Like his fictional detective -- like all good detectives, really -- Neil Plakcy is observant. And, as an aspiring author of mystery fiction, he observed that South Florida was overstocked with authors eagerly mining the region's exotic eccentricities but under-stocked with gay mystery novels. Even with South Beach, Key West and Wilton Manors.

And so Kimo Kanapa'aka, one-time competitive surfer and gay Hawaiian detective, was born.

"It's so hard to find some corner of South Florida that no one has already done," laments Plakcy, 49, who lives in Hollywood with his partner and their golden retriever.

'When I moved here, I started to read Florida books to get a sense of where I'd moved, and I learned a lot. So when I went to Hawaii on vacation and fell in love with it, I said, `Oh, I want to read some Hawaii books now.' But there aren't a lot. Most mysteries set in Hawaii are about a traveler who goes place to place, and one book in the series is set in Hawaii. So I wanted to do for Hawaii what I'd seen so many people do for Florida."

And so in Mahu Surfer (Alyson, $14 in paper), the second in Plakcy's Mahu series, we find Kimo, now comfortably out of the closet and interested in exploring his new life, investigating the murders of three surfers on Oahu's North Shore. "Mahu" is a Hawaiian negative term for homosexuals.

Plakcy, who appears Tuesday at Books & Books in Miami Beach, was born and raised in suburban Yardley, Pa. He's an assistant professor of English at Broward Community College in Pembroke Pines and studied at Florida International University's Creative Writing Program, a terrific place for aspiring thriller writers. The program's director is novelist/historian Les Standiford, who wrote the entertaining John Deal thrillers; Plakcy's thesis advisor was James W. Hall, still writing the Thorn thrillers, many of which are set in the Keys.

"FIU gives such value to genre fiction," Plakcy says. 'The writers there are great practitioners. They look at it as literature. At other MFA programs it's more about language. Les Standiford always calls FIU `the blue collar school of writing."'

Plakcy finds similarities between digging up the dark side in the Hawaiian islands and our sultry version of paradise.

"So much of what I love about Florida is what I love about Hawaii. I love the contrast between light and shadow, metaphorically, good and evil. . . . Graham Greene wrote that there was something about shady characters in sunny places. You're isolated down here, and there's a certain type of person who gravitates to these edge communities. You find the same thing in Hawaii. And I love the cultural mixing we have here, the multicultural melting pot."

But what truly intrigues Plakcy about Kimo, about whom he has also written several short stories, is the detective's emerging sexual identity and how it informs his work.

"Sexual orientation, that's a big thing. That's got to be important. It's the one thing that distinguishes Benjamin Justice [from John Morgan Wilson's novels] from Harry Bosch [from Michael Connelly's books]. Justice is gay, and that has affected his life and how he approaches the crime."

Plakcy, who also co-edited Paws to Reflect: Exploring the Bond Between Gay Men and Their Dogs (Alyson, $24.95), is something of an expert on gay detective fiction. He admits he knows less about lesbian detective fiction. So many books, so little time, after all. He ponders the future of the genre, citing many popular novelists -- among them Jonathan Kellerman, Suzanne Brockman and Laurie King -- who have recurring gay characters and protagonists.

Still, he says, the genre seems to remain a niche interest. And another expert in gay detective fiction has an idea why that hasn't changed.

"Publishing houses are becoming less adventurous," laments Drewey Wayne Gunn, a Texas A&M professor and author of The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film. ``They're less willing to support niche marketing, to go along with writers who don't sell a lot. Carroll & Graf was gay friendly, and it was swallowed up. A lot of writers are struggling to find a publisher at all."

Ominous news, but Plakcy chooses to accentuate the positive. He's soon off to New York and Boston, where he'll share the stage with fellow gay-detective-fiction authors Anthony Bildulka, Mark Zito and Mark Richard Zubro. He wants to write more about Kimo, especially as the character more deeply explores his sexuality.

"There are some people who are very vanilla on the sex," he says mischievously. "The door closes, the lights go out, and that's that. That's for a mainstream audience. A straight male friend of mine who read Mahu said there was a point in the book where he went `Eeeeeeee!' That's what I want: at least one scene that makes straight male readers go 'Eeeeeeee!"'