He was a type. The totally muscled sportsman—muscles upon muscles so that even his face looked like a leather bag of walnuts.

Once again, we turn to a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald – one of my favorites, I think. As I was enjoying it it, I was struck (not for the first time) by MacDonald’s ability to transcend his genre. He was, you’ll recall, writing paperback originals for Fawcett Publications – whose line of trade was sexy, violent stories for a male audience. They were competing directly for readers with Mickey Spillane.

And yet MacDonald takes the premise of The Quick Red Fox, a premise tailor-made for the Spillane audience (Hollywood sex goddess, being blackmailed, calls on studly private eye to save her reputation) and runs it in an entirely unexpected direction. He makes it a love story, with some kind of moral core.

Lysa Dean is a major Hollywood star, up there with Liz Taylor and Kim Novak. Her whole life is regimented, as is her appearance and physical health. But a year and a half back, she kicked loose for a while, hooking up with a shady guy. He took her to a wild house party at a place on a cliff on the California coast, where a lot of group sex took place. What she did not guess was that there was a man with a camera on the rocks a little way off, capturing the action through a telephoto lens. Now she’s being blackmailed.

She sends her personal assistant, Dana Holtzer, to bring McGee to see her. McGee isn’t much taken with Lysa, but Dana intrigues him. Dana is a very reserved woman, very efficient, very put-together. McGee takes the job, not for the money, but to get to know Dana. Lysa sends Dana along with him, as an assistant, and over time Dana thaws toward him, opening up about her past and her situation. McGee, who has always tried to avoid long-term commitments, begins thinking about settling down….

This, of course, cannot end well.

The Quick Red Fox is, I think, one of the best and most memorable of the Travis McGee series. McGee’s growing dreams of a life with Dana raise the emotional stakes, and the mystery remains baffling to the very end (I challenge anyone to figure out whodunnit in this one).

It’s notable that this story features two female characters who appear to be physically “flawless,” and they both leave McGee cold. He much prepares Dana, who (we are told) has some flaws. There’s a scene featuring a pair of hostile lesbians, which has no doubt contributed to the oft-repeated accusation that MacDonald was a homophobic writer. But McGee treats those women the way they demand to be treated, and his view of homosexuality was the conventional one for his time (and, I expect, for the future too).

There’s a lot of moral judgment in this story, more useful in what it opposes than in what it affirms. All McGee can come up with to express his own code is that “a moral act is one you feel good about afterward.” Author MacDonald could have done better than that, I hope, but he wasn’t delivering a moral lecture here.

In any case, I like The Quick Red Fox very much. Cautions for adult themes, pretty mild by today’s standards.