Novel: Big Trouble

Overview
Dave Barry’s Big Trouble is a screwball caper set in Miami that collides a suburban family comedy with a crime thriller and turns both into high-velocity farce. A sprawling ensemble of grifters, cops, teens, execs, and one philosophical drifter pinball through a single misbegotten night that grows from a harmless high school game into a federal incident involving a suitcase bomb. Barry channels his newspaper-honed eye for South Florida absurdity into a plot where every coincidence lands like a punchline and every punchline propels the plot.

Plot
The fuse is lit by “Killer,” a school game of tag played with squirt guns. Matt Arnold sneaks into the yard of classmate Jenny Herk to score a hit and impress her. He is spotted by Jenny’s stepfather, Arthur Herk, a spectacularly unpleasant corporate man who assumes the teenager is an assassin. Arthur’s paranoia is not entirely misplaced. He has been skimming from his defense-contractor employer, drawing the wrath of people who solve accounting problems with hired guns. Two out-of-town hitmen arrive in Miami to fix the Arthur issue, bringing their own brand of chaos.

Circling the Herk household is Puggy, a homeless wanderer who has taken up residence in a backyard tree and found work at a grimy bar favored by shady dealers. The bar’s regulars include Russian arms merchants, whose most alarming piece of merchandise is a compact nuclear device in an ordinary suitcase. Arthur, flailing to cover his tracks and maybe extract some revenge, stumbles toward the bomb. At the same time, two profoundly inept thieves swipe what they think is an easy score and instead make off with the suitcase that can ruin everyone’s week.

Once the bomb enters the stream of Miami oddballs, the story detonates. Hostages are taken. The airport becomes a magnet for the entire cast, teens, parents, cops, assassins, drifter, and federal agents, all converging on a commercial jet that is absolutely the wrong place to store a nuclear device. Through a sequence of botched threats, accidental heroics, and improvisations born of panic, the plane lifts off with the bomb aboard and the wrong people holding the wrong leverage. The climax is a mishmash of bravery and dumb luck that removes the bomb from the populated world by the narrowest of margins and leaves the criminals cuffed, the corrupt exposed, and the survivors blinking at how close they came to apocalyptic slapstick.

Characters
Eliot Arnold, a burned-out ad man turned freelance writer, is a decent parent trying to keep his son from doing something stupid, only to be dragged along after him. Anna Herk is a sharp, weary spouse whose decency contrasts sharply with Arthur’s venality. Matt and Jenny are the teenage lens on the mayhem, their awkward attraction cutting through adult incompetence. Puggy, serene and Fritos-fueled, floats through danger as an accidental sage. The assassins and petty crooks are comic foils whose menace is continually undercut by Miami’s talent for humiliating tough guys.

Themes and Tone
Barry’s target is the entropy of modern life, sharpened by South Florida’s unique cocktail of sunshine, scams, and bureaucratic malfunction. Chance governs outcomes more than design, and institutions, from corporations to law enforcement, look only marginally more competent than the crooks. Family dynamics anchor the absurdity: out of the wreckage comes an unlikely romance and a wary détente between teenagers and their parents. The tone is relentlessly comic, deadpan narration, ricocheting dialogue, and set pieces that escalate from plausible to preposterous without losing their internal logic.

Style and Setting
Short chapters and quick cuts keep dozens of moving pieces airborne, while Miami itself functions as a character: humid, neon-lit, and teeming with intersecting hustles. Barry’s humor arrives as observational slapstick, where small details, a toad, a sprinkler system, a misplaced briefcase, tip into catastrophe. Beneath the gags is a caper engine built with precision, rewarding the reader with the fizzy satisfaction of watching disorder improbably resolve into a happy, and very funny, landing.