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Fiction, Reviews

‘Darker Than Amber,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.

Revisited another Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald, because they never do get old. Darker Than Amber is one of the best, I think. The story works out as dark as the title promises, but that makes the moments of grace shine all the brighter.

Trav and his friend, the economist Meyer, are fishing under a bridge in Marathon, Florida when somebody drops a girl, wired to a cement block, off the deck above. Trav being Trav, he leaps into the water immediately, managing to get her back to the surface in time to save her life with artificial respiration.

She turns out to be a beautiful young woman named Vangie, but she’s no innocent damsel in distress. She’s a prostitute who worked her way up to a very nasty con game in which they not only robbed, but murdered, selected men. Because she experienced a moment of sympathy for one victim, her partners decided to kill her. But she’s “case-hardened,” as Travis puts it, and in the end she can’t be saved, either morally or physically. After a second murder attempt succeeds, Trav makes up his mind to balance the scales for her.

I first encountered Darker Than Amber in its movie adaptation, on TV (I reviewed that film here). The book, needless to say, is a lot better. What is portrayed as an extended, improbable slug-fest between Rod Taylor and William Smith in the film is in the book a very neat gaslighting sting that works, not perfectly, but well enough to satisfy the reader.

Darker Than Amber was published in 1966 and shows its age, but that’s part of its value, it seems to me. Trav’s sexual mores will satisfy neither today’s conservatives nor liberals, but they weren’t remarkable for his time – except perhaps for his admission that he can work up no attraction whatever to Vangie’s shopworn charms.

There’s a scene where a black character delivers a little lecture about civil rights. It must have sounded sophisticated at the time, but it too hasn’t aged well.

Still, that’s how the world looked in those days. The best thing about the book, as always, is Trav himself – he picks up the Philip Marlowe tradition of opening up to the reader about his inner life. But he takes it further. And the reader can’t help liking his self-deprecating manner.

Highly recommended. Cautions for mature subject matter.

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.