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.