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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.

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.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bright Orange for the Shroud,’ by John D. MacDonald

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After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue.

Whenever I see a deal on one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books in e-book form, I grab it. So it was with Bright Orange for the Shroud, a fairly early – but memorable – entry in the series. If I remember correctly, now and then in later books, when he’s recalling his personal nightmares, McGee mentions Boo Waxwell.

Travis McGee isn’t a private eye. He calls himself a salvage specialist. When people are robbed of large amounts of money or valuable possessions, he goes and gets them back, then keeps half the value. This enables him to live his chosen lifestyle – “taking his retirement in installments.”

He plans to make this particular summer one of his lazy ones. He’ll do some maintenance on his big houseboat, the Busted Flush, cruise a bit, do some fishing. He’s earned a rest.

Until Arthur Wilkinson shows up on the dock, incoherent and emaciated. Arthur was part of their beachside community for a while, a low-key, diffident man who’d made money in the family business. Then he met tiny, gorgeous Wilma Ferrer, married her, and moved away.

But it turned out Wilma was a con woman. With her little group of confidence friends, she picked Arthur clean. Money wasn’t enough for her, though. Together with the muscle of the group, big Boo Maxwell, she made sure Arthur had been destroyed as a man.

McGee can help people recover stuff, but recovering a lost soul is outside his skill set. So he goes to Chookie McCall, a professional dancer who dated Arthur for a while, before hooking up with a wrong guy, now in prison. Though she’s reluctant at first, one look at Arthur arouses all Chookie’s maternal instincts.

McGee comes up with a plan to con the cons and get some of Arthur’s money back. It’s a good plan. His mistake is underestimating Boo Waxwell as an opponent. Though he comes off as an ignorant, overgrown cracker, Boo is no fool at all. Someone suggests that Boo is McGee’s alter ego, what he might have been if something had been missing in his make-up. (In many ways, Boo anticipates Max Cady, the brutal villain of MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice under the title, Cape Fear.)

There’s not a wasted line in this book. It’s tough and hard-boiled and tender and sympathetic. There’s a lot of sexual content. Some of it reads really great from my traditional, sexist point of view, and some of it reflects the mores of the sexual revolution and hasn’t aged well.

The plot includes, in my opinion, one too many lucky breaks for the good guys. But all in all, Bright Orange for the Shroud works splendidly. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

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I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightmare in Pink,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Captain McGee. Private cruises. Personalized therapy. And a little twinge of pain when the plane took off, pain for McGee, because she was too close to what-might-have-been. If there’s no pain and no loss, it’s only recreational and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.

In 1963, Fawcett Publications (which began, as I’ve told you before, in Robbinsdale, Minn., the town where I live, but had by this time been in New York state for decades) faced a business crisis. Fawcett was one of the pioneers in the field of “paperback originals” – novels published specifically for the paperback market, generally sensational and lowbrow in character. Their most popular writer was Richard S. Prather, author of a series of racy hard-boileds starring a randy private eye named Shell Scott. Prather had received an irresistible offer from Pocket Books, and was jumping over to their house. Fawcett desperately needed a new series detective.

In a moment of sanity (fairly rare in publishers) they turned to one of their most dependable and talented writers, John D. MacDonald. “Give us a series hero,” they said.

MacDonald’s response was a character he planned to call Dallas McGee. Dallas would be a lanky beach bum, living on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Instead of a private eye, he would call himself a “salvage specialist.” When people were robbed or cheated out of valuable possessions or large sums of money, they could go to McGee. He would try to retrieve them, and if he succeeded he got to keep half.

Fawcett green-lighted the project, and McDonald quickly churned out several short novels starring Dallas McGee to launch the series rapidly. They were nearly ready to release the first one when disaster struck – inconvenience for Fawcett, but tragedy for the nation. Pres. John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22. Everyone understood that it would be very poor taste to offer a series hero named Dallas in the present atmosphere. They consulted with the author and settled on a new name – Travis McGee. The pages were all re-set, and the first book, The Deep Blue Goodbye, appeared in early 1964.

Not long ago, a sale price showed up for the e-book version of Nightmare in Pink, the second offering in the series. I figured, “Why not? Let’s see how it holds up.”

I was amazed how much I enjoyed it.

Travis McGee, it is explained, is a veteran of the Korean War. One day during the war, his buddy Mike Gibson was substituting for McGee while he was on leave. Mike came under attack, and ended up crippled and blinded. Today he lives in a VA hospital. McGee visits him from time to time. Now he’s facing life-threatening surgery. He has a favor to ask.

His sister Nina, he says, is a commercial artist in Manhattan. She’s gotten engaged to a businessman, an investment broker. Would McGee check the guy out, see if he’s kosher?

McGee can’t say no. But by the time he’s arrived, the issue seems moot. Nina’s fiancé is dead, victim of an apparent mugging. Only the evidence doesn’t add up. When McGee starts poking around his life and his associations, it looks as if he suspected some crooked goings-on. Could he have been murdered to keep him quiet?

As McGee slips into a relationship with Nina (no surprise there), he also steps on some trip wires, alerting people who are very powerful and very ruthless, who will not hesitate to destroy both him and his new girl.

I had a strange sensation as I read Nightmare in Pink. A clarity, a cleanness I don’t experience with most contemporary novels, even ones with better sexual morals. It was a feeling something like stepping out of a smoke-filled room into the fresh outdoor air.

What Nightmare in Pink was not polluted with was Wokeness. Travis McGee came before men felt obligated to be apologetic about being men. He’s proud to be a man, comfortable in his masculinity. He likes women and they like him. I read books like these to live vicariously, and Travis McGee offers a mainline shot of pure, vicarious testosterone.

I’ve often written about my pleasure in hard-boiled narration. McGee does hard-boiled narration, but in his own way. Instead of the jewel-like aphorisms you find in Raymond Chandler, MacDonald’s McGee offers thoughtful meditations. He makes observations of the world, of humanity, and right and wrong. I don’t always agree with him, but there’s more genuine thought going on here than you’d expect in a straight-to-paperback potboiler from Fawcett.

In short, I had a blast with Nightmare in Pink, and recommend the whole series (though I consider the e-books a little overpriced).

[The book has a new introduction by Lee Child which does little to advance MacDonald criticism, in my opinion. His best argument to persuade modern people to read the books seems to be that MacDonald was ecologically aware. That’s true, but misleading. Current environmentalism tends to the Luddite side, and MacDonald was no Luddite. He had a business degree, and sympathetic businessmen are not rare in his books.]