enema immediately, but the man is unable to make himself understood, and when he is, he is either laughed at as a drunk or shunned as a pervert. Before the alcohol kills him, he collapses in the street and is run over by a tourist trolley.
  • In Hammerhead Ranch Motel:
    • Serge kidnaps several petty criminals who have been tracking the same suitcase full of money as him, and kills each of them by performing taxidermy on them while they are still alive, mounting their heads or their entire corpses for pedestrians to see;
    • Serge concocts homemade napalm, combined with scents that camouflage it as suntan lotion, then smears it all over his unsuspecting victim while posing as a Hispanic beach attendant, causing his racist victim to dismiss him as stupid and non-threatening.
  • In Triggerfish Twist:
    • Serge kidnaps an abusive Little League coach, who is fanatically protective of his lawn, ties him up at the baseball field and inserts the hose from a pressure washing machine in his mouth, exposing the man to "fifty to a hundred times the pressure of a regular garden hose."
    • Serge ties up another 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.

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 Atomic Lobster Serge and Coleman are kept very busy in and around Tampa and on a cruise ship as Serge continues to clean up Florida by dispatching many members of the criminal element. Serge employs many innovative methods of terminating Florida low-life using common household items available at neighborhood hardware or sporting goods stores. Serge's methods reflect attention to physics, chemistry and news stories of true crime and popular science.
  • In Gator-a-go-go Serge once again utilizes some creative methodology in his killings. In one instance, he removes the lap bar from an enormous bungee swing ride and places a gangster whom he has bound and gagged in the seat. When the ride activates, the man is hurled hundreds of feet in the air and eventually lands on top of a building.

External links

  • Serge Storms' website, featuring his "blog"

References

1. ^Orange Crush
2. ^Torpedo Juice
3. ^Triggerfish Twist
4. ^Cadillac Beach
5. ^The Big Bamboo
6. ^Hurricane Punch
7. ^Gator A-Go-Go
8. ^The Stingray Shuffle
{{Tim Dorsey}}

3 : Fictional serial killers|Novel series|Fictional characters from Miami

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