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.