On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the safest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.

It’s always cause for celebration for this reader when another Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald shows up on bargain sale. This time it was One Fearful Yellow Eye, notable (in this reader’s opinion) for the quality of its prose.

Years ago, our hero Travis McGee, lanky and languid Florida “salvage specialist,” found a young woman named Glory contemplating suicide on a beach. She’d had an astonishing run of bad luck and tragedy. He took her home, fed her and reassured her and took her to his bed, and eventually she went on with her life. She met an older man, Dr. Fortner Geiss, a prominent Chicago physician, who admitted to her he was dying, but they gave each other a couple good years, in spite of his adult children’s hostility. Now he’s dead, and she’s discovered that his considerable wealth has disappeared. In his last months, he’d converted everything to cash, which is nowhere to be found. The inevitable – but counterintuitive in such a good man – conclusion is that he’d been blackmailed.

So Glory calls on McGee. His deal is to look for things people have had stolen from them, and if he finds it he keeps half. That’s okay with her.

McGee flies to Chicago and agrees to look into the problem. He’s a little out of his element in a Chicago winter, and Dr. Geiss’s son and daughter are no warmer – especially his daughter Heidi, a gorgeous ice queen. It’s not a big surprise when Heidi becomes McGee’s special rehabilitation project.

One Fearful Yellow Eye is not, in my opinion, one of the best McGee novels in terms of plot. I thought the ending strayed a little close to deus ex machina.

But in terms of prose, I’d rate it one of MacDonald’s best. He was soaring as a stylist in those days. Although I’d entirely forgotten the plot here, I found more lines and passages than usual that had stuck in my mind from previous readings:

“Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates?”

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city….

I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report: The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. And you can’t hardly taste the additives.

Anyway, I got a kick out of One Fearful Yellow Eye. Cautions for sexual situations and violence.