The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.
Ah, the joys of settling down with another Travis McGee novel. Even when author John D. MacDonald’s philosophy rings a little tinny, and the predictions have proven wrong in hindsight, Travis himself remains the best of friends – not only highly entertaining but reliable. Pale Gray for Guilt came out in 1968 and is one of the best in the series.
Tush Bannon is one of Travis McGee’s best old friends from his football days. He’s a big, cheerful, uncomplicated fellow, running a small business, raising a nice family. He has everything Trav can never have unless he alters his lifestyle, and Trav knows it. Then somebody decides to take Tush’s business away, and they take his life along with it. Travis is guilty that he wasn’t there to help. So he makes up his mind to get something back for the widow and the kids. And if a bad guy happens to get in the way of justice, he won’t hesitate to extract some blood too.
With the help of his economist friend Meyer, Trav sets up a neat and appealing con. The author of the book had a business degree from Harvard, and this sting, involving inflating a stock and getting out ahead of the pigeon before it crashes, was a little complex, but convincing. Along the way, McGee and Meyer have ample opportunity to look into the Abyss themselves, and glimpse it looking back at them.
Pale Gray for Guilt has the added element, in retrospect, of setting up a poignant plot element that will only bear fruit years later, in the last book of the series, The Lonely Silver Rain.
An outstanding entry in a classic series, Pale Gray for Guilt gets this reader’s highest recommendation. Cautions for adult situations, somewhat racy for the quaint old days of the 1960s.
“I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”
My life takes me into the state of Iowa fairly frequently, and back in the 1970s and 80s, a frequent feature of my drives down there was the sight of hot air balloons traversing the broad heavens. Iowa was a center for the sport of ballooning back in those days. Since that time, I’m informed, the activity has moved to the southwest. But that period remains memorialized in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel, Free Fall In Crimson, originally published in 1981.
In sequence, this novel follows The Green Ripper, in which McGee lost a woman he loved and hoped to make a future with. So he’s pretty low at the beginning. He’s losing weight, and even pondering dropping his “salvage” business, to become a boat salesman or something. His friend Meyer worries about him.
Then he’s contacted by Ron Esterland, a newly successful artist from New York. Ron explains that he’s troubled by the circumstances of his father’s death. His father was a successful Florida businessman, married several times, once to a movie star. He was dying of cancer when he was attacked in a highway rest area and beaten to death, more than a year ago. Ron had been estranged from his father, and doesn’t care about his money, but the timing seems suspicious. Could his father have been killed by someone connected to the actress ex-wife, for the inheritance?
McGee agrees to check it out, without great enthusiasm. But when he meets Anne Renzetti, manager of a hotel that Esterland had owned, his interest is piqued and his enthusiasm for life rekindled.
The investigation will take him back to Hollywood, to that snake pit from which he barely escaped alive back in the adventure of The Quick Red Fox. Once again he’ll encounter Lysa Dean, the gorgeous, calculating movie queen to whom he once delivered a rare rejection. She’ll connect him with the ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Hollywood director who’s shooting a movie about ballooning in Iowa. And that will lead him into a confrontation with a psycho motorcycle outlaw who’ll unleash a whole lot of reckless violence and death on a lot of people before the final showdown.
I’d read Free Fall In Crimson before, of course. But I hadn’t remembered much about it except for the balloon ride. I found it to be a very well-written and serious book, and I recommend it highly – with cautions for adult themes and a whole lot of innocent bloodshed.
He was a type. The totally muscled sportsman—muscles upon muscles so that even his face looked like a leather bag of walnuts.
Once again, we turn to a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald – one of my favorites, I think. As I was enjoying it it, I was struck (not for the first time) by MacDonald’s ability to transcend his genre. He was, you’ll recall, writing paperback originals for Fawcett Publications – whose line of trade was sexy, violent stories for a male audience. They were competing directly for readers with Mickey Spillane.
And yet MacDonald takes the premise of The Quick Red Fox, a premise tailor-made for the Spillane audience (Hollywood sex goddess, being blackmailed, calls on studly private eye to save her reputation) and runs it in an entirely unexpected direction. He makes it a love story, with some kind of moral core.
Lysa Dean is a major Hollywood star, up there with Liz Taylor and Kim Novak. Her whole life is regimented, as is her appearance and physical health. But a year and a half back, she kicked loose for a while, hooking up with a shady guy. He took her to a wild house party at a place on a cliff on the California coast, where a lot of group sex took place. What she did not guess was that there was a man with a camera on the rocks a little way off, capturing the action through a telephoto lens. Now she’s being blackmailed.
She sends her personal assistant, Dana Holtzer, to bring McGee to see her. McGee isn’t much taken with Lysa, but Dana intrigues him. Dana is a very reserved woman, very efficient, very put-together. McGee takes the job, not for the money, but to get to know Dana. Lysa sends Dana along with him, as an assistant, and over time Dana thaws toward him, opening up about her past and her situation. McGee, who has always tried to avoid long-term commitments, begins thinking about settling down….
This, of course, cannot end well.
The Quick Red Fox is, I think, one of the best and most memorable of the Travis McGee series. McGee’s growing dreams of a life with Dana raise the emotional stakes, and the mystery remains baffling to the very end (I challenge anyone to figure out whodunnit in this one).
It’s notable that this story features two female characters who appear to be physically “flawless,” and they both leave McGee cold. He much prepares Dana, who (we are told) has some flaws. There’s a scene featuring a pair of hostile lesbians, which has no doubt contributed to the oft-repeated accusation that MacDonald was a homophobic writer. But McGee treats those women the way they demand to be treated, and his view of homosexuality was the conventional one for his time (and, I expect, for the future too).
There’s a lot of moral judgment in this story, more useful in what it opposes than in what it affirms. All McGee can come up with to express his own code is that “a moral act is one you feel good about afterward.” Author MacDonald could have done better than that, I hope, but he wasn’t delivering a moral lecture here.
In any case, I like The Quick Red Fox very much. Cautions for adult themes, pretty mild by today’s standards.
Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.
Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.
McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.
And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.
Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.
Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.
They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.
Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.
It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).
A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think.
Another deal on a Travis McGee e-book means another Travis McGee review, to the joy of all. Author John D. MacDonald was at the peak of his powers back in the 1970s when The Dreadful Lemon Skycame out; the result is a neat, tight, engaging mystery.
Our hero Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale boat dweller and beach bum, is not technically a private eye. He basically does favors for friends and friends referred by friends, mostly recovering stolen property, retaining a large percentage of the value as his fee. The Dreadful Lemon Sky begins with something less than a “salvage” job. Carrie Milligan, an old friend, asks him to hold a large amount of cash for her for one month. If she doesn’t come to claim it by then, he should get it to her sister in New Jersey.
But it doesn’t take that long. A few days later, there’s a news item – Carrie Milligan was killed by a truck while crossing a highway near her home in Bay City (which appeared to me to resemble very much the city of Palm Bay, where I once lived). McGee and his economist friend Meyer sail north in McGee’s houseboat for the funeral. There he meets the sister along with Carrie’s circle of friends. And at that point McGee starts getting suspicious. Something is going on under the surface here – he will discover drug smuggling, political corruption, sexual kink and betrayal. The solution will prove to be a complex one, and cruel.
Every McGee novel includes scenes that stick in my mind, even after decades. This one includes a great moment where McGee rescues Carrie’s sister from being fleeced by a funeral director, and McGee’s meditation on the corrosive nature of corporate takeovers of smaller brands. Also, he rents a yellow AMC Gremlin in Bay City, which happened to be exactly the car I was driving back when I first read the book. We Gremlin drivers needed all the support we could get.
Great story. Great reading experience. Cautions for violence, drug use and a pretty lyrical sex scene.
Death comes while you are struggling with your application or lack of application of the Judeo-Christian ethic. While you work out the equation which says, If I don’t kill him, he will kill me, so even if I have been taught not to kill, this is an exception—while you are working that out, he is blowing chunks of bone out of your skull. The quick and the dead is an ancient allusion. They were quick and I was quick and lucky.
I always knew it was coming. Even when this book first came out (and I read it back then) I had to expect that when John D. MacDonald gave his hero Travis McGee the girl of his dreams, a big, healthy, well-balanced woman who seemed to be made for him, he would have to kill her off in the next book. (The author is the true villain of every story.) And so it was. The Green Ripper is the darkest and saddest of the Travis McGee series, and incidentally a harbinger of what future detective fiction would be.
Gretel Tuckerman, Trav’s new woman, has taken a job at a property development and health spa near Fort Lauderdale. One day she notices a stranger on the grounds, and recognizes him from a brief encounter years ago in California. A couple days later she is dead, apparently the victim of a rare disease carried by an insect bite.
But before long, a stricken McGee and his friend Meyer get a visit from some government agents with questions. Thanks to Meyer’s security clearance, they get to ask a few questions of their own. It appears there’s a terrorist network within the US, connected to a secretive religious cult in California. It was Gretel’s misfortune to recognize one of its members, and apparently they murdered her by clandestine means.
This is where McGee goes underground. He assumes a new identity, that of a working fisherman with a drinking problem, headed to California to find his daughter, whom he believes joined the cult. He will find the cult. He will join them. Get to know them. Make friends.
And he will get terrible revenge.
Here, I believe, we see the genesis of the detective thriller as we know it today – the Jack Reacher and Gray Man books and others in the same vein, some better, some not so good. Most Travis McGee books are about the mystery, the problem, with a generous helping of violence thrown in. Today, most detective series are primarily about the violence, with just enough of a mystery to hold the plot together.
As an old fogy, I generally find the older way more enjoyable. And as far as I recall, MacDonald never again went as far into ultra-violence as he did in this story. It’s not that I judge The Green Ripper a bad novel, it’s just that the combination of grief and vengeance makes it a downer.
Also, Meyer, supposedly a genius, makes a lot of economic predictions in this book that haven’t played out well in the real world. On the other hand, we have here an object lesson about avoiding religious groups run by women.
So, not my favorite Travis McGee. But it’s a great series.
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.
I am tall, and I gangle. I look like a loose-jointed, clumsy hundred and eighty. The man who takes a better look at the size of my wrists can make a more accurate guess. When I get up to two twelve I get nervous and hack it back on down to two oh five. As far as clumsiness and reflexes go, I have never had to use a flyswatter in my life. My combat expression is one of apologetic anxiety. I like them confident. My stance is mostly composed of elbows.
Another deal on a Travis McGee book by John D. MacDonald – and this is another important entry in the series, if only by virtue of its being the first.
I’ve told the story here before, because it amuses me. So I’ll just summarize it now. In 1963, Fawcett Publications, a major popular paperback house, hired a new author to create a detective series, replacing Richard S. Prather, their former top seller, who’d followed deeper pockets to greener pastures (to mix a metaphor). John D. MacDonald, the new kid, came up with a slightly reclusive hero, a beach bum living on a houseboat, called Dallas McGee (changed quickly to Travis McGee after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas). McGee called himself a “salvage expert,” but he didn’t salvage shipwrecks or cars. He recovered stolen objects or money, in return for half the value as a finder’s fee. The first book to appear, in 1964, was The Deep Blue Good-bye. (Every volume would incorporate a color in the title.)
McGee is persuaded by a friend, a dancer, to talk to another dancer named Cathy Kerr. Cathy is a country girl, a single mother, living hand to mouth. But she thinks she might have a right to a missing treasure. Her father, she explains, came home from the war with some secret package that he hid carefully, before being sent to prison for murder. He died before his release, but after a while his former cellmate Junior Allen showed up – a big, strong, dynamic type who swept Cathy off her feet and soon had her completely dominated. He also dug holes all over their farm. And one day he found something and vanished. Cathy is pretty sure he found her father’s stash, and she and her kid could sure use half of it, if McGee could get it back for her.
McGee doesn’t need work just now, but he’s impressed with Cathy’s dignity after all she’s been through. He traces Junior Allen’s footsteps, learning he was last seen on a yacht with a rich, beautiful woman. McGee finds the woman, Lois Atkinson, in her home, cast off by Allen and now a wreck of herself. Allen systematically broke her down and degraded her, and she has nearly starved herself to death in despair and self-disgust. McGee nurses her back to health, and at last begins a gentle affair with her, one which threatens to break through his prickly personal defenses.
But he still has Junior Allen to catch, and he formulates a devious plan to con the con man.
Unfortunately, as with all plans of battle, this one does not survive contact with the enemy. And Junior Allen is a formidable enemy indeed. The climax is one of the most harrowing and memorable in the series.
I read a review some time back that argued that The Deep Blue Good-bye is unworthy of the rest of the books, weighed down by the standard tropes of 1960s men’s fiction. I cannot agree. MacDonald certainly serves up the expected necessaries – plenty of violence and sex. But I think the original readers back in 1964 must have been puzzled by this book – there’s a lot of genuinely excellent prose here, and even the obligatory sex scenes are lyrical and revelatory of character, rather than sordid. (Though I do not approve of the sexual mores.)
Some of MacDonald’s prose – I would argue – is as good as that of his contemporaries Hemingway and O’Hara, only ensconced in far more interesting stories.
I drove back through late afternoon heat. The world darkened, turned to a poisonous green, and somebody pulled the chain. Water roared down the chute. Rose-colored lightning webbed down. Water bounced knee high, silver in the green premature dusk, and I found a place to pull off out of the way and let the fools gnash each other’s chrome and tinwork, fattening the body shops, busying the adjustors, clogging the circuit court calendars. The sign of the times is the imaginary whiplash injury.
Another notable element in this book was one moment – never to be repeated again that I can recall – when McGee hints at some trauma in his earlier life that left him perpetually commitment-averse.
To draw a line under it all, I highly enjoyed The Deep Blue Good-bye and recommend it. Not for kids.
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.
So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.
As I think I may possibly have mentioned before, I’m a hopeless fan of John D. MacDonald, and especially his Travis McGee novels, about a Florida boat bum and “salvage specialist” who recovers people’s stolen property and keeps half the value as his fee. The Lonely Silver Rain holds a special place in the series, as its 21st and final installment. It was published in 1985, and the author died the following year.
Trav gets a call from Billy Ingraham, an old friend who’s a millionaire and a widower, who recently retired, acquired a trophy wife, and had a yacht custom-built to his specifications. The boat had barely gotten in the water when somebody stole it. Billy has heard that Trav once found somebody else’s stolen yacht. Could he do the same for him? Trav explains that the first recovery was kind of a fluke, but Billy promises a generous finder’s fee. Helped by his best friend, the economist Myer, Trav makes a plan to use aerial photography and systematic analysis to try to find the needle in the haystack. And, to his own surprise, he does find it.
But when he boards the yacht, now abandoned in an isolated bay in the Keys, he finds it trashed, with three corpses inside. A young man and two young women have been tortured and murdered here. Trav recognizes the signs – this is a drug deal gone bad. This is nothing for outsiders to mess with.
Trav backs out carefully, covering his tracks, and phones the Coast Guard anonymously to alert them. Then he tells Billy to forget he was ever involved.
Too late, it turns out. One of the dead women was the daughter of a high-level Peruvian gangster. Someone has decided that somebody must be made to pay for the murders, and somehow they’ve identified Travis McGee as the scapegoat. He’ll have to either handle the problem or find a way to disappear forever.
I remember that, when this book came out, some reviewers commented on what they saw as a weary, graying quality. The author’s chronological plan was for Travis McGee to age at a somewhat slower rate than people in the real world. Under that plan, McGee was now middle-aged, but still had good years in him (though he worries now and then about losing a half-step). But MacDonald was approaching 70 himself at the time (which even I admit is old, though I’m older than that now), and he was clearly experiencing intimations of mortality. There’s even a fleeting moment in this book, a sort of throwaway scene, where Trav acknowledges the possibility of the Great Beyond sending us messages.
The Lonely Silver Rain may not be the top entry in the Travis McGee series, but it’s written with all the skill and craft of a consummate professional. Plus, as a special bonus, there’s an episode at the end that adds a (possibly unintentional but touching ) coda that rounds out a classic detective series rather nicely.
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