Tag Archives: John D. MacDonald

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where Is Janice Gantry?’ by John D. MacDonald

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“…You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”

Sam Brice is a former pro football player who left the sport under a cloud, losing his trophy wife in the process. He genuinely loved her, and has never gotten over it. Now he works as an insurance adjuster on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He used to date Janice Gantry, who works in the same office. She grew frustrated with his lack of ambition, and they broke up. But they remain friends. She’s thinking of getting married to someone else now, and Sam wishes her well.

As Where Is Janice Gantry? begins, Sam is awakened by someone scratching at his screen porch. It’s Charlie, a young local man who has escaped from prison. All Charlie wants is a place to sleep a few hours and a short ride. With some misgivings, Sam helps him; he always thought there was something off about the story of his crime. It’s still dark when he drives Charlie to a phone. Then, on impulse, he watches from concealment to see what happens next. Charlie makes a call, and soon Janice Gantry appears. She drives Charlie to the office where she and Sam work. Sam spies through a window as she makes a phone call. Then a suspicious sheriff’s deputy on patrol attacks him and arrests him for prowling. Sam is finally released by the sheriff, who knows him but doesn’t like him. The sheriff warns him to keep his nose clean.

The next morning Janice does not arrive at work, and soon she’s officially a missing person. The sheriff thinks Charlie must have murdered her, or she ran off with him. Sam can’t tell him what he knows, and wouldn’t be believed anyway. He talks to a friend, a local gossip, who directs his attention to the house of a reclusive millionaire who lives on a nearby Key. This is the man whose safe Charlie was originally convicted of robbing. Sam makes a plan to meet the millionaire’s lonely wife, but instead meets her sister, a lovely woman who happens to be visiting. She too senses something is wrong in the house…

Where Is Janice Gantry? is one of those John D. MacDonald non-McGee books that left a particular impression on my memory. Sam Brice is a little like McGee (who wouldn’t be created for about three years at that point), but he has the advantage of the non-serial character in that he’s allowed to grow. Sam is sympathetic, but secretly bitter and openly gun-shy about relationships and life in general. The extreme exertions and dangers he’ll face in this book will change his life.

There’s a lot of sex in this book. Sam’s beautiful new lover spends a fair part of the story pretty much naked, as was suitable for the paperback market at that time in history. Even though the sexual revolution was fairly new at the time, it’s already assumed that lovers will sleep together before marriage. So morality cautions are in order. One character may be meant to be homosexual, but it’s not explicitly stated.

Nevertheless, Where Is Janice Gantry? is a well-written, gripping mystery/thriller by a master of the genre. Recommended for grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Purple Place for Dying,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down—twenty years ago—or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted.

I’d almost forgotten about A Purple Place for Dying, another in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Even though it contains one of the great set pieces in the saga.

Travis is far from his Fort Lauderdale home in this one. He’s out west, where Mona Yeoman, the big, young, beautiful wife of a very rich man, has summoned him to a secret meeting in a lonely mountain cabin. She’s fallen in love with a man her own age, she says, and wants to get free of her husband. She wants Travis to help her work that out.

Travis isn’t much interested, until Mona is suddenly dead, pierced by a high-powered rifle bullet fired from a distance. And when he makes his way down the mountain to report the murder, nobody believes him. By the time the sheriff’s men get to the site, her body is gone. For all anyone can tell, Mona succeeded in running off with her lover, and McGee is just covering for them. Which means he’ll have to figure out what’s really going on.

He’ll meet Mona’s husband, a hard man but not a bad man; a man Travis respects. He’ll meet Mona’s lover’s sister, a lonely, damaged woman who’ll probably be alone forever unless she finds some real man with a gentle touch to heal her spirit (and you can guess where that will lead).

All in all, I don’t think Travis McGee is at his best too far from his house boat, especially when he leaves his economist friend Meyer behind. On the other hand, A Purple Place for Dying features one of his most imaginative fights – the defense, without a gun, of a desert mesa against two armed men. That was pretty cool.

Not the best McGee, but still better than most of the stuff you’ll see nowadays. Extra points awarded for patriarchal sexism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Lavender Look,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.

It was around 45 years ago, in Missouri, that I picked up my first Travis McGee novel, The Long Lavender Look, from a rack in a grocery store or a drug store or something. The story proved to be quite a sordid tale of theft and prostitution and murder in a small town. It was the way it was told that grabbed me.

Travis McGee, freelance “salvage specialist,” is barreling south one night on a rural Florida road in Miss Agnes, his blue Rolls Royce pickup conversion, his friend, the economist Meyer, beside him. They’re headed home from a wedding celebration. Suddenly a near-naked girl runs across the  road in front of them, close enough to make McGee hit the brakes, putting Miss Agnes in a skid that lands them in a canal. Meyer pulls Travis from the water, saving his life, but a few minutes later Travis returns the favor when a passing motorist stops and shoots at them, shouting a message that makes no sense to them.

Finally they reach a small town by foot, but they’re soon arrested by sheriff’s deputies. Apparently the guy who shot at them was tortured to death that same night, and Travis and Meyer look like the most likely suspects. Under questioning, one of the deputies brutalizes Meyer, giving him injuries requiring hospitalization. Travis contacts a lawyer who gets them released, but not before warning the sheriff that he’s going to ruin him.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets a lot more complicated than that. As it turns out, the sheriff is a decent cop – though not without blind spots. Travis will stay around to get his own questions answered, and the death count will not be small.

The Long Lavender Look is a tough story, with a lot of collateral damage involved. But the author’s humane and poignant narration makes it all touching and memorable in the end. This is one of my favorite McGee books, and not just because it was my first.

Not politically correct (though there’s plenty of environmental concern), but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Beach Girls,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The breeze died. The high white sun leaned its tropic weight on the gaudy vacation strip of Florida’s East Coast, so that it lay sunstruck, lazy and humid and garish, like a long brown sweaty woman stretched out in sequins and costume jewelry.

Another classic John D. MacDonald book, non-Travis McGee variety, from The Murder Room. The Beach Girls is an interesting, often impressive tale stressing humans and society more than crime (though there’s some crime). These old paperbacks were intended for a male audience, so there’s also quite a lot of sex, though it’s not explicit. Very little monogamy is on display.

Stebbins’ Marina in Elihu Beach, Florida is a marginal operation. Its owner, an amiable widow, can’t afford to maintain it properly, and local interests are pressuring her to sell it to developers.

But the marina is home to a motley group of boat owners – local fishermen, poor boat bums and rich yacht owners. There are a couple stinkers among them, but most of them get along happily in a live-and-let-live way.

When Leo Rice shows up looking for work, something seems off about him. He’s nice enough, and he’s willing to learn and to work hard. There’s no arrogance about him. But he doesn’t seem to match the story he tells about himself. He has the look of a man used to bigger things, greater responsibilities.

Leo has a secret. He’s got an issue with one of the residents, one of the bad types nobody likes. He came for revenge, but now he can see that he’s not tough enough for that job. And he’s suddenly interested in Christy, one of the marina residents, a girl who’s been damaged in the past and put on a clown’s persona. Is he willing to die trying to get justice, or does he have a future with Christy?

The Beach Girls offers a very fine author’s human insight, empathy, and powers of observation. The mores of the time it describes are very different from ours, and will probably disturb conservatives and liberals alike. The sex is pretty free and easy in this little community, but there’s also a passage that seems to defend wife-beating (in an extreme case). Approach such passages with your sense of history in place.

Otherwise, recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deadly Welcome,’ by John D. MacDonald

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As you’ve noticed, I am working my way (happily) through the old John D. MacDonald paperbacks re-issued for Kindle by The Murder Room. Deadly Welcome was a particular pleasure, because it’s one I hadn’t read before.

Alex Doyle works in sort of troubleshooting capacity (never really explained) for the US State Department. But one day he’s ordered to the Pentagon and informed he’s now on loan to the military. They have an assignment for him, one he’s uniquely qualified to carry out.

There’s a Colonel M’Gann who’s been doing important defense work. A while back he got married to a woman named Jenna Larkin, originally of Ramona Beach, Florida. She seemed to be a good wife, and nursed him back from a stroke. They moved to Ramona Beach together. Then she was murdered, strangled on the beach. Now Col. M’Gann has withdrawn from the world. The military wants him back. They’d like Alex to go down there and see if he can solve the murder. That might bring the Colonel back.

Alex doesn’t want to do it. The very reason they chose him is because he originally came from Ramona himself. He even knew Jenna Larkin (all the boys did). Back there he was considered white trash. He got framed for a theft and only avoided prison by enlisting in the Army. He expects no great welcome in his home town.

Indeed, once he arrives, pretending to have money he wants to invest in a local business, almost his first encounter is with the deputy sheriff, who works him over with a truncheon just to show him who’s in charge. Alex pretends to be properly cowed, but he’s not the same guy who got run out of town so long ago. He’ll get his own back in his own time. Along the way he’ll meet Jenna’s sister, a beautiful woman with a traumatic past. And he’ll uncover a possible motive for the murder, which helps him come up with a way to trap a killer.

Deadly Welcome isn’t a terribly memorable book. There’s a little too much amateur psychology here, perhaps. But it’s a well-crafted, plausible story with a satisfying conclusion. Journeyman work, and well worth the price.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dress Her in Indigo,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The dregs of dreams were all of childhood, and in the morning mirror I looked at the raw, gaunt, knobbly stranger, at the weals and the pits and the white tracks of scar tissue across the deepwater brown of the leathery useful body, and marveled that childhood should turn into this—into the pale-eyed, scruff-headed, bony stranger who looked so lazily competent, yet, on the inside, felt such frequent waves of Weltschmerz, of lingering nostalgia for the lives he had never lived.

Another deal on a Travis McGee e-novel by John D. MacDonald pops up, and it is for me but the work of a moment to seize on it and make it my own. This one is Dress Her in Indigo, one of the most memorable installments, I think, in that memorable hard-boiled series. It poses certain challenges for me in reviewing it in this space. This is one of the books, in a series where sex is not infrequent, in which sex is particularly central. The book is an interesting artifact in that it arises from that moment in social history when the Swingin’ Sixties were morphing into the Hippie Era, and will be useful to future historians, if only as an expression of its time.

In general, Travis McGee, “salvage specialist,” makes his living finding lost money and property for people. But this job is different. His best friend, the ursine, affable economist known only as Meyer, asks him to help him do a favor for another friend.

T. Harlan Bowie is an investment counselor who grew very rich almost inadvertently, and is now confined to a wheelchair. His wife died not long ago, leaving him with an adult daughter he barely knew. The girl, “Bix,” was extremely beautiful and a very lost soul. A while back she headed off to Mexico with some friends in a camper, and now word has come that she died in an auto accident on a mountain road. All T. Harlan wants is to find out is what her life was like down there. Was she happy? Did she have good friends?

McGee has a bad feeling about this job from the outset, but he and Meyer set out for Oaxaca, her last known address. What they discover leaves them wondering whether they should just lie to the old man. Because Bix’s circle of friends were not nice people at all. They were involved in drug dealing and drug smuggling, and some pretty kinky sex games too. And murder, in the end.

But wait, it gets worse. The big secret is yet to be discovered, and when it is, McGee will be faced with one of the most difficult moral decisions he’ll ever have to make.

But back to the sex. Travis McGee is very far from being a role model, especially for the Christian reader. And one of the most interesting aspects of this book is a stark – comic in places – contrast that’s set up between his experiences in the sack (well-written without being explicit) with one woman who is extremely seductive and experienced, and another woman who is relatively innocent (at least by comparison). Spoiler alert: the innocent one comes out way ahead. If one were to think this out to the end, it might lead to possible arguments for lifetime monogamy, but of course no such argument is made here. Let the reader understand.

Anyway, Dress Her in Indigo is one of MacDonald’s best. Recommended, with cautions as noted above.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Crossroads,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I am and mean to remain a big booster of the author John D. MacDonald, especially his Travis McGee novels. That doesn’t mean, however, that I like all his books equally well. The Crossroads, published in the Murder Room series, is not (in my opinion) one of his stellar achievements.

Back in the early 20th Century, old Papa Drovek, cheerful and parsimonious, invested every dollar he could save up in buying land along the highway. In time it became a major intersection. He built a gas station. Then a café. And as the crossroads experienced increasing traffic, his little empire grew – a truck stop, hotels, strip malls. Today he’s retired, still living in his little cottage, keeping an eye on his beloved children as they carry on the business. He’s old school in his habits, and keeps his money in cash, in a safe deposit box at the bank.

But his children are not entirely happy. His oldest son Charles (Chip) has a good head for business, and is ambitious and hard-working. But his home life is tragic. The woman he married is now a barely functioning alcoholic. Chip loves another woman, but the doctors have told him that any major change in his wife’s situation will certainly lead to her rapid decline and death. So he sticks.

His sister Joan is equally smart and energetic. But she married a drone who seems content to go fishing and live off her money.

Their youngest brother, Pete, has never grown up. Given work in the company, he soon loses interest and turns his attentions to golf. He married a pretty girl, a former model, who shows no sign of any brain wattage whatever.

What none of them knows is that they have an enemy. A man with a deep grudge and a twisted plan to get his hands on Papa Drovek’s money. The plan will involve taking a couple lives, but that’s a sacrifice he has no trouble making.

The Crossroads seemed to me essentially a tragic soap opera. There are no real surprises in the story, and no real hero. Just fairly ordinary people making fairly ordinary mistakes and – in the end, if they’re lucky — learning from them. I’m afraid I found it all kind of dreary.

One thing I noticed in this book – and I probably should have noticed before in reading this series – is that it’s set up in British orthography. “Gas” is always “petrol.” “Gray” is spelled “grey.” “Dispatch case” is “despatch case.” Turns out the Murder Room series is published by an English company, and they must be using text from English editions of the books.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just makes the American dialogue awkward at times.

Authors, Bookselling

Going public

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Above, something I’ve never seen before – a clip of John D. MacDonald giving a speech. He reminisces on his struggling years as a writer. The advice here is still good in terms of a writer’s attitude, but happily we don’t have to worry about the condition of returned manuscripts anymore. Say what you like about digital publishing, but you can’t deny the pages are always just as pristine, however many times you send them out. Any blemishes are likely to be grammatical, and your own stinking fault.

One thing I’ve rarely done in my long but obscure career  as a writer is give a public reading of my work. I’ve done a few signings – generally a harrowing and not very rewarding experience, but only a few readings. Which is odd when you think of it, because I’m good at that. Radio and acting experience, as I’ve mentioned more often than necessary.

But I’m going to be doing a reading on Saturday. It’s Homecoming time at Waldorf University, Forest City, Iowa, one of my several alma maters. Waldorf is special to me, because it was the first college I attended. They’re doing an authors’ forum, featuring several Waldorf graduates who write books. I’ll be one of them. I’m supposed to do a 15-minute reading, and then there’ll be a question-and-answer period, and we’ll have the chance to sell our books.

Consequently, I won’t be blogging on Friday, since I’ll be traveling that day. We appreciate your patience, and thank you for flying Brandywine Books.

Reviews

YouTube film review: ‘Darker Than Amber’

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As I read John D. MacDonald’s A Deadly Shade of Gold, which I reviewed yesterday, I was reminded of the 1970 film production of another Travis McGee book, Darker Than Amber. I found that it was on YouTube (in a somewhat muddy recording), and figured I’d watch it. I’d seen it before, on television sometime in the ‘70s, I think. I remembered I liked it. I wondered how it held up.

The answer is, not very well. In my opinion, it should have been called Darker Than Camembert, because there’s a whole lot of cheese goin’ on here.

The movie plot follows the book fairly closely, I’ll give it that. Travis McGee (played by Rod Taylor) is fishing with his friend Meyer (Theodore Bickel) when a girl (Suzy Kendall) drops off a nearby bridge with a weight tied to her ankles (if I recall right, it was a concrete block in the book; here it’s a bodybuilder’s weight). This is the sort of thing that happens to McGee all the time, of course, and he is quickly overboard, diving to free the girl and bring her back to the surface alive. She turns out to be named Vangie, and she’s pretty messed up. She ignores Travis’ safety warnings, and is soon in trouble again. Which puts McGee on a collision course with Terry (the great heavy William Smith in his best paranoid mode), a bodybuilder (probably on too many steroids) who has been working a badger game with Vangie. The film culminates in a brutal fight between McGee and Terry on a cruise ship. (According to Smith’s own statement, Taylor hit him in earnest and he hit back, so the fight you see is genuine. Taylor broke three of Smith’s ribs, while Smith broke Taylor’s nose. Or so the story goes. I can’t imagine hitting William Smith at all, let alone hard enough for him to notice.)

John D. MacDonald hated this movie, and never tired of saying so. He felt that its emphasis was on violence rather than human beings and feelings.

What didn’t I like? For one thing, Rod Taylor wasn’t the right physical type for McGee (Robert Culp, who was also considered for the role, would have been closer to MacDonald’s descriptions). And we see little of the thoughtful McGee in this script, which concentrates on action. Miss Agnes, McGee’s Rolls Royce pickup, is here approximated by an RR with a sort of camper rear-end, clearly built over an intact vehicle.

But the worst part was the whole aesthetic of the thing, I think. 1960s styles, colors, camera angles, music. And to top it all, a particular makeup appliance worn by Smith at the end just looks silly.

Still, if you’d like to see a Travis McGee story on film, you can find it on YouTube. The only other attempt was a TV pilot called Travis McGee, which couldn’t be saved even by the deathless Sam Elliot in the lead. Among its sins – McGee wears a mustache, his houseboat has become a sailboat, and the whole setting has been moved to California.

I didn’t embed the film in this post, because I suspect there may be copyright problems and the whole thing’s likely to be pulled any day now. Cautions for violence and brief nudity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Deadly Shade of Gold,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I motioned him back and had him get himself a shot glass. I filled it from my bottle. I held my glass up and said, “Drink to me, my friend. Drink to this poisonous bag of meat named McGee. And drink to little broken blondes, and a dead black dog, and a knife in the back of a woman, and a knife in the throat of a friend. Drink to a burned foot, and death at sea, and stinking prisons and obscene gold idols. Drink to loveless love, stolen money and a power of attorney, mi amigo. Drink to lust and crime and terror, the three unholy ultimates, and drink to all the problems which have no solution in this world, and at best a dubious one in the next.”

He beamed without comprehension, and said, “Salud!” We drank and bowed and I filled the glasses again.

I have favorites and less favorites among John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. I would not list A Deadly Shade of Gold as one of my favorites. It’s dark and convoluted, and unfortunately contains several authorial thoughts that annoy me. Still, it’s McGee, and I wouldn’t be without it.

Travis McGee, Florida houseboat-dwelling beach bum and “salvage specialist,” gets a call from his old buddy Sam Taggart, who’s been gone two years. Sam wants to know if Trav still “operates like he used to.” That means recovering stolen property for people and keeping half the value. He invites Trav to his seedy motel room and shows him an ugly golden statuette. There are 23 more like that, he tells Trav. Somebody took them from him and he wants them back.

Trav tells Sam that Nora wants to see him. That takes him aback. Sam was engaged to Nora before he ran off. Sam then says he’s changed his mind. If Nora will take him back, forget the salvage job. He says he’ll just dispose of this statue, and then Trav should bring Nora to see him tomorrow.

But when Trav and Nora show up, Sam is dead – killed with a knife in an ugly way.

Now it’s more than a salvage. It’s personal. Trav makes a trip to New York to talk to dealers and find out who might have owned the collection of gold statuettes. That leads him to a trip to Mexico (Nora comes along), to surveille the home of a reclusive, exiled Cuban government official.

Then things start getting complicated and violent, and it grows difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. It will all culminate in a fiery showdown in a billionaire’s home in Beverly Hills.

None of the Travis McGee books are exactly cheery, but A Deadly Shade of Gold is particularly dark. I think the author must have been depressed that year (1965). Aside from people dying in ways they don’t deserve, MacDonald expresses opinions which (in my view) have not largely held up well. He disses religion, and takes an entirely gratuitous swipe at all hunters. He warns of overpopulation. He talks about the dangers of right-wing extremism without even considering (apparently) that there might be an equal and opposite danger on the other side.

However, the story is consistently anti-communist. And a large part of the plot involves attempts by Communist agents to influence American politicians and entertainment people through sexual blackmail. That’s a theme right out of the headlines (or rather, the buried ledes).

If you’ve never read a Travis McGee novel, I wouldn’t recommend A Deadly Shade of Gold for a starter. Otherwise, buy it. Cautions for sex scenes and violence.