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Reviews
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Travis McGee Novels |
| Mini-Review of the celebrated John D. MacDonald Series |
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If you're a child of the 60's or '70's and you were raised on the popular John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee" series, you can probably skip this review. Write it off as amateurishly enthusiastic, inappropriately un-analytical, just another voice in the cheering throngs of wildly admiring yet unbelieving McGee admirers. "Unbelieving"? No one puts down a McGee book at its end, thinking that any of this could actually have happened in one lifetime to one person. No one believes many people, if any, could exist on the epic McGee scale without losing their aptitude for the deep, profound, irreverent, or funny. At the end of the last chapter McGee fans, no doubt like myself, wish the novel would never end; more to the point, that the list of unread novels would not diminish until finally, with a great thunderclap, the last in the series has finally been read. McGee is a tall, hard-hitting ocean-bronzed "marine salvage consultant". McGee's rule of salvage: if something of great value has been taken from you by force or fraud, and conventional law enforcement avenues are useless or dangerous, McGee will salvage the loss in exchange for half of any recovery. This funds McGee's part-time retirement on his houseboat "Busted Flush", usually found by party-going friends berthed at slip 18, Bahia Mar, vicinity of Fort Lauderdale. McGee is the healer of the broken and wounded, the champion of the unlikely victim, friend of the questioning philosopher, an ocean-going Paladin in search of a just cause. This is his business. There's no psalm-singing preachiness, hidden agendas, or protestations of a special claim to virtue. John D. MacDonald was a master storyteller. His written world is populated by characters from every possible region, mindset, educational level and sense of justice. Some of MacDonald's people would fit well into the high-rolling casino world of Ian Fleming's Bond series. Others are archetypes of the southern sheriff, the backwoods trash out of Deliverance, the bankers on Wall Street ... a complete cross section of the good, the bad and the ugly in America. A MacDonald heavy is a creature to behold, larger than death, with a character that slowly unfolds like the writhing coils of a grinning python after crushing its prey. What is revealed is a totally remorseless psychopathic killer. The villain whom Travis eventually discovers and tracks down is as vividly horrible as any unspeakably warped characterization crafted by sicko thriller masters Elmore Leonard or Lawrence Sanders. I find I can't read more than one or two McGee novels in a row for that reason. Despite a hearty infusion of “redeeming social value” with which the author buffers all his plots, it takes too long to shake that dread sense that nothing can be trusted, that something wicked hides behind the innocent apparition of the kid on the roller skates, the postman, and the really nice guy at the party. On the other hand, I have read about two Lawrence Sanders novels, maybe 20 years ago, and that's enough for me. Sanders is a powerful masterful writer. The images he created of unspeakably omnipotent evil have a staying power that says to me, "enough is enough". MacDonald writes with a strong sense of a balance between good and evil, including delightful sojourns into the worlds of deep and meaningful discourse, and long Mediterranean cruises, often both at the same time. The difference between a Sanders heavy and a MacDonald heavy: To the Sanders heavy (as best as I can still recall), evil exists for its own sake; victims are random, hapless, and passive; they do not struggle for their own salvation when trapped in the Sanders web, unless to further ensnare themselves. The MacDonald heavy is evil parasitically dependent on the good, needing the appearance of sanction and the actual (if unwilling) cooperation of the victim. The MacDonald villain is usually so clever at plotting and concealing his tracks that evil would always be rewarded with opportunities for more evil, until, that is, the web captures one Travis McGee. McGee's method of finding his villain is to allow himself to become ensnared. He sets up a situation of entrapment that gets somewhat out of control. The villain invariably finds Travis first, beats him half to death or just leaves him for dead, and murders half of the novel's supporting cast. The villain enjoys it, becomes better and better at murder as more and more tracks need to be covered, and is finally undone when no more options are left for Travis, or so it seems. We find ourselves saying, "No, Travis, you can't keep doing this. Get the steady job and live to a real retirement age." But that's just not McGee. I've read or re-read all but a couple of the McGee series, now. If you haven't been exposed to the late John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, his publisher claims more than 32 million in print. Amazon carries them all. Not hard to find, highly addictive, and highly recommended. Just give yourself a breather between novels! I believe the following well-worn list, Googled at some point from the ubiquitous "somewhere off the web", is an accurate compilation of all the McGee books published. There is little advantage in reading the Travis McGee series in any particular order. My approach, at least, worked well: I just read them in whatever order I could get my hands on them. Currently published by Ballentine/Fawcett Books. 1964 The Deep Blue
Good-By review ©Alex Forbes, February 14,
2006 |
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