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Travis McGee #1
The Deep Blue Good-By
From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Deep Blue Good-bye is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat. Travis McGee is a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He’s also a knight-errant who’s wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is He’ll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half. “John D. MacDonald was the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King McGee isn’t particularly strapped for cash, but how can anyone say no to Cathy, a sweet backwoods girl who’s been tortured repeatedly by her manipulative ex-boyfriend Junior Allen? What Travis isn’t anticipating is just how many women Junior has torn apart and left in his wake. Enter Junior’s latest victim, Lois Atkinson. Frail and broken, Lois can barely get out of bed when Travis finds her, let alone keep herself alive. But Travis turns into Mother McGee, giving Lois new life as he looks for the ruthless man who steals women’s spirits and livelihoods. But he can’t guess how violent his quest is soon to become. He’ll learn the hard way that there must be casualties in this game of cat and mouse.
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
About the author
John D. MacDonald
494 books1,231 followersJohn D. MacDonald was born in Sharon, Pa, and educated at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Syracuse and Harvard, where he took an MBA in 1939. During WW2, he rose to the rank of Colonel, and while serving in the Army and in the Far East, sent a short story to his wife for sale, successfully. He served in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. After the war, he decided to try writing for a year, to see if he could make a living. Over 500 short stories and 70 novels resulted, including 21 Travis McGee novels.
Following complications of an earlier heart bypass operation, MacDonald slipped into a coma on December 10 and died at age 70, on December 28, 1986, in St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was survived by his wife Dorothy (1911-1989) and a son, Maynard.
In the years since his death MacDonald has been praised by authors as diverse as Stephen King, Spider Robinson, Jimmy Buffett, Kingsley Amis and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. Thirty-three years after his passing the Travis McGee novels are still in print.
Following complications of an earlier heart bypass operation, MacDonald slipped into a coma on December 10 and died at age 70, on December 28, 1986, in St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was survived by his wife Dorothy (1911-1989) and a son, Maynard.
In the years since his death MacDonald has been praised by authors as diverse as Stephen King, Spider Robinson, Jimmy Buffett, Kingsley Amis and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. Thirty-three years after his passing the Travis McGee novels are still in print.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,407 reviews
April 22, 2008
This book should have been called To Catch a Rapist You Have to Think Like a Rapist. I'd always heard good things about John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, so I decided I'd start at the beginning, and bought the first couple of books in the series. After reading The Deep Blue Good-by, however, I don't have much interest in reading any more. The main problem I had with this book is its protagonist. Travis McGee is a self-important asshole who overexplains his trite beach-bum "philosophy" any chance he gets, which invariably stops the narrative dead in its tracks. But the worst part about him is his attitude toward "the ladies." McGee sees himself as God's gift to women but in reality is one step away from being a date rapist. McGee is the only fully realized character in this book. The women are all wholly defined by their physical characteristics; McGee is a harder and more thorough judge of women's bodies than Lorenzo Lamas. He notices every pucker and imperfection and ascribes to them character in a way that seems almost medieval. Nevertheless, MacDonald is clearly under the impression that McGee is a sensitive, sexy, and intelligent man who understands women and what they need, which only makes things creepier.
Anyway, The Deep Blue Good-by is all about Travis McGee tracking down a thief and serial rapist named Junior Allen. As McGee gets closer to Allen he has an unerring ability to know which young girl in a group is the most vulnerable and innocent, and therefore the ripest prospect for violation by Allen. The plot could have been interesting, but because of McGee's attitude towards life and love, it ends up just being weird and creepy.
Also, anyone named Travis who prefers to be called "Trav" is a fucking prick.
Anyway, The Deep Blue Good-by is all about Travis McGee tracking down a thief and serial rapist named Junior Allen. As McGee gets closer to Allen he has an unerring ability to know which young girl in a group is the most vulnerable and innocent, and therefore the ripest prospect for violation by Allen. The plot could have been interesting, but because of McGee's attitude towards life and love, it ends up just being weird and creepy.
Also, anyone named Travis who prefers to be called "Trav" is a fucking prick.
May 25, 2023
The Deep Blue Good-By is a very well written mystery noir… The tale is laden with clever observations…
Money is a mainstay of evil… And greed is a goad…
Travis McGee is a private hardboiled troubleshooter… He is tough but compassionate… He boasts nitty-gritty wisdom… He scorns the system…
The onset of the sixties is a Freudian era… Women are instrumental in everything… They are hot stuff… They are victims…
His adversary is dangerous… He is a felon… He is a snake possessing venomous fangs…
He who is able to provide for himself is also able to provide for others.
Money is a mainstay of evil… And greed is a goad…
“This is a complex culture, dear. The more intricate our society gets, the more semi-legal ways to steal.”
Travis McGee is a private hardboiled troubleshooter… He is tough but compassionate… He boasts nitty-gritty wisdom… He scorns the system…
I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
The onset of the sixties is a Freudian era… Women are instrumental in everything… They are hot stuff… They are victims…
These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love…
His adversary is dangerous… He is a felon… He is a snake possessing venomous fangs…
“Trav, you be careful getting near him. He’s mean as anything you like to find in a swamp.”
He who is able to provide for himself is also able to provide for others.
January 16, 2015
I'm a huge fan of suspense fiction, absolutely loving the surprising and unexpected twists and turns. I've read (and re-read) a lot in this genre over the years, but John D MacDonald (JDM) had escaped me. I'm not sure why. I had heard of the movie "Cape Fear", which was adapted from JDM's book The Executioners, but for some reason I knew nothing of his pulp fiction series about Travis McGee.
One day I was having a conversation with my good friend and fellow GR member, Cathy DuPont, and she kept talking about this guy called Trav. The way she spoke about him led me to believe that he was a very good friend of hers, a Floridian neighbour, and an all-round wonderful guy. It seemed that they'd known each other for some time. Cathy was clearly smitten with him.
So you can imagine my surprise when much later I discovered that Trav was not real!
"What do you mean, he doesn't exist! What are you saying, Cathy…that he's just some character in a book?"
I actually sent Cathy this picture when I found out!
After getting over my initial shock, I had a longer conversation with Cathy about Trav. I learnt that she is on her third reading of the Travis McGee series. That sure is something - there are 21 books in total. Cathy knows each book, and indeed Trav, inside out. The sheer enjoyment that this series gives her is obvious, and her love for Trav infectious. I just had to 'meet' the man who put a smile on my friend's face.
Then in October 2014, this gal from Dubai met up with her friend from Florida for a few days RnR in New York city. We visited a few bookstores and were fortunate to find one that had the full Travis McGee series. I purchased "Blue", with Cathy by my side. We both chuckled. Such a perfectly wonderful moment.
And that perfection continued with the reading of this book.
The Deep Blue Good-By (aka "Blue") is the first of 21 novels in the Travis McGee series by American author John D. MacDonald. All McGee novel titles incorporate a colour, and the novels have essentially been written as one long story on the life and times of Travis, or Trav as he likes to be called.
Trav lives on a 52-foot barge-type houseboat called "The Busted Flush", docked at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The barge is named after the poker hand, in memory of the game in which Trav won it. Trav also owns a custom vintage Rolls-Royce that has been converted into a pickup truck. The truck is painted "a horrid electric blue" and Trav calls it "Miss Agnes", after an elementary school teacher whose hair was the same shade.
Trav with Busted Flush and Miss Agnes
If you asked Trav what his occupation was, he'd hand you a business card that reads "Salvage Consultant". In reality, he could be described loosely as a private investigator, with most of his business coming by word of mouth. His clients are usually people who have been deprived of something important and/or valuable (typically by unscrupulous or illegal means) and have no way to regain it lawfully. Trav's usual fee is half the value of the item (if recovered) with McGee risking expenses, and those who object to such a seemingly high fee are reminded that
"Half is a lot better than nothing at all."The pattern for the series is set in The Deep Blue Good-by when a woman by the name of Cathy Kerr asks Trav for help recovering a dubiously-earned fortune that her dead father left hidden. Trav takes the case, and it leads to a smarmy but persuasive lowlife named Junior Allen. And in his effort to learn more about Allen, Trav meets Allen's latest victim, Lois Atkinson. Allen had wormed his way into controlling Lois’ life and money, and she was reduced to a nearly catatonic state by the time Trav came along. In addition to being a brute and a treasure-hunting rival for Trav, Lois reveals that Allen is also a serial rapist. Trav proceeds with his plan to recover Cathy’s fortune and ensure that Junior Allen meets justice.
So, will I read more in the series?
You bet! The power of Trav has me under his spell, drawing me in. It's like music. It's his voice, telling you his story in a particular way. I could become addicted!
Critics may charge that Trav represents an outdated and politically incorrect view of masculinity, and they may be right. But perhaps this misses the point. Yes, Trav is a womaniser much like James Bond or early Spenser. And yes, woman are miraculously restored by his testosterone-soaked presence. And yes, this makes Trav an anachronism. But so does McGee’s disgust at the rapacious development of South Florida or dislike of everything from credit cards to the limited opportunities women have in life. In one classic rant, Trav muses:
"The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhaustive quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel.”Trav is a man who refuses to change much of anything. He thoughtfully but forcefully maintains his independent life, a life of action that makes for brisk reading and also begins to weigh on Trav, I am told, by the end of the series.
Thanks JDM for the magnificent character, Trav McGee.
Thanks Random House for keeping Trav alive.
And Cathy, many thanks to you, my friend, for sharing Trav with me.
For those interested in the books in the series, they are listed here:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/list...
Cathy's review of "Blue" can be found here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
January 24, 2016
If you’ve been conned or robbed out of something by a shady character then Travis McGee will try to get it back for half the value of what was taken. And if you’re a woman he’ll more than likely bang you in the process. No extra charge.
Cathy Kerr is a single mom whose father had hidden something valuable he brought back from serving in the military overseas before being sent to prison. After he dies in jail a pyschopath named Junior Allen shows up and manages to locate and steal the goods. While trying to pick up Junior’s trail McGee finds himself reluctantly cast as the savior and caregiver of Lois, a woman that Junior brutally assaulted and dominated to the point that she was total wreck in the aftermath.
This first novel in the series sets the tone with MacDonald doing some sharp writing that works as both crime story and social commentary with Travis quietly rebelling against the consumerist and conformist culture he despises. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty dated in a way that lets McGee function as both a womanizing sexist and the white knight there to defend damsels in distress.
It’s dated, but there’s still good stuff here. I’m looking forward to the planned movie version of this because he could still be a great character if he gets modernized a bit. Hopefully, Christian Bale can do for Travis McGee what Daniel Craig has done for James Bond.
Cathy Kerr is a single mom whose father had hidden something valuable he brought back from serving in the military overseas before being sent to prison. After he dies in jail a pyschopath named Junior Allen shows up and manages to locate and steal the goods. While trying to pick up Junior’s trail McGee finds himself reluctantly cast as the savior and caregiver of Lois, a woman that Junior brutally assaulted and dominated to the point that she was total wreck in the aftermath.
This first novel in the series sets the tone with MacDonald doing some sharp writing that works as both crime story and social commentary with Travis quietly rebelling against the consumerist and conformist culture he despises. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty dated in a way that lets McGee function as both a womanizing sexist and the white knight there to defend damsels in distress.
It’s dated, but there’s still good stuff here. I’m looking forward to the planned movie version of this because he could still be a great character if he gets modernized a bit. Hopefully, Christian Bale can do for Travis McGee what Daniel Craig has done for James Bond.
September 19, 2020
Una historia muy bien contada. Me pierdo un poco en las descripciones del mundo de los barcos porqué no logro ubicarme.
Me ha recordado a las novelas del gran Charles Williams.
El personaje principal de Travis McGee es fantástico. Un honrado y solitario buscador de negocios más o menos legales que vive en un barco ganado en una partida de póquer y que siempre está rodeado de mujeres. Un tipo entrañable.
Más allá de la investigación, hay una hermosa historia de amor. Diría que, casi casi, es la trama principal y que el resto se desarrolla a partir del amor tan tierno y tan complicado que surge entre ellos.
Me quedaré leyendo las aventuras del Sr. McGee durante unos cuantos libros más.
A very well told story. I get a little lost in the descriptions of the boat world because I can't find my way around.
It reminded me of the novels of the great Charles Williams.
Travis McGee's main character is fantastic. An honest and solitary seeker of more or less legal business who lives on a boat won in a poker game and is always surrounded by women. A lovely guy.
Beyond research, there is a beautiful love story. I would say that, almost, it is the main plot and that the rest develops from the love so tender and so complicated that arises between them.
I will stay reading Mr. McGee's adventures for a few more books.
Me ha recordado a las novelas del gran Charles Williams.
El personaje principal de Travis McGee es fantástico. Un honrado y solitario buscador de negocios más o menos legales que vive en un barco ganado en una partida de póquer y que siempre está rodeado de mujeres. Un tipo entrañable.
Más allá de la investigación, hay una hermosa historia de amor. Diría que, casi casi, es la trama principal y que el resto se desarrolla a partir del amor tan tierno y tan complicado que surge entre ellos.
Me quedaré leyendo las aventuras del Sr. McGee durante unos cuantos libros más.
A very well told story. I get a little lost in the descriptions of the boat world because I can't find my way around.
It reminded me of the novels of the great Charles Williams.
Travis McGee's main character is fantastic. An honest and solitary seeker of more or less legal business who lives on a boat won in a poker game and is always surrounded by women. A lovely guy.
Beyond research, there is a beautiful love story. I would say that, almost, it is the main plot and that the rest develops from the love so tender and so complicated that arises between them.
I will stay reading Mr. McGee's adventures for a few more books.
August 18, 2017
This is a novel that put John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) on my short list of favorite authors, between Elmore Leonard and Stephen King, even though I can just barely recommend it. Published in 1964, The Deep Blue Good-by is the debut of Travis McGee, "Salvage Consultant" in south Florida who over the course of twenty-one novels--titled with every color in the spectrum save for "black" or "white"-- recovers missing items. As plots go it's as routine as any airport paperback, but is wet with nautical atmosphere and in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination, also stiff with a historically keen male nihilism that sets it apart.
Moored in Lauderdale aboard the 52-foot houseboat Busted Flush (won where else but in a private poker session), Travis McGee is introduced idling the afternoon away with Chookie McCall, a dancer and choreographer who hasn't known Travis long enough to figure out whether he really does find things for people, keeping half of its value. Chookie just so happens to know someone looking for something and has invited her over. McGee hears the woman out. Cathy Kerr is a dancer whose father served in the Air Transport Command in India and Burma during the war and brought home an item of awesome value. Cathy just doesn't know what it was.
Wally Kerr was taken away when Cathy was nine years old, sentenced to Leavenworth for beating an officer to death. A year ago, a smiling man named Ambrose A. "Junior" Allen arrived in Candle Key, claiming to be a cellmate of her father's. Shacking up with Cathy, Junior spent most of his time digging around for something. Waking one morning to find the man gone and their two driveway markers smashed, Kathy is sure that he stole an object her father had meant for her. Junior Allen returned to Candle Key with money and a cruiser registered as the Play Pen., seducing another vulnerable woman in the area named Lois Atkinson. Kathy asks Travis McGee to help her.
She looked at me with soft apologetic brown eyes, all dressed in her best to come talk to me. The world had done its best to subdue and humble her, but the edge of her good, tough spirit showed through. I found I had taken an irrational dislike to Junior Allen, that smiling man. And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
Driving a 1936 Rolls Royce that's been converted into a pickup truck and that he calls Miss Agnes, Travis starts by checking out Junior Allen. He judges Junior to be a formidable man. 38, in good shape, capable of forcing shy women to give him what he wants, stealing something of value and converting it to cash in New York, then possessing the nerve to return to the scene of his crime for a new victim. Trav accompanies Cathy on a visit to her younger sister Christine in an attempt to learn about their father and what he might have brought back to interest Junior so much. McGee then ventures to the end of Candle Key to pay a visit to Lois Atkinson.
Finding Lois Atkinson to be a tall, slender woman in her early thirties, McGee is surprised to find her falling apart from her experience with Junior Allen. Malnourished and alcoholic, she is actually close to death until Travis invites himself in and begins to care for her, calling a doctor to examine her and slowly gaining her confidence. He learns little to nothing about Junior Allen except for what Lois says in her sleep and once she's recovered physically from her ordeal, Travis invites her to stay with him aboard the Busted Flush. Travis soon takes off to New York and Harlingen, Texas to speak with two army buddies of Sergeant Wally Kerr.
Travis determines that Cathy's father started out swapping Missionary Bonds purchased in China for cash in the States before ultimately graduating to . Returning to Lauderdale, Travis and Lois' relationship blooms into an intimate one. Junior Allen runs into Cathy at the nightclub where she works and luring her away, beats her within an inch of her life. Travis discovers Junior has settled on a new woman to corrupt and destroy, plotting to isolate her and her friends on a cruise to Bimini. Travis hatches a scheme to get himself on Junior Allen's cruiser, get his client's heirloom and get Junior Allen.
A.A. Allen, Junior, came through as a crafty, impulsive, and lucky man. He had gone after the sergeant's fortune with guile and patience, but now that he had begun to have the use of it, he was recklessly impatient to find his own rather perverse gratifications. Sanity is not an absolute term. Probably, in the five years of imprisonment, what had originally been merely a strong sexual drive had been perverted into a search for victims. He had indulged himself with erotic fantasies of gentle women, force, terror, corruption. Until, finally, the restolen fortune became merely a means to an end, to come out and live the fantasies.
If titles alone were enough, The Deep Blue Good-by would be one of my favorite all-time novels. MacDonald does a intoxicating job evoking a hard-boiled and sun-drenched nihilism here, establishing a resourceful entrepreneur in Travis McGee who seems more content to keep his own company than run one, scraping his boat and scraping by in a world he barely notes worth saving. John F. Kennedy isn't mentioned specifically, but the year of publication hints that the president's assassination and direction the country was headed in had a lot to do with McGee's skepticism of America, traveling as far south as he could without needing to speak Spanish.
She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big, plated, pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions, and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom, and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all the fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.
Travis McGee respects Lois Atkinson, but where the novel sputters and stalls is her introduction. Lois is a victim who wallows in it, playing from a position of weakness whether than strength. Rather than help McGee, she's a drag on him and the story, which needed to propel forward. Junior Allen is a good antagonist on his own, but doesn't interact with the protagonist in a compelling way. Other than Travis McGee, there aren't really any compelling characters in the novel, shocking when the Florida locales are taken into account. Still, MacDonald's prowess as a writer, his delicious prose and offbeat sensibility made me a fan.
The hardcover of The Deep Blue Good-by that I found at the library lacks the stunning artwork of Robert McGinnis, who in addition to illustrating paperback covers for the Travis McGee series produced many movie posters in the '60s and '70s, including those for the Sean Connery 007 pictures.
Moored in Lauderdale aboard the 52-foot houseboat Busted Flush (won where else but in a private poker session), Travis McGee is introduced idling the afternoon away with Chookie McCall, a dancer and choreographer who hasn't known Travis long enough to figure out whether he really does find things for people, keeping half of its value. Chookie just so happens to know someone looking for something and has invited her over. McGee hears the woman out. Cathy Kerr is a dancer whose father served in the Air Transport Command in India and Burma during the war and brought home an item of awesome value. Cathy just doesn't know what it was.
Wally Kerr was taken away when Cathy was nine years old, sentenced to Leavenworth for beating an officer to death. A year ago, a smiling man named Ambrose A. "Junior" Allen arrived in Candle Key, claiming to be a cellmate of her father's. Shacking up with Cathy, Junior spent most of his time digging around for something. Waking one morning to find the man gone and their two driveway markers smashed, Kathy is sure that he stole an object her father had meant for her. Junior Allen returned to Candle Key with money and a cruiser registered as the Play Pen., seducing another vulnerable woman in the area named Lois Atkinson. Kathy asks Travis McGee to help her.
She looked at me with soft apologetic brown eyes, all dressed in her best to come talk to me. The world had done its best to subdue and humble her, but the edge of her good, tough spirit showed through. I found I had taken an irrational dislike to Junior Allen, that smiling man. And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
Driving a 1936 Rolls Royce that's been converted into a pickup truck and that he calls Miss Agnes, Travis starts by checking out Junior Allen. He judges Junior to be a formidable man. 38, in good shape, capable of forcing shy women to give him what he wants, stealing something of value and converting it to cash in New York, then possessing the nerve to return to the scene of his crime for a new victim. Trav accompanies Cathy on a visit to her younger sister Christine in an attempt to learn about their father and what he might have brought back to interest Junior so much. McGee then ventures to the end of Candle Key to pay a visit to Lois Atkinson.
Finding Lois Atkinson to be a tall, slender woman in her early thirties, McGee is surprised to find her falling apart from her experience with Junior Allen. Malnourished and alcoholic, she is actually close to death until Travis invites himself in and begins to care for her, calling a doctor to examine her and slowly gaining her confidence. He learns little to nothing about Junior Allen except for what Lois says in her sleep and once she's recovered physically from her ordeal, Travis invites her to stay with him aboard the Busted Flush. Travis soon takes off to New York and Harlingen, Texas to speak with two army buddies of Sergeant Wally Kerr.
Travis determines that Cathy's father started out swapping Missionary Bonds purchased in China for cash in the States before ultimately graduating to . Returning to Lauderdale, Travis and Lois' relationship blooms into an intimate one. Junior Allen runs into Cathy at the nightclub where she works and luring her away, beats her within an inch of her life. Travis discovers Junior has settled on a new woman to corrupt and destroy, plotting to isolate her and her friends on a cruise to Bimini. Travis hatches a scheme to get himself on Junior Allen's cruiser, get his client's heirloom and get Junior Allen.
A.A. Allen, Junior, came through as a crafty, impulsive, and lucky man. He had gone after the sergeant's fortune with guile and patience, but now that he had begun to have the use of it, he was recklessly impatient to find his own rather perverse gratifications. Sanity is not an absolute term. Probably, in the five years of imprisonment, what had originally been merely a strong sexual drive had been perverted into a search for victims. He had indulged himself with erotic fantasies of gentle women, force, terror, corruption. Until, finally, the restolen fortune became merely a means to an end, to come out and live the fantasies.
If titles alone were enough, The Deep Blue Good-by would be one of my favorite all-time novels. MacDonald does a intoxicating job evoking a hard-boiled and sun-drenched nihilism here, establishing a resourceful entrepreneur in Travis McGee who seems more content to keep his own company than run one, scraping his boat and scraping by in a world he barely notes worth saving. John F. Kennedy isn't mentioned specifically, but the year of publication hints that the president's assassination and direction the country was headed in had a lot to do with McGee's skepticism of America, traveling as far south as he could without needing to speak Spanish.
She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big, plated, pea-brain lizards didn't make it. Sharks, scorpions, and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom, and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn't seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all the fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.
Travis McGee respects Lois Atkinson, but where the novel sputters and stalls is her introduction. Lois is a victim who wallows in it, playing from a position of weakness whether than strength. Rather than help McGee, she's a drag on him and the story, which needed to propel forward. Junior Allen is a good antagonist on his own, but doesn't interact with the protagonist in a compelling way. Other than Travis McGee, there aren't really any compelling characters in the novel, shocking when the Florida locales are taken into account. Still, MacDonald's prowess as a writer, his delicious prose and offbeat sensibility made me a fan.
The hardcover of The Deep Blue Good-by that I found at the library lacks the stunning artwork of Robert McGinnis, who in addition to illustrating paperback covers for the Travis McGee series produced many movie posters in the '60s and '70s, including those for the Sean Connery 007 pictures.
February 21, 2014
[9/10]
excellent start to a classic noir series. I really liked the main character and I hope I will manage to write a more indepth review soon.
Update:
Other people go down to the keys and bring back shell ashtrays or mounted fish or pottery flamingos. Travis McGee brings back a Lois Atkinson. The souvenir fervor is the mainstay of a tourist economy.
Could we call this genre 'sunny noir'? As in hard-boiled , private dick crime investigation set in laidback, luminous Florida. A state who has its own share of lowlife and criminals, providing plenty of work for Travis. Who is not exactly a private dick, but more of a debt collector from difficult customers. He takes a hefty share of the salvaged property, allowing a leisure lifestyle between jobs . He boasts at one time that he prefers to : Instead of retiring at sixty I'm taking it in chunks as I go along.. I was quite envious of Trav when I read this, but his chosen career has its drawbacks, like getting beaten up and shot at quite often. Bad guys and money do not usually separate willingly.
Another reason to like and envy Travis is his residence, his castle where he is king and master of his domain: Home is where the privacy is. , in this case The Busted Flush, a 52-foot barge-type houseboat he won in a poker game, docked at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale. Our hero is a bit of cynic, at least in his frequent declamations against the evils of modern society. His actions though speak louder than words, and following him around in his investigations, I developed a different portrait of a man whose anger and bitterness are the result of actually caring too much about his fellow men (actually about women, but you get my drift) and about his Florida homeland. Carl Hiaasen writes the introduction to this novel, and he is a great choice as both authors include in their books strong environmental and social militancy.
I'm spending a lot of time on Travis before talking about plot and style, because I have a feeling I'm hooked on the series, in for the long run, and the narrator is the most important ingredient in such cases. You either relate to him, or you give up after the first couple of issues. With my usual penchant for making inappropriate associations, I drew some parallels between Travis McGee and Walden: a love for the natural world, a self imposed exile from the artificial society, a plea for cleaner living and peace of mind. Here's a sample of his rants:
I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
I am dreary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
Reality is in the enduring eyes, the unspoken dreadful accusation in the enduring eyes of a worn young woman who looks at you, and hopes for nothing.
And with the last phrase I finally got around to the story here. Travis is asked by his current non-girlfriend, a saucy dancer in a topless bar, to help a young woman in trouble. She can't go to the police because she has been robbed by the man she has fallen in love with, a former convict who tricked her imprisoned father into revealing a secret hoard buried on the girl's property. Travis complains and grumbles constantly, but he decides to check the story out, getting more and more enraged as he finds out more about the culprit, a certain Junior Allen.
The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statutes. A smiling man, quick and handy as a cat, webbed with muscle, armored with money, now at liberty in an unsuspecting world, greedy as a weasel in a hen house.
This guy forcefully seduces vulnerable women, a serial statutory raper who gets away scot free because his victims blame themselves and fail to report him to the authorities. Money suddenly become irrelevant to Travis as he is put in the position of nursemaid for the broken dolls left in the wake of Junior Allen. Our errant knight extends his sympathy for lost women to the larger landscape of Florida and the failure of the American Dream, as he contemplates the sexual revolution of the 1960's coupled with the lack of career choices for the young and vulnerable:
These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally we say sorry you can't have any.
I should caution against picturing Travis as a knight in shining armor. He is quite rusty and amoral, both in his methods of obtaining information which don't rule out torture and intimidation, and in his own predatory interest in women.
The novel is fast paced and tightly written, free of bloat and well balanced with dialogue, social commentary and live action. The main appeal for me was in getting to know Travis and I look forward to spending more time in his company. I don't know yet if the novel was filmed, but I would sure be interested in a movie version.
Thanks to the guys in the Pulp reading group for picking this up as the February choice.
excellent start to a classic noir series. I really liked the main character and I hope I will manage to write a more indepth review soon.
Update:
Other people go down to the keys and bring back shell ashtrays or mounted fish or pottery flamingos. Travis McGee brings back a Lois Atkinson. The souvenir fervor is the mainstay of a tourist economy.
Could we call this genre 'sunny noir'? As in hard-boiled , private dick crime investigation set in laidback, luminous Florida. A state who has its own share of lowlife and criminals, providing plenty of work for Travis. Who is not exactly a private dick, but more of a debt collector from difficult customers. He takes a hefty share of the salvaged property, allowing a leisure lifestyle between jobs . He boasts at one time that he prefers to : Instead of retiring at sixty I'm taking it in chunks as I go along.. I was quite envious of Trav when I read this, but his chosen career has its drawbacks, like getting beaten up and shot at quite often. Bad guys and money do not usually separate willingly.
Another reason to like and envy Travis is his residence, his castle where he is king and master of his domain: Home is where the privacy is. , in this case The Busted Flush, a 52-foot barge-type houseboat he won in a poker game, docked at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale. Our hero is a bit of cynic, at least in his frequent declamations against the evils of modern society. His actions though speak louder than words, and following him around in his investigations, I developed a different portrait of a man whose anger and bitterness are the result of actually caring too much about his fellow men (actually about women, but you get my drift) and about his Florida homeland. Carl Hiaasen writes the introduction to this novel, and he is a great choice as both authors include in their books strong environmental and social militancy.
I'm spending a lot of time on Travis before talking about plot and style, because I have a feeling I'm hooked on the series, in for the long run, and the narrator is the most important ingredient in such cases. You either relate to him, or you give up after the first couple of issues. With my usual penchant for making inappropriate associations, I drew some parallels between Travis McGee and Walden: a love for the natural world, a self imposed exile from the artificial society, a plea for cleaner living and peace of mind. Here's a sample of his rants:
I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
I am dreary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
Reality is in the enduring eyes, the unspoken dreadful accusation in the enduring eyes of a worn young woman who looks at you, and hopes for nothing.
And with the last phrase I finally got around to the story here. Travis is asked by his current non-girlfriend, a saucy dancer in a topless bar, to help a young woman in trouble. She can't go to the police because she has been robbed by the man she has fallen in love with, a former convict who tricked her imprisoned father into revealing a secret hoard buried on the girl's property. Travis complains and grumbles constantly, but he decides to check the story out, getting more and more enraged as he finds out more about the culprit, a certain Junior Allen.
The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statutes. A smiling man, quick and handy as a cat, webbed with muscle, armored with money, now at liberty in an unsuspecting world, greedy as a weasel in a hen house.
This guy forcefully seduces vulnerable women, a serial statutory raper who gets away scot free because his victims blame themselves and fail to report him to the authorities. Money suddenly become irrelevant to Travis as he is put in the position of nursemaid for the broken dolls left in the wake of Junior Allen. Our errant knight extends his sympathy for lost women to the larger landscape of Florida and the failure of the American Dream, as he contemplates the sexual revolution of the 1960's coupled with the lack of career choices for the young and vulnerable:
These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies. These are the new people, and we are making no place for them. We hold the dream in front of them like a carrot, and finally we say sorry you can't have any.
I should caution against picturing Travis as a knight in shining armor. He is quite rusty and amoral, both in his methods of obtaining information which don't rule out torture and intimidation, and in his own predatory interest in women.
The novel is fast paced and tightly written, free of bloat and well balanced with dialogue, social commentary and live action. The main appeal for me was in getting to know Travis and I look forward to spending more time in his company. I don't know yet if the novel was filmed, but I would sure be interested in a movie version.
Thanks to the guys in the Pulp reading group for picking this up as the February choice.
April 22, 2019
Absolutely wonderful. What a great start to a famous series! 5+ Stars.
After reading the entire series, this is one of my very favourite McGees.
I love the early 1960's Florida keys setting. MacDonald's flowing and spare descriptive prose is wonderful, almost like the words don't exist, as if MacDonald just places the images directly into your mind. Very Hemingway. Truly amazing.
As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.
Bonus. From the 1970 "Darker Than Amber" movie starring Rod Taylor, pictures of the producers' ideas of McGee's "The Busted Flush":
Full size image here
The relationship between Travis and Chook is wonderful, honest, loving, respectful, sexy, natural. The prose is open and honest and spare with good pacing. A delightful way to begin this first-of-series Travis McGee. It's clear than even in 1962, MacDonald is a proto-feminist. His instincts are honourable yet sexy, respectful but powerful. Awesome!
Chook reappears now and then in future McGee novels, and very surprisingly in the last ever McGree "The Lonely Silver Rain".
Full size image here
Full size image here
Vintage Rolls Royce, "Miss Agnes" pickup truck (which I have made blue via Photoshop)
Full size image here
Like Spielberg's shark in Jaws, we feel the presence of Junior without actually seeing him. This tension is intense and superb, and grows throughout the first 2/3 of the book. We know there's a battle to come, and its outcome is uncertain. Excellent.
Some extras, and wonderful quotes set the character of young McGee.
(As you can see, I am an incurable romantic)
Seven-mile Bridge
Full size image here
The drive down to Candle Key:
We drifted swiftly down through Perrine and Naranja and Florida City, then through Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Tavernier and across another bridge onto Candle Key...
Full size image here
"Manifest Destiny" WOOT! 😊
I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
I let her out. I noticed a small and touching thing. Despite all wounds and dejections, her dancer's step was so firm and light and quick as to give a curious imitation of joy.
I guess Chook is about twenty-three or -four. Her face is a little older than that. It has that stern look you see in old pictures of the Plains Indians. At her best, it is a forceful and striking face, redolent of strength and dignity. At worst it sometimes would seem to be the face of a Dartmouth boy dressed for the farcical chorus line. But that body, seen more intimately than ever before, was incomparably, mercilessly female, deep and glossy, rounded under the tidy little fatty layer of girl pneumatics with useful muscle.
"Free Love" already beginning, even in the early 1960s
These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.
But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah.
Recommended:
(Article from Elle magazine 2017) How Playboy's Unsung Female Photographer Broke into the Boys' Club and Took Them All for a Ride
Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative. It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caresses of affection. There is a tiny magnificence about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions.
Mrs. Atkinson. She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence. Her eyes were large and very dark and tilted and set widely. She wore dark Bermuda shorts and sandals and a crisp blue and white blouse, no jewelry of any kind, a sparing touch of lipstick.
McGee's self-description is always somewhat satirical
I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, when needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn't know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.
The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statutes. A smiling man, quick and handy as a cat, webbed with muscle, armored with money, now at liberty in an unsuspecting world, greedy as a weasel in a hen house. I knew the motive. The motive was murder. ... Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.
Youthful sexual joy and power, a celebration of the physical
She came into my sleep and into my bed, awakening me with her mouth on mine, and strangely there was no shock or surprise in it. My subconscious had been aware that this would happen. A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily, presenting the warm length of her, the incredibly smooth texture of her, to my awakening embrace. Her breath was shuddering, and she gave a hundred quick small kisses. Her caresses were quick and light, and her body turned and glowed and glided and changed in her luxurious presentation of self, her mouth saying darling and her hair sweet in darkness, a creature in endless movement, using all of herself the way a friendly cat will bump and twine and nudge and purr. I wanted to take her on her basis, readying her as graciously as she had made herself ready, with an unhurried homage to all her parts and purposes, an intimate minuet involving offer and response, demand and delay, until the time when it would all be affirmed and taken and done with what, for want of a better name, must be called a flavor of importance.
A painful homage to the young whose dreams are doomed
Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. ... So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician's world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart.
The Florida Keys (retro-style 1960s map)
Full size image here
And finally, two great blogs about John D. MacDonald, McGee and the rumoured-never-written novel where McGee dies"...
The Birth of Travis McGee (fascinating)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...
"Black Border for McGee" (rumours surrounding a final book, never published)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...
.
After reading the entire series, this is one of my very favourite McGees.
I love the early 1960's Florida keys setting. MacDonald's flowing and spare descriptive prose is wonderful, almost like the words don't exist, as if MacDonald just places the images directly into your mind. Very Hemingway. Truly amazing.
As usual with my reviews, please first read the publisher’s blurb/summary of the book. Thank you.
Bonus. From the 1970 "Darker Than Amber" movie starring Rod Taylor, pictures of the producers' ideas of McGee's "The Busted Flush":
Full size image here
The relationship between Travis and Chook is wonderful, honest, loving, respectful, sexy, natural. The prose is open and honest and spare with good pacing. A delightful way to begin this first-of-series Travis McGee. It's clear than even in 1962, MacDonald is a proto-feminist. His instincts are honourable yet sexy, respectful but powerful. Awesome!
Chook reappears now and then in future McGee novels, and very surprisingly in the last ever McGree "The Lonely Silver Rain".
Full size image here
Full size image here
Vintage Rolls Royce, "Miss Agnes" pickup truck (which I have made blue via Photoshop)
Full size image here
Like Spielberg's shark in Jaws, we feel the presence of Junior without actually seeing him. This tension is intense and superb, and grows throughout the first 2/3 of the book. We know there's a battle to come, and its outcome is uncertain. Excellent.
Some extras, and wonderful quotes set the character of young McGee.
(As you can see, I am an incurable romantic)
Seven-mile Bridge
Full size image here
The drive down to Candle Key:
We drifted swiftly down through Perrine and Naranja and Florida City, then through Key Largo, Rock Harbor, Tavernier and across another bridge onto Candle Key...
Full size image here
"Manifest Destiny" WOOT! 😊
I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny.
I let her out. I noticed a small and touching thing. Despite all wounds and dejections, her dancer's step was so firm and light and quick as to give a curious imitation of joy.
I guess Chook is about twenty-three or -four. Her face is a little older than that. It has that stern look you see in old pictures of the Plains Indians. At her best, it is a forceful and striking face, redolent of strength and dignity. At worst it sometimes would seem to be the face of a Dartmouth boy dressed for the farcical chorus line. But that body, seen more intimately than ever before, was incomparably, mercilessly female, deep and glossy, rounded under the tidy little fatty layer of girl pneumatics with useful muscle.
"Free Love" already beginning, even in the early 1960s
These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else.
But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah.
Recommended:
(Article from Elle magazine 2017) How Playboy's Unsung Female Photographer Broke into the Boys' Club and Took Them All for a Ride
Christine stood there inside her smooth skin, warm and indolent, mildly speculative. It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caresses of affection. There is a tiny magnificence about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions.
Mrs. Atkinson. She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence. Her eyes were large and very dark and tilted and set widely. She wore dark Bermuda shorts and sandals and a crisp blue and white blouse, no jewelry of any kind, a sparing touch of lipstick.
McGee's self-description is always somewhat satirical
I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, when needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn't know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.
The worst crimes of man against woman do not appear on the statutes. A smiling man, quick and handy as a cat, webbed with muscle, armored with money, now at liberty in an unsuspecting world, greedy as a weasel in a hen house. I knew the motive. The motive was murder. ... Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.
Youthful sexual joy and power, a celebration of the physical
She came into my sleep and into my bed, awakening me with her mouth on mine, and strangely there was no shock or surprise in it. My subconscious had been aware that this would happen. A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily, presenting the warm length of her, the incredibly smooth texture of her, to my awakening embrace. Her breath was shuddering, and she gave a hundred quick small kisses. Her caresses were quick and light, and her body turned and glowed and glided and changed in her luxurious presentation of self, her mouth saying darling and her hair sweet in darkness, a creature in endless movement, using all of herself the way a friendly cat will bump and twine and nudge and purr. I wanted to take her on her basis, readying her as graciously as she had made herself ready, with an unhurried homage to all her parts and purposes, an intimate minuet involving offer and response, demand and delay, until the time when it would all be affirmed and taken and done with what, for want of a better name, must be called a flavor of importance.
A painful homage to the young whose dreams are doomed
Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. ... So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician's world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart.
The Florida Keys (retro-style 1960s map)
Full size image here
And finally, two great blogs about John D. MacDonald, McGee and the rumoured-never-written novel where McGee dies"...
The Birth of Travis McGee (fascinating)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...
"Black Border for McGee" (rumours surrounding a final book, never published)
http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.co...
.
July 15, 2011
Junior Allen has sleazed his way into a fortune in stolen gems and the daughters of the man who they belonged to want them back. Only Junior is a woman-beating rapist and has left a trail of battered women in his wake. Can Travis McGee get the gems back and take his cut?
This is the first John D. MacDonald book I've read and probably won't be the last. MacDonald really knows how to build the suspense. Junior Allen is a first degree douche bag and a good villain. You can't help but read faster and faster, eager to see him get what's coming to him. The writing is really good and the characters of Travis and Junior are well done.
Why only three stars? The women are paper characters, barely distinguishable from one another outside of their physical descriptions. Some of that may have to do with the time it was written. I caught the fact the JFK airport was still called Idlewild pretty early on, before I saw that the copyright date was 1964. Also, I'm not completely sold on Travis McGee. Something about him rubs me the wrong way. The pages full of his inner musings got a little tedious.
All gripes aside, Deep Blue Good-By was a gripping read. I'll be tracking down the next Travis McGee book sooner or later.
This is the first John D. MacDonald book I've read and probably won't be the last. MacDonald really knows how to build the suspense. Junior Allen is a first degree douche bag and a good villain. You can't help but read faster and faster, eager to see him get what's coming to him. The writing is really good and the characters of Travis and Junior are well done.
Why only three stars? The women are paper characters, barely distinguishable from one another outside of their physical descriptions. Some of that may have to do with the time it was written. I caught the fact the JFK airport was still called Idlewild pretty early on, before I saw that the copyright date was 1964. Also, I'm not completely sold on Travis McGee. Something about him rubs me the wrong way. The pages full of his inner musings got a little tedious.
All gripes aside, Deep Blue Good-By was a gripping read. I'll be tracking down the next Travis McGee book sooner or later.
November 24, 2017
John D. MacDonald introduced the world to his libertarian and reclusive anti-hero Travis McGee in this excellent 1964 publication.
Already an established and successful writer, MacDonald was persuaded to create a franchise character, a recurring romantic hero to sell books. What he did was craft a personification for the world-weary angst of post-WWII riding shotgun on the tide of 60s alienation and disillusion.
Self-described as a beach bum who was “wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television” McGee fills the role of the cool, cagey outsider who has a deep-set sense of right and wrong and a live-and-let-live nonchalance about all the rest. Living aboard his poker game won house boat ‘The Busted Flush”, McGee’s standard operating procedure is to make money when he needs it by retrieving lost property for friends for half the value.
In his opening novel, MacDonald also produced one of his best antagonists. Junior Allen is a smiling Nietzschean superman barreling right out of a Jack London short story. The dichotomy between McGee’s silent but principled idealism and Allen’s animalistic lust for power is what fuels this page turning adventure.
What’s it about? McGee helps recover a lost fortune in stolen goods to help a friend and Allen is the gold hoarding dragon who must first be bested. This comparison to knights errant and romanticism is intentional, MacDonald has drawn McGee to be the last of the free romantics in a world growing increasingly more mechanized and impersonal. And he wrote it in 1964!
What holds all this together is MacDonald’s inspired and intellectually observant writing. This looks to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Already an established and successful writer, MacDonald was persuaded to create a franchise character, a recurring romantic hero to sell books. What he did was craft a personification for the world-weary angst of post-WWII riding shotgun on the tide of 60s alienation and disillusion.
Self-described as a beach bum who was “wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television” McGee fills the role of the cool, cagey outsider who has a deep-set sense of right and wrong and a live-and-let-live nonchalance about all the rest. Living aboard his poker game won house boat ‘The Busted Flush”, McGee’s standard operating procedure is to make money when he needs it by retrieving lost property for friends for half the value.
In his opening novel, MacDonald also produced one of his best antagonists. Junior Allen is a smiling Nietzschean superman barreling right out of a Jack London short story. The dichotomy between McGee’s silent but principled idealism and Allen’s animalistic lust for power is what fuels this page turning adventure.
What’s it about? McGee helps recover a lost fortune in stolen goods to help a friend and Allen is the gold hoarding dragon who must first be bested. This comparison to knights errant and romanticism is intentional, MacDonald has drawn McGee to be the last of the free romantics in a world growing increasingly more mechanized and impersonal. And he wrote it in 1964!
What holds all this together is MacDonald’s inspired and intellectually observant writing. This looks to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
May 25, 2014
Third Time's a Charm
Cathy's First Love, Still
For anyone considering reading the Travis McGee series (first book published in 1964 with a total of 21 books in the series) this book should definitely be read first. It lays the ground work for who McGee really is, how he feels about society, women and Florida in general. These are important basics for reading the series since the character for me, is so very important.
Reading the Long Blue Goodbye for me, was like seeing an old friend, no, I take that back, an old lover and we parted ways amicability so many years ago but it’s good for him to be back in my hands. We both had other relationships in our absence from each other but that spark is still there, as strong as ever. Elvis Cole, well, he’ll just have to wait a bit. Philip Marlowe and Vachss’ Burke, I’ll be back with you shortly. Have some business to finish with Trav.
In his first adventure Trav helps Cathy, from Candle Key, in the Keys of course. Cathy, he helps Cathy. It's meant to be, it's in the stars, Trav.
Travis McGee - Owner of the Busted Flush Won in a Poker Game
and Docked at Bahia Mar, Slip F-18 in Fort Lauderdale, FL
John D. MacDonald by the way, was a great, word is not strong enough, writer with a wonderful sense of place in all his books. He wrote mostly mysteries, some more frightening than others such as Cape Fear which I’ve yet been able to finish.
First time reader, good for you; if not, what’s stopping you?
And you women out there, I met him first. You guys, well, hummm. Face it you love him too, especially his sensitive side, eh?
[image error]
Travis McGee...Salvager of Worthwhile Goods Including Women
A great blog D. R. Martin---McGee and Me with a synopsis of every one of the 21 Travis McGee series. Take note, there are spoilers. I like to read after finishing the book and blog to others reading Trav.
Cathy's First Love, Still
For anyone considering reading the Travis McGee series (first book published in 1964 with a total of 21 books in the series) this book should definitely be read first. It lays the ground work for who McGee really is, how he feels about society, women and Florida in general. These are important basics for reading the series since the character for me, is so very important.
Reading the Long Blue Goodbye for me, was like seeing an old friend, no, I take that back, an old lover and we parted ways amicability so many years ago but it’s good for him to be back in my hands. We both had other relationships in our absence from each other but that spark is still there, as strong as ever. Elvis Cole, well, he’ll just have to wait a bit. Philip Marlowe and Vachss’ Burke, I’ll be back with you shortly. Have some business to finish with Trav.
In his first adventure Trav helps Cathy, from Candle Key, in the Keys of course. Cathy, he helps Cathy. It's meant to be, it's in the stars, Trav.
Travis McGee - Owner of the Busted Flush Won in a Poker Game
and Docked at Bahia Mar, Slip F-18 in Fort Lauderdale, FL
John D. MacDonald by the way, was a great, word is not strong enough, writer with a wonderful sense of place in all his books. He wrote mostly mysteries, some more frightening than others such as Cape Fear which I’ve yet been able to finish.
First time reader, good for you; if not, what’s stopping you?
And you women out there, I met him first. You guys, well, hummm. Face it you love him too, especially his sensitive side, eh?
[image error]
Travis McGee...Salvager of Worthwhile Goods Including Women
A great blog D. R. Martin---McGee and Me with a synopsis of every one of the 21 Travis McGee series. Take note, there are spoilers. I like to read after finishing the book and blog to others reading Trav.
January 10, 2022
I was looking forward to reading this book, just to see what my GR friend Julie loved about this series. (Thank you, Julie! You know who you are.) Then three additional witnesses weighed in: Lee Child in his eloquent Introduction, a quote from Sue Grafton, and a quote from Mary Higgins Clark. I have been mourning the loss of the two female authors and the fact that we will have no more books to treasure from their pens. After reading this book, I am the fifth in my little court to vote "yes" on this series. Many will say this does not hold up in the 21st century. For me that is part of Travis McGee's charm. He is a man of the 60's, but not without some manners. I can especially see that the beloved Kinsey Milhone came to life through Sue Grafton's pen and some help from John D. MacDonald. Some other things I appreciate about the Travic McGee series are: 1) The Florida setting. 2) Colorful titles. 3) The mystery noir style somewhat reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. I may be just the right generation to still appreciate these titles and I am not going to let that go to waste.
March 26, 2014
John D. MacDonald does lists. For example, he's wary of
Again, creating a picture of rotting, materialistic excess:
His main character, Travis McGee, is a romantic hero, loner, in fact "he who is alone," one man against the world, trying to stem or at least contain and limit its corrupting influence.
His bad guy here
Travis McGee sees through the people he meets psychiatrist-like, for instance this stewardess who has just unsuccessfully come on to him:
Now, sometimes, this "psychiatrist" offers--and receives--sexual therapy from the women he encounters, to everyone's better health and happiness. He shows discretion, though--reluctant to take advantage. Sometimes.
But when the bad guy encounters the women, he hooks them on sex, presumably the wrong kind, addictive and corrupting. Some of what we today might call abusive, but mostly the sex:
And the bad guy, again:
The women here are of two kinds--"ladies" or not.
But was it human?
And on the other hand,
which, by the way, can be obtained in one of two ways--by deception or by commitment.
All these women, thoroughbred or common, whole or corrupt, are of one sort, although one minor (possibly continuing) character may be native American.
Women grow up and age fast--say, mid-twenties?
Now, how confusing is all this?
This book was published in 1964. Clues in the text place the action in 1962. So it was a time of transition--not yet the "'60s," which began in 1967, but the sexual revolution has begun and the times they are achangin'. It was a pretty confusing time to come of age. I was there.
One must conform, but one must not conform. One must be sexual, but one must be pure.
The people whom Travis McGee could analyze so well? Well, of course he could, since they were familiar types, cardboard cutouts of people. That's easy to see in retrospect.
I happened upon this book in an Audible sale. It was fun and thought-provoking to listen to. Several years ago some guy friends strongly recommended a Robert B. Parker, but I couldn't read it. I may not have been able to read this one either, but I could listen.
Oh, yeah--the author got me with one familiar trope. It had to happen in this first book of the series, but I didn't see it coming.
...plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny. (p. 14)
Again, creating a picture of rotting, materialistic excess:
...with a thumb in the Yellow Pages, I began checking the marinas. All this great ever-increasing flood of bronze, brass, chrome, Fiberglas, Lapstreak, teak, auto pilots, burgees, Power Squadron hats, nylon line, all this chugging winking blundering glitter of props, bilge pumps and aelf-importance needs dockside space. (p. 137)
His main character, Travis McGee, is a romantic hero, loner, in fact "he who is alone," one man against the world, trying to stem or at least contain and limit its corrupting influence.
His bad guy here
...is on a short rein. Or reign. ...Maybe he was clever, but certainly not controlled. ...He was a swaggering sailor with money in his pockets, and if he kept on being careless, neither he nor the money could last very long. Viewed in that light, his luck was impressive. (p. 144)
Travis McGee sees through the people he meets psychiatrist-like, for instance this stewardess who has just unsuccessfully come on to him:
The smile did not change and the eyes became slightly absent. She made some small talk and then swayed down the aisle, smiling, offering official services. Most of them find husbands, and some of them are burst or burned in lonely fields, and some of them become compulsively, forlornly promiscuous, sky sailors between the men in every port, victims of rapid transit, each flight merely a long arc from bed to bed. (p. 97)
Now, sometimes, this "psychiatrist" offers--and receives--sexual therapy from the women he encounters, to everyone's better health and happiness. He shows discretion, though--reluctant to take advantage. Sometimes.
But when the bad guy encounters the women, he hooks them on sex, presumably the wrong kind, addictive and corrupting. Some of what we today might call abusive, but mostly the sex:
She gave me a strange and troubled look. "I don't know as it was love. I didn't want him to have me like that, right there at the home place with my mother still alive then, and Davie there, and Christine and her two. It was shameful, but I couldn't seem to help myself. The first time or so, he forced me. He would be tender and loving, but afterward. Saying he was sorry. But he was at me like some kind of animal, and he was too rough and too often. He said it had always been like that with him, like he couldn't help himself. And after a while he changed me, so that it didn't seem too rough any more, and I didn't care how many times he came at me or when. It was all turned into a dream...and I went around feeling all soft and dreamy and stupid, and not caring a damn about what anybody thought, only caring that he wanted me and I wanted him. He's a powerful man, and all the time we were together he never did slack off...." (pp. 35-36)
And the bad guy, again:
Returning to Candle Key to rape and corrupt the lonely woman who found him distasteful had been foolish. (p. 144)
The women here are of two kinds--"ladies" or not.
A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. ...She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily.... ...Her caresses were quick and light and her body turned and glowed and glided and changed in her luxurious presentation of self, her mouth saying darling and her hair sweet in darkness, a creature in endless movement, using all of herself the way a friendly cat will.... (pp. 128-129)
True, it was a splendid specimen, good bones, a true heart, and a marvelous pelt. It could cook and adore and it had a talent for making love. Sew it into burlap and roll it in the mud and it would still be, unmistakably, a lady. (p. 132)
But was it human?
And on the other hand,
These are the playmate years, and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorably amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel.... Only a woman of pride, complexity, and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love," (p. 20)
which, by the way, can be obtained in one of two ways--by deception or by commitment.
All these women, thoroughbred or common, whole or corrupt, are of one sort, although one minor (possibly continuing) character may be native American.
Women grow up and age fast--say, mid-twenties?
Now, how confusing is all this?
This book was published in 1964. Clues in the text place the action in 1962. So it was a time of transition--not yet the "'60s," which began in 1967, but the sexual revolution has begun and the times they are achangin'. It was a pretty confusing time to come of age. I was there.
One must conform, but one must not conform. One must be sexual, but one must be pure.
The people whom Travis McGee could analyze so well? Well, of course he could, since they were familiar types, cardboard cutouts of people. That's easy to see in retrospect.
I happened upon this book in an Audible sale. It was fun and thought-provoking to listen to. Several years ago some guy friends strongly recommended a Robert B. Parker, but I couldn't read it. I may not have been able to read this one either, but I could listen.
Oh, yeah--the author got me with one familiar trope. It had to happen in this first book of the series, but I didn't see it coming.
December 2, 2022
I’d been looking around for another series of books to get stuck into, having exhausted most of those I’ve long been committed to. So when my Goodreads friend Phrodrick recommended that I take a look at Travis Magee I was quick to download an audio version of book 1. Written in the mid-sixties, this book is a reminder how simple things were before mobile phones and the internet either cluttered or improved our lives, depending on your perspective. Travis lives in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, on a houseboat he won in a card game. It seems that earns a living by periodically hunting down cash and valuables that have been ‘misplaced’, taking fifty percent of the recovery value as his cut.
Here he learns of a man who made what seems like an illegal fortune while completing military service India. For reasons I won’t go into, his surviving descendants never got to see any of this as they were conned by a man who has bad written all over him. Travis isn’t busy right now but neither is he particularly inclined to disturb his cosy routine of not doing very much. But hey, a payday is a payday so soon he’s engaged in the chase. It’s not going to be easy as there are few clues to the whereabouts of the conman or even the nature or scale of the potential bounty. But Travis is a rangy charmer with a nose for a lead and he’s soon on the scent.
It seems that all women are entranced by Magee’s looks and affable manner and that this is the primary tool in his kit bag, but look a little harder and you see that he’s also got a violent streak. Quite a nasty one. So it’s a mix of charm and a right hook or two that eventually gets him on the trail. But the real action happens when he finally catches up with the man he’s been looking for and here things get really brutal. And then there’s a somewhat surprising ending, which highlights the fact that our lead man is a rather more complex creature than I’d initially pegged him to be.
I enjoyed my time with Travis, even though I’m not yet sure whether I actually like him. I’ll definitely be back for more; this book was an easy one to spend time with, the writing being part standard mystery/adventure but with a decent mix of literary passages providing a sharp contrast. I want to see how both the character and his adventures develop from here.
Here he learns of a man who made what seems like an illegal fortune while completing military service India. For reasons I won’t go into, his surviving descendants never got to see any of this as they were conned by a man who has bad written all over him. Travis isn’t busy right now but neither is he particularly inclined to disturb his cosy routine of not doing very much. But hey, a payday is a payday so soon he’s engaged in the chase. It’s not going to be easy as there are few clues to the whereabouts of the conman or even the nature or scale of the potential bounty. But Travis is a rangy charmer with a nose for a lead and he’s soon on the scent.
It seems that all women are entranced by Magee’s looks and affable manner and that this is the primary tool in his kit bag, but look a little harder and you see that he’s also got a violent streak. Quite a nasty one. So it’s a mix of charm and a right hook or two that eventually gets him on the trail. But the real action happens when he finally catches up with the man he’s been looking for and here things get really brutal. And then there’s a somewhat surprising ending, which highlights the fact that our lead man is a rather more complex creature than I’d initially pegged him to be.
I enjoyed my time with Travis, even though I’m not yet sure whether I actually like him. I’ll definitely be back for more; this book was an easy one to spend time with, the writing being part standard mystery/adventure but with a decent mix of literary passages providing a sharp contrast. I want to see how both the character and his adventures develop from here.
May 26, 2023
This is my first of MacDonald's Travis McGee novels, but it certainly won't be the last. Written 60 years ago, it is still fresh, relevant and entertaining.
October 22, 2014
Michael Pritchard is the reader & the audio quality was terrible on these old, second hand tapes, but I'm really glad I listened to it. While I've read a few of these books over the years, I've never read this, the first one. Originally, published in the mid 60's, the Travis McGee series was one of the staples of detective fiction for the next 10 or 15 years.
No, this really isn't a 4 star book, but it gets an extra one for being so popular & making such a wonderful break from the prudish 50's. One of the interesting things about McGee is that he has plenty of opportunities for casual sex with beach bunnies ready to hand &, while he occasionally indulges, he does so without much enthusiasm, more like a man who drops by McDonalds to simply satisfy his hunger. The meal isn't great, but it will do until he gets around to finding something better & he knows it. He's somewhat disappointed in himself for doing so. Of course he does find more meaningful relationships, but things rarely work out the way he plans.
McGee is no James Bond, more like Paladin in "Have Gun Will Travel". Our self-professed tough guy doesn't like to work & lives in semi-permanent retirement. He only takes on a job when there is a good chance of a substantial return & then takes 50% plus expenses - or so he says. It's fun watching him give in & rationalize his departures from his hard-hearted intentions.
The action is pretty well done & quite believable. McGee can take care of himself & he's a pretty big guy, but he's no superman. He lives aboard a house boat, so there is a lot of marine action off the Florida coast, too. It all seems pretty accurate to me & not terribly dated. Oh, it's set firmly in the 60's but he's a fairly progressive sort.
Not great literature, but a fun, filling, quick read - a bit more than just a candy book. Some of McGee's observations of people are quite interesting & somewhat thought provoking. I'm going to try to find some more of these from my local library, hopefully for download. Cassettes are such a PITA after dealing with MP3's.
No, this really isn't a 4 star book, but it gets an extra one for being so popular & making such a wonderful break from the prudish 50's. One of the interesting things about McGee is that he has plenty of opportunities for casual sex with beach bunnies ready to hand &, while he occasionally indulges, he does so without much enthusiasm, more like a man who drops by McDonalds to simply satisfy his hunger. The meal isn't great, but it will do until he gets around to finding something better & he knows it. He's somewhat disappointed in himself for doing so. Of course he does find more meaningful relationships, but things rarely work out the way he plans.
McGee is no James Bond, more like Paladin in "Have Gun Will Travel". Our self-professed tough guy doesn't like to work & lives in semi-permanent retirement. He only takes on a job when there is a good chance of a substantial return & then takes 50% plus expenses - or so he says. It's fun watching him give in & rationalize his departures from his hard-hearted intentions.
The action is pretty well done & quite believable. McGee can take care of himself & he's a pretty big guy, but he's no superman. He lives aboard a house boat, so there is a lot of marine action off the Florida coast, too. It all seems pretty accurate to me & not terribly dated. Oh, it's set firmly in the 60's but he's a fairly progressive sort.
Not great literature, but a fun, filling, quick read - a bit more than just a candy book. Some of McGee's observations of people are quite interesting & somewhat thought provoking. I'm going to try to find some more of these from my local library, hopefully for download. Cassettes are such a PITA after dealing with MP3's.
September 7, 2023
It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
In 1964, John D. MacDonald stained Florida crime fiction a deep shade of blue with the introduction of his "Travis McGee" character, a laid-back, semi-unemployed character who lives on a houseboat and spends a good amount of his time charming the local ladies until some piece of interesting and potentially profitable "salvage" business falls in his lap. As a non-standard detective prototype, McGee has influenced plenty of other characters - including Jack Reacher, whose creator Lee Child pens a brief introduction to this edition of McGee's debut - and MacDonald himself inspired waves of Floridian Mystery/Crime authors such as Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey in their own quirky styles. The series is said to chronicle American culture over 20+ years so readers should expect that the treatment of women generally as "playthings" in this novel is about 60 years out of date.
Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies.
In 1964, John D. MacDonald stained Florida crime fiction a deep shade of blue with the introduction of his "Travis McGee" character, a laid-back, semi-unemployed character who lives on a houseboat and spends a good amount of his time charming the local ladies until some piece of interesting and potentially profitable "salvage" business falls in his lap. As a non-standard detective prototype, McGee has influenced plenty of other characters - including Jack Reacher, whose creator Lee Child pens a brief introduction to this edition of McGee's debut - and MacDonald himself inspired waves of Floridian Mystery/Crime authors such as Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey in their own quirky styles. The series is said to chronicle American culture over 20+ years so readers should expect that the treatment of women generally as "playthings" in this novel is about 60 years out of date.
Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets. They yearn for security, but all they can have is what they make for themselves, chittering little flocks of them in the restaurants and stores, talking of style and adornment, dreaming of the terribly sincere stranger who will come along and lift them out of the gypsy life of the two-bit tip and the unemployment, cut a tall cake with them, swell them up with sassy babies, and guide them masterfully into the shoal water of the electrified house where everybody brushes after every meal. But most of the wistful rabbits marry their unskilled men, and keep right on working. And discover the end of the dream. They have been taught that if you are sunny, cheery, sincere, group-adjusted, popular, the world is yours, including barbecue pits, charge plates, diaper service, percale sheets, friends for dinner, washer-dryer combinations, color slides of the kiddies on the home projector, and eternal whimsical romance—with crinkly smiles and Rock Hudson dialogue. So they all come smiling and confident and unskilled into a technician’s world, and in a few years they learn that it is all going to be grinding and brutal and hateful and precarious. These are the slums of the heart. Bless the bunnies.
November 24, 2023
"A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like a guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways."
"...these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known."
"Manhattan in August is a replay of the Great Plague of London. The dwindled throng of the afflicted shuffle the furnace streets, mouths sagging, waiting to keel over. Those still healthy duck from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, spending a minimum time exposed to the rain of black death outside."
"Tears and sea water taste much the same."
Many years ago, I remember sitting in the rocking-chair of my grandparents' home and watching soap operas. They were not my first choice of viewing, but it was something my grandmother loved, and she would become so involved in the contrived stories and the characters that she would literally talk to the TV as she ran back and forth between the living room and the connecting kitchen. At the time, I thought it was funny, but, I must admit I was doing something very similar as I read The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald.
The Deep Blue Good-By was author MacDonald's first Travis McGee novel and was published in 1964 beginning twenty years of Travis McGee stories that would finally total twenty-one novels. The Florida based main character could be described as a kind of private detective who rescues lost valuables for a fee. He resides on a house boat he calls The Busted Flush and drives a vintage Rolls Royce named Miss Agnes. He is quite opinionated, which I am sure mirrors the opinions of Mr. McDonald, and considers himself to be a veritable lady's man. I am not sure I agree with McGee's lifestyle, but I suppose, as they said about the lifetime resident at San Quentin, he has a good heart.
In any case, agreeing or disagreeing with the protagonist's opinions or manners doesn't always determine whether you become interested or entertained by a writer, and I must admit, I could barely put the darn book down. For most fast readers, this is positively a book to be read in one sitting, but I am one of those unfortunate readers that contemplates the hidden meaning of every word, thus it required me four sittings. For me, MacDonald's writing was something that I could almost touch, and the action was in a way non-stop, that is, unless he was handing out a spoonful of Travis McGee wisdom to which I didn't always concur, but I couldn't help but appreciate.
Regardless, this is a book, and I'm sure the others in the series are very similar, where the reader becomes totally invested in the characters to the point where you find yourself saying, "I can't believe you did that!, " or "Oh, my heavens!" At least, for me, I couldn't help it.
For anyone that loves a good noir story, and have not yet discovered John D. MacDonald, these books are for you. Highly recommended.
"...these are the last remaining years of choice. In the stainless nurseries of the future, the feds will work their way through all the squalling pinkness tattooing a combination tax number and credit number on one wrist, followed closely by the I.T. and T. team putting the permanent phone number, visaphone doubtless, on the other wrist. Die and your number goes back in the bank. It will be the first provable immortality the world has ever known."
"Manhattan in August is a replay of the Great Plague of London. The dwindled throng of the afflicted shuffle the furnace streets, mouths sagging, waiting to keel over. Those still healthy duck from one air-conditioned oasis to the next, spending a minimum time exposed to the rain of black death outside."
"Tears and sea water taste much the same."
Many years ago, I remember sitting in the rocking-chair of my grandparents' home and watching soap operas. They were not my first choice of viewing, but it was something my grandmother loved, and she would become so involved in the contrived stories and the characters that she would literally talk to the TV as she ran back and forth between the living room and the connecting kitchen. At the time, I thought it was funny, but, I must admit I was doing something very similar as I read The Deep Blue Good-By by John D. MacDonald.
The Deep Blue Good-By was author MacDonald's first Travis McGee novel and was published in 1964 beginning twenty years of Travis McGee stories that would finally total twenty-one novels. The Florida based main character could be described as a kind of private detective who rescues lost valuables for a fee. He resides on a house boat he calls The Busted Flush and drives a vintage Rolls Royce named Miss Agnes. He is quite opinionated, which I am sure mirrors the opinions of Mr. McDonald, and considers himself to be a veritable lady's man. I am not sure I agree with McGee's lifestyle, but I suppose, as they said about the lifetime resident at San Quentin, he has a good heart.
In any case, agreeing or disagreeing with the protagonist's opinions or manners doesn't always determine whether you become interested or entertained by a writer, and I must admit, I could barely put the darn book down. For most fast readers, this is positively a book to be read in one sitting, but I am one of those unfortunate readers that contemplates the hidden meaning of every word, thus it required me four sittings. For me, MacDonald's writing was something that I could almost touch, and the action was in a way non-stop, that is, unless he was handing out a spoonful of Travis McGee wisdom to which I didn't always concur, but I couldn't help but appreciate.
Regardless, this is a book, and I'm sure the others in the series are very similar, where the reader becomes totally invested in the characters to the point where you find yourself saying, "I can't believe you did that!, " or "Oh, my heavens!" At least, for me, I couldn't help it.
For anyone that loves a good noir story, and have not yet discovered John D. MacDonald, these books are for you. Highly recommended.
June 11, 2014
I just began to re-read this series, and, how wonderful, I do not remember much from 15 or more years ago. This was, I think, the first of the Travis McGee stories, published in 1964, and it still reads well today, although the series got even better as it went on, especially after Meyer's appearance. Travis is a very flawed hero, but that is part of his appeal. He doesn't always succeed. Some of his attitudes toward women are reprehensible by today's standards, but he always tries to rise to his understanding of male chivalry. Enough analysis. These stories are to enjoy at the surface.
September 28, 2016
While this book has a really striking style of first-person narration with plenty of wonderful misanthropy, the causal disgust for women is what we call "off-putting." Even if MacDonald's opinion mirrors McGee's low opinion of women and what they do with their bodies as compared to what men are welcome to do with their own, this book can be taken as a time capsule of socially accepted sexism/misogyny or you can go one step further and accept McGee as a sleazy protagonist with unsavory qualities, which I am mostly fine with. The book's use of redemption through noir tropes would work better if every woman wasn't helpless and clueless and if McGee's prejudices were shoved in his face to be reckoned with, but what can you do? Today it is 2016, when this book started the wildly successful series of briny mysteries it was 1964. That narrative voice is still so fresh and snappy that I can deal with the occasional sour tastes. Plot in one sentence: Professional beach-bum/"Salvage Consultant" Travis McGee is hired by a shrinking violet to steal back some loot (originally stolen by her dearly departed jailbird daddy) from a sly brute with a weakness for luxury boats and rape.
November 17, 2022
I found my self an 18-20 year old in Germany from early 1964 until mid 1966 serving in the U.S. Army. In our barracks I had a double bunk mate from Oregon, a prolific reader of paperback fiction. The $70 monthly "perilous" duty pay I received didn't go very far if you frequented the local German eating & drinking establishments. There wasn't much for entertainment on base (we didn't have TV but we did have a movie about once a week) and by mid month my funds limited me to reading lots of my bunk mates paperbacks after he was through with them. They were mostly Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm, Ian Fleming's James Bond and of course JDM's Travis McGee. These books and authors are fond memories and started me on my 50 plus years of reading adventures. Thanks to my goodreads friend Bobby Underwood for reminding me to re-visit them. IMO, if the remaining books in the Travis McGee series are as good as The Deep Blue Good-by (the 1st Travis McGee) then they have stood the test of time. I look forward to re-reading those books as well as other authors of that era.
February 25, 2023
Definitely late to the party on this one, but I cannot even count how many times I have heard or read references to Travis McGee over the years. The Deep Blue Good-By is the first installment of MacDonald's long series, and while we get a little background on Travis, I am sure his character will be more fully fleshed out as the series continues.
Travis resides in a housebarge called Busted Flush moored in Ft. Lauderdale that he won in an epic poker game (hence the name) but really lives off the grid so to speak. Technically unemployed, Travis takes 'jobs' to earn his keep, but not any type of job:
The job Travis takes on here concerns the theft of some mysterious war loot (WWII) that a friend of a friend of Travis had stolen. The thief is a real piece of work, who seems to thrive on raping and degrading women, leaving a trail of destroyed lives in his wake, and it is this trail that Travis starts to follow...
What struck me the most about this, however, was the strong libertarian attitudes of Travis, as MacDonald tosses in many snide quips about an overbearing government, tax collectors, bankers, and indeed, those living out the 'American dream' of a house in the burbs, steady job and 2.5 kids. The parallels with F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series are obvious, almost to the extent that Wilson essentially stole the idea of Travis and rechristened him Jack in NYC instead of Florida. Pretty risqué for day-- this was first published in 1964-- with lots of sex scenes, although nothing explicit. Expect a somewhat enlightened, albeit still Neanderthal, representation of women to go with the era; Travis tries to respect women at least. Good pacing, interesting backstory on the loot from WWII, and good action. I can see why this became iconic. 3.5 stars, but the dialogue felt choppy at times, so not rounding up.
Travis resides in a housebarge called Busted Flush moored in Ft. Lauderdale that he won in an epic poker game (hence the name) but really lives off the grid so to speak. Technically unemployed, Travis takes 'jobs' to earn his keep, but not any type of job:
"Where you kidding me that time we talked... about what you do for a living?"
"What did I say?"
"It sounded sort of strange, but I guess I believed you. You said if X has something valuable and Y comes along and takes it away form him, and there is absolutely no way in the world X can ever get it back, then you come along and make a deal with X to get it back, and keep half. Then you just... live on that until it starts to run out. Is that the way it is, really?"
The job Travis takes on here concerns the theft of some mysterious war loot (WWII) that a friend of a friend of Travis had stolen. The thief is a real piece of work, who seems to thrive on raping and degrading women, leaving a trail of destroyed lives in his wake, and it is this trail that Travis starts to follow...
What struck me the most about this, however, was the strong libertarian attitudes of Travis, as MacDonald tosses in many snide quips about an overbearing government, tax collectors, bankers, and indeed, those living out the 'American dream' of a house in the burbs, steady job and 2.5 kids. The parallels with F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series are obvious, almost to the extent that Wilson essentially stole the idea of Travis and rechristened him Jack in NYC instead of Florida. Pretty risqué for day-- this was first published in 1964-- with lots of sex scenes, although nothing explicit. Expect a somewhat enlightened, albeit still Neanderthal, representation of women to go with the era; Travis tries to respect women at least. Good pacing, interesting backstory on the loot from WWII, and good action. I can see why this became iconic. 3.5 stars, but the dialogue felt choppy at times, so not rounding up.
June 13, 2013
First in the Travis McGee suspense series revolving around Travis, who only works when he needs the money. Based in Florida.
My Take
I found Lee Child's introduction in this edition edifying. I had no idea of MacDonald's background or how the war was likely to have influenced his writing. Child also tips us to MacDonald's environmental stance; it's subtle within the story, and I suspect I'd've missed it if I hadn't read the intro.
MacDonald's books ought to be part of a writer's education on how to write. He's incredible with his poetic descriptions, how beautifully he paints a scene and creates a person, using words without going into cliché. And no, his words are unique enough that I don't recall reading them in anyone else's work. So no excuses that he was able to create the clichés later writers have to avoid!
MacDonald starts off "in progress", as if Travis has been doing this for some time, and he sets Travis up as lazy, but also a man with a heart and a strong sense of justice. Cathy's story is sad enough, but it's Lois' that will really break your heart. MacDonald makes excellent use of her character and her condition to provide the nasty details about Junior Allen.
I did enjoy Trav's psychological excursions, listening to him as he figures out how to get inside someone's mind---mind you, he's got his cockiness and it gets taken down a peg. Still, I'm going to enjoy reading more of his work...
The Story
Cathy has been morally violated by a ruthless man, and when she gets Travis McGee involved, he discovers more victims in even worse case.
Lois Atkinson is at the end of her rope until Trav steps in and becomes even more determined to stop Junior Allen.
The Characters
Travis McGee is a boat bum doing just enough to get by. When he needs money, he takes on a job retrieving X's property from Y and splitting the retrieved. He won the Busted Flush in a card game and lives aboard. Miss Agnes is his chopped Rolls Royce pickup. Chookie McCall is a choreographer with heart and Travis' friend. She manages the Island Dancers who perform at the Bahama Room, Adam Teabolt's place.
Cathy Kerr is a mother who has left her son, Davie, in her sister Christine Haason's care while she earns a living far from home as a dancer. Cathy's husband, Wally Kerr, took off. Christine's husband, Jaimie, was killed. Sergeant David Berry is her father. A sly man who finagled his way through the war only to be jailed for murder when he returns. Leaving the treasure he accumulated vulnerable.
Junior Allen, a.k.a., A.A. Allen, a.k.a., Dads, was in jail with her father and somehow learned just enough. Enough to jerk over the Berry family. And to take a liking for it. He seems particularly talented at finding nasty women who like the hurtin' as well as those who will break the worst. Deeleen and Corry are two "little sweethearts" Dads is chatting for the next woman he intends to break, Patty Devlan. Pete was the set-up for Patty.
Mrs. Lois Atkinson is one of Junior's victims, and it's just horrible the state she's reduced to. Dr. Ramirez helps Trav get Lois back from the brink. Dr. Harper Fairlea is her somewhat estranged brother; Harp's wife is Lucille.
Callowell was a pilot who served with Berry for a time. George Brell was one of Berry's partners. Angie is Brell's miserable little girl; Gerry is his trophy wife. Lew Dagg is the jerk of a football player who thought he could take Travis on.
The Alabama Tiger "operates the world's only permanent floating house party", and Molly Bea and Conny are some of Tiger's tarts. He's a good friend who doesn't ask questions.
Harry is a New York contact who knows the street.
The Cover
The cover is from the 2013 edition and is split in two: the top half is black crumpled paper forming a backdrop for the author's name, the series, and the title while the bottom half is a photo of a woman's calves with cute blue sandals dangling in the clear blue of a swimming pool.
I think the title refers to the bad guy when he experiences The Deep Blue Good-By.
My Take
I found Lee Child's introduction in this edition edifying. I had no idea of MacDonald's background or how the war was likely to have influenced his writing. Child also tips us to MacDonald's environmental stance; it's subtle within the story, and I suspect I'd've missed it if I hadn't read the intro.
MacDonald's books ought to be part of a writer's education on how to write. He's incredible with his poetic descriptions, how beautifully he paints a scene and creates a person, using words without going into cliché. And no, his words are unique enough that I don't recall reading them in anyone else's work. So no excuses that he was able to create the clichés later writers have to avoid!
MacDonald starts off "in progress", as if Travis has been doing this for some time, and he sets Travis up as lazy, but also a man with a heart and a strong sense of justice. Cathy's story is sad enough, but it's Lois' that will really break your heart. MacDonald makes excellent use of her character and her condition to provide the nasty details about Junior Allen.
I did enjoy Trav's psychological excursions, listening to him as he figures out how to get inside someone's mind---mind you, he's got his cockiness and it gets taken down a peg. Still, I'm going to enjoy reading more of his work...
The Story
Cathy has been morally violated by a ruthless man, and when she gets Travis McGee involved, he discovers more victims in even worse case.
Lois Atkinson is at the end of her rope until Trav steps in and becomes even more determined to stop Junior Allen.
The Characters
Travis McGee is a boat bum doing just enough to get by. When he needs money, he takes on a job retrieving X's property from Y and splitting the retrieved. He won the Busted Flush in a card game and lives aboard. Miss Agnes is his chopped Rolls Royce pickup. Chookie McCall is a choreographer with heart and Travis' friend. She manages the Island Dancers who perform at the Bahama Room, Adam Teabolt's place.
Cathy Kerr is a mother who has left her son, Davie, in her sister Christine Haason's care while she earns a living far from home as a dancer. Cathy's husband, Wally Kerr, took off. Christine's husband, Jaimie, was killed. Sergeant David Berry is her father. A sly man who finagled his way through the war only to be jailed for murder when he returns. Leaving the treasure he accumulated vulnerable.
Junior Allen, a.k.a., A.A. Allen, a.k.a., Dads, was in jail with her father and somehow learned just enough. Enough to jerk over the Berry family. And to take a liking for it. He seems particularly talented at finding nasty women who like the hurtin' as well as those who will break the worst. Deeleen and Corry are two "little sweethearts" Dads is chatting for the next woman he intends to break, Patty Devlan. Pete was the set-up for Patty.
Mrs. Lois Atkinson is one of Junior's victims, and it's just horrible the state she's reduced to. Dr. Ramirez helps Trav get Lois back from the brink. Dr. Harper Fairlea is her somewhat estranged brother; Harp's wife is Lucille.
Callowell was a pilot who served with Berry for a time. George Brell was one of Berry's partners. Angie is Brell's miserable little girl; Gerry is his trophy wife. Lew Dagg is the jerk of a football player who thought he could take Travis on.
The Alabama Tiger "operates the world's only permanent floating house party", and Molly Bea and Conny are some of Tiger's tarts. He's a good friend who doesn't ask questions.
Harry is a New York contact who knows the street.
The Cover
The cover is from the 2013 edition and is split in two: the top half is black crumpled paper forming a backdrop for the author's name, the series, and the title while the bottom half is a photo of a woman's calves with cute blue sandals dangling in the clear blue of a swimming pool.
I think the title refers to the bad guy when he experiences The Deep Blue Good-By.
July 3, 2017
Let me start out by telling you some of what interests me about the author. MacDonald came from a well-off family and was on a business track with stints at several Eastern universities including Syracuse and the Wharton School at Penn and an M.B.A. from Harvard. Having achieved a solid business foundation he served in World War II and when he was mustered out he turned his back on the conventional business career and began to write. He was, eventually, a very successful author by any standard receiving many awards and selling over 70 million books. The Travis McGee series may be his most popular. The Deep Blue Good-by is the first of that series.
From my perspective, I see McGee as falling somewhere among Mike Hammer and Nate Heller with Philip Marlowe hardly in sight. This is what I call hard-boiled P.I. territory, not what some have termed noir. McGee is a “salvage expert” who works when he has to from his “houseboat” on the Florida East Coast and takes 50% of what he salvages, plus expenses. He often finds himself in the shadowlands between good and evil and has periods where he questions what he does or why he does it. He is tough, resourceful and smart. Most of the time, these characteristics are sufficient for him to succeed.
Before Goodreads, I may have read a handful of McGee novels but nothing in the past decade. I decided to go back and see what had interested me. The Deep Blue Good-by would not have inspired me to read more. It is obvious that MacDonald is just getting his bearings (to use a nautical analogy). He has only a general sense of what a fully formed McGee would be and how he should go about his work.
Some examples of MacDonald’s prose:
“Maybe I was despising that part of myself….What an astonishment these night thoughts would induce in the carefree companions of blithe Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject from a structured society.”
“This family was a circus act, balanced on a small platform atop a swaying pole, as the crowd goes ahhh, anticipating disaster. A vain foolish man and a careless young wife and a tortured girl, swaying to the long drum roll. When it fell, the unmarked House Beautiful would sell readily, the Lincoln would e acquired by a Mexican dentist.” (Future novels don’t make this attempt very often)
“She had high small breasts, and she was very long-waisted. The long limber torso widened into chunky hips and meaty thighs.” (Every woman in this story gets a similar deconstruction.)
“Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making-out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in supermarkets.” (MacDonald doesn’t devote as much of his cynicism to young women in his later novels.)
“Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life.” (Is this really Travis or, I believe more likely, MacDonald talking about himself?)
This version of Travis McGee is prone to excessive alcohol and carnality and some post-episode self-chastisement for his shortcomings. He, as yet, has no real friends and seems to seek a “loner” existence, though he can be charming and gracious when necessary. My previous reading shows that MacDonald’s clever plotting is more often matched with better characterization and an improved McGee down the road. You would not hear me complain if you chose to skip this initial effort.
From my perspective, I see McGee as falling somewhere among Mike Hammer and Nate Heller with Philip Marlowe hardly in sight. This is what I call hard-boiled P.I. territory, not what some have termed noir. McGee is a “salvage expert” who works when he has to from his “houseboat” on the Florida East Coast and takes 50% of what he salvages, plus expenses. He often finds himself in the shadowlands between good and evil and has periods where he questions what he does or why he does it. He is tough, resourceful and smart. Most of the time, these characteristics are sufficient for him to succeed.
Before Goodreads, I may have read a handful of McGee novels but nothing in the past decade. I decided to go back and see what had interested me. The Deep Blue Good-by would not have inspired me to read more. It is obvious that MacDonald is just getting his bearings (to use a nautical analogy). He has only a general sense of what a fully formed McGee would be and how he should go about his work.
Some examples of MacDonald’s prose:
“Maybe I was despising that part of myself….What an astonishment these night thoughts would induce in the carefree companions of blithe Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject from a structured society.”
“This family was a circus act, balanced on a small platform atop a swaying pole, as the crowd goes ahhh, anticipating disaster. A vain foolish man and a careless young wife and a tortured girl, swaying to the long drum roll. When it fell, the unmarked House Beautiful would sell readily, the Lincoln would e acquired by a Mexican dentist.” (Future novels don’t make this attempt very often)
“She had high small breasts, and she was very long-waisted. The long limber torso widened into chunky hips and meaty thighs.” (Every woman in this story gets a similar deconstruction.)
“Bless them all, the forlorn little rabbits. They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making-out. Their futile, acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in supermarkets.” (MacDonald doesn’t devote as much of his cynicism to young women in his later novels.)
“Who am I to keep from putting my shoulder to the wheel? Why am I not thinking about an estate and how to protect it? Gad, woman, I could be writing a million dollars a year in life insurance. I should be pulling a big oar in the flagship of life.” (Is this really Travis or, I believe more likely, MacDonald talking about himself?)
This version of Travis McGee is prone to excessive alcohol and carnality and some post-episode self-chastisement for his shortcomings. He, as yet, has no real friends and seems to seek a “loner” existence, though he can be charming and gracious when necessary. My previous reading shows that MacDonald’s clever plotting is more often matched with better characterization and an improved McGee down the road. You would not hear me complain if you chose to skip this initial effort.
July 22, 2018
I would like to start off by saying that 2 stars means I felt this novel was okay. It was also the first Travis McGee novel that I have read. The Deep Blue Good-By was published in 1964 and reading it I felt it. McGee is a self-described "beach bum" who prefers to take on new cases only when the spare cash runs low. Unlike most novels in this genre he is neither a police officer nor a private investigator; instead, he is a self-described "salvage consultant" who recovers others' property for a fee of 50%. He lives on a 52-foot houseboat he won in a poker game and named "The Busted Flush".
There is no mystery here. No suspense. Cathy Kerr is a single mom eking out a living. Her father smuggled something valuable back after having served overseas in the military and had hidden it but he died in prison without revealing the location to his family. A fellow prisoner named Junior Allen shows up and manages to locate the treasure and steals it. McGee agrees to track down Allen and salvage what might be left ... for 50%.
The novel is pretty dated with McGee coming across as both a womanizing sexist and a white knight there to defend damsels in distress. As I mentioned earlier this novel was written in the 1960's and it feels it with John D. MacDonald offering sharp writing that works as both crime story and social commentary with McGee rebelling against the consumerist and conformist society that he despises.
I found the Travis McGee character intriguing enough that I will probably read other novels in the series some day. I have heard good things about John D. MacDonald's books so I am willing to read more.
There is no mystery here. No suspense. Cathy Kerr is a single mom eking out a living. Her father smuggled something valuable back after having served overseas in the military and had hidden it but he died in prison without revealing the location to his family. A fellow prisoner named Junior Allen shows up and manages to locate the treasure and steals it. McGee agrees to track down Allen and salvage what might be left ... for 50%.
The novel is pretty dated with McGee coming across as both a womanizing sexist and a white knight there to defend damsels in distress. As I mentioned earlier this novel was written in the 1960's and it feels it with John D. MacDonald offering sharp writing that works as both crime story and social commentary with McGee rebelling against the consumerist and conformist society that he despises.
I found the Travis McGee character intriguing enough that I will probably read other novels in the series some day. I have heard good things about John D. MacDonald's books so I am willing to read more.
January 27, 2022
This was my first experience with this author. The plot wasn’t bad, but this was so sexist and dated. Damsels in distress. Every woman (identified by her body parts, “a little too much meat across the hips”) wants Travis. Ugh.
June 9, 2023
This was my first journey into the world of Travis McGee. Boy, howdy, what a fun and fine trip! John D MacDonald’s writing is right up there with the best. Not only is this a great story, but MacDonald’s use of the English language is something akin to Chet Baker’s work with a trumpet. Pure magic.
Here’s McGee describing himself:
“...Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject form a structured society.”
“I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, where needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn’t know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.”
Descriptions of other characters:
“I could see that she was elderly by Chook’s standards. Perhaps twenty-six or -seven. A brown-eyed blonde, with the helpless mournful eyes of a basset hound. She was a little weathered around the eyes. In the lounge lights I saw that the basic black had given her a lot of good use. Her hands looked a little rough. Under the slightly bouffant skirt of the black dress were those unmistakable dancer’s legs, curved and trim and sinewy.”
“Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.”
“She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence.”
“A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability. But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out, in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.”
And, my favorite line:
“She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.”
MacDonald certainly knew how to turn a phrase--a brilliant artist using words to paint pictures that jump from the page. There’s something quote-worthy on just about every page of THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY.
“The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They’re disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their heads. And you can’t reverse the process.”
“I had that fractional part of consciousness left which gave me a remote and unimportant view of reality. The world was a television set at the other end of a dark auditorium, with blurred sound and a fringe area picture.”
“People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter.”
“He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.”
A special thanks goes out to my great friend, Bobby, who gave me this book.
Here’s McGee describing himself:
“...Travis McGee, that big brown loose-jointed boat bum, that pale-eyed, wire-haired girl-seeker, that slayer of small savage fish, that beach-walker, gin-drinker, quip-maker, peace-seeker, iconoclast, disbeliever, argufier, that knuckly, scar-tissued reject form a structured society.”
“I tried to look disarming. I am pretty good at that. I have one of those useful faces. Tanned American. Bright eyes and white teeth shining amid a broad brown reliable bony visage. The proper folk-hero crinkle at the corners of the eyes, and the bashful appealing smile, where needed. I have been told that when I have been aroused in violent directions I can look like something from an unused corner of hell, but I wouldn’t know about that. My mirror consistently reflects that folksy image of the young project engineer who flung the bridge across the river in spite of overwhelming odds, up to and including the poisoned arrow in his heroic shoulder.”
Descriptions of other characters:
“I could see that she was elderly by Chook’s standards. Perhaps twenty-six or -seven. A brown-eyed blonde, with the helpless mournful eyes of a basset hound. She was a little weathered around the eyes. In the lounge lights I saw that the basic black had given her a lot of good use. Her hands looked a little rough. Under the slightly bouffant skirt of the black dress were those unmistakable dancer’s legs, curved and trim and sinewy.”
“Willy Lazeer is an acquaintance. His teeth and his feet hurt. He hates the climate, the Power Squadron, the government and his wife. The vast load of hate has left him numbed rather than bitter. In appearance, it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.”
“She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence.”
“A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability. But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out, in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.”
And, my favorite line:
“She was styled for abundant lactation, and her uniform blouse was not.”
MacDonald certainly knew how to turn a phrase--a brilliant artist using words to paint pictures that jump from the page. There’s something quote-worthy on just about every page of THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY.
“The wide world is full of likable people who get kicked in the stomach regularly. They’re disaster-prone. Something goes wrong. The sky starts falling on their heads. And you can’t reverse the process.”
“I had that fractional part of consciousness left which gave me a remote and unimportant view of reality. The world was a television set at the other end of a dark auditorium, with blurred sound and a fringe area picture.”
“People have their acquired armor, made up of gestures and expressions and defensive chatter.”
“He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.”
A special thanks goes out to my great friend, Bobby, who gave me this book.
August 3, 2012
A man's got to do what a man's got to do
Even when that means believing women are nothing more than objects of his sliding scale of deserved affection and taking advantage of those too weak or too kind or too grateful to say no.
But then that's what everyone says about Travis McGee. What more can you say about the guy?
He's a man of strong moral principles, full of arrogance and conceit, a man who dislikes the America of the sixties yet happily takes advantage of it. He'll take a beating and keep on coming. He's a tough guy with a cynical edge. I can see why he and John D. MacDonald were so highly thought of as he is the perfect update on the hard-boiled noir hero of the previous generation and his influence can be felt even today, Dave Robiceaux springs to mind most easily as benefitting from his creators affection for Travis McGee.
The story is what it is, a not entirely good guy is hired to collect something not entirely legal in whatever way he sees fit. Along the way he encounters many broads in very little clothing, described with great affection. There's a bad guy and some not so good guys, a showdown and some interesting detection all padded out with discussions on the state of society and actions designed to make Travis seem like a much friendlier yet conflicted guy than he initially appears.
It was a fun read and I'm definitely interested in reading more of these books. And there's a lot of them too quite happily.
Even when that means believing women are nothing more than objects of his sliding scale of deserved affection and taking advantage of those too weak or too kind or too grateful to say no.
But then that's what everyone says about Travis McGee. What more can you say about the guy?
He's a man of strong moral principles, full of arrogance and conceit, a man who dislikes the America of the sixties yet happily takes advantage of it. He'll take a beating and keep on coming. He's a tough guy with a cynical edge. I can see why he and John D. MacDonald were so highly thought of as he is the perfect update on the hard-boiled noir hero of the previous generation and his influence can be felt even today, Dave Robiceaux springs to mind most easily as benefitting from his creators affection for Travis McGee.
The story is what it is, a not entirely good guy is hired to collect something not entirely legal in whatever way he sees fit. Along the way he encounters many broads in very little clothing, described with great affection. There's a bad guy and some not so good guys, a showdown and some interesting detection all padded out with discussions on the state of society and actions designed to make Travis seem like a much friendlier yet conflicted guy than he initially appears.
It was a fun read and I'm definitely interested in reading more of these books. And there's a lot of them too quite happily.
January 26, 2013
John D.MacDonald writer of over 75 novels and 500 short stories has been widely viewed as having influenced numerous writers living today: Hiaasen, Vonnegut, White, Hall, Koontz (who considered MacDonald his "literary Guru"), and Stephen King, a very good friend of McDonald and to whom the MacDonald estate gave its only serious consideration to allowing another author to create a McGee sequel (for good reasons both financial and ethical, this did not happen). Many other authors have considered MacDonald to be influential in their own work.
Numerous silver screen adaptions of MacDonald's novels appear in the Hollywood and television lexicons: most notably the well know original and modern adaptation of MacDonald's The Executioners adapted into the movie: Cape Fear. Other notable films starring actors like Gregory Peck, Ed Harris, Barbara Eden, Sam Elliot, and Robert Mitchum include but are not limited to The Man-Trap, Cry Hard, Cry Fast, The Empty Copper Sea, Condominium and more.
All of the MacDonald's McGee novels feature a color in the title of the novel.
Heavily influenced by Hemingway, MacDonald began his career as a pulp writer. In creating his memorable Travis McGee series the author - using a mastery of words and economy - fashioned colorful and evil villains, a flawed hero Travis McGee, numerous salvage exploits, plenty of gorgeous girlfriends, well crafted plots, as well as beautiful philosophical musings that describe the overall changes to Florida spanning the years 1964 - 1985. In this he appears to have created the fundamental root of a lot that has followed in this genre.
Having just recently joined the MacDonald fans worldwide I am perplexed as to why I have not read him sooner. I have read a lot in this genre and yet missed this crucial author. Certainly as I closed the last page of his first book my first thought was of having come across something special, something unique, and as I said it was as if I'd come across the Fountain Head of what a lot of other hard-boiled writers appear to want to emulate. Reading MacDonald is like reading directly from the source. Indeed: if originality is the art of hiding your source...than MacDonald is that source.
In reading the many reviews here on Goodreads as well as other places the ratings appear to be primarily 4 or 5 star ratings. When coming across lower ratings (1-3 stars) it wasn't because of the writing, plot, characterization or what not. The lower ratings seem to come primarily as a protestation against the sexual exploits and objectification of women by the main character Travis McGee. These reviewers date the material as belonging to an age where the gender issues in one era are dated and in turn ascribe to modern day conventions social enlightenment and superiority and therefore this renders the McGee series unacceptable to such readers. To these reviewers I would say: visit any strip club and tell me Travis McGee would sense a modern day superiority in attitudes towards such women, an objectification different from another era. On the contrary, the McGee novels and the hero's friendliness with women of ill repute, women with vices, women abused (poor or not), along with his unmistakable sense of justice towards such women to me seems in many ways morally equal if not superior to the bland moral evasion based on enlightened superiority practiced today. Trav is no evader. He does something about injustice and has no qualms ascribing the profit motive as part of his motivation, falls for gorgeous women, accepts them as they are, fights for them no matter their class, struggles with his own moral imperatives that come into conflict. This is one of the reasons why I love the McGee series...(so far).
Higher ratings for the Travis McGee novels seem to prevail, however. And I agree completely. Ratings of 4 and above concentrate primarily on MacDonald's ability as a writer of the genre and in this he is a master. There's a reason why so many writers deem him influential in their own work. Interspersed throughout his McGee novels are many passages best described as philosophical musings that are incisive, direct, and acute as Florida transforms itself across several decades. Taking one at random (I'm turning a few pages and grab the first paragraph I see):
"There are some other things you do when they turn your lights out. You learn how to use darkness. Varieties of darkness. The darkness of hot sun on the beach, and intense physical effort. The small darkness of liquor. The small darkness of the Tiger's girls. But these do not work in any lasting way. The body mends, but a part of it took its last breath behind that glassine barrier.
So, for now this review will be duplicated across all my McGee reviews. If you've read this one, you've read 'em all.
Enjoy!
Numerous silver screen adaptions of MacDonald's novels appear in the Hollywood and television lexicons: most notably the well know original and modern adaptation of MacDonald's The Executioners adapted into the movie: Cape Fear. Other notable films starring actors like Gregory Peck, Ed Harris, Barbara Eden, Sam Elliot, and Robert Mitchum include but are not limited to The Man-Trap, Cry Hard, Cry Fast, The Empty Copper Sea, Condominium and more.
All of the MacDonald's McGee novels feature a color in the title of the novel.
Heavily influenced by Hemingway, MacDonald began his career as a pulp writer. In creating his memorable Travis McGee series the author - using a mastery of words and economy - fashioned colorful and evil villains, a flawed hero Travis McGee, numerous salvage exploits, plenty of gorgeous girlfriends, well crafted plots, as well as beautiful philosophical musings that describe the overall changes to Florida spanning the years 1964 - 1985. In this he appears to have created the fundamental root of a lot that has followed in this genre.
Having just recently joined the MacDonald fans worldwide I am perplexed as to why I have not read him sooner. I have read a lot in this genre and yet missed this crucial author. Certainly as I closed the last page of his first book my first thought was of having come across something special, something unique, and as I said it was as if I'd come across the Fountain Head of what a lot of other hard-boiled writers appear to want to emulate. Reading MacDonald is like reading directly from the source. Indeed: if originality is the art of hiding your source...than MacDonald is that source.
In reading the many reviews here on Goodreads as well as other places the ratings appear to be primarily 4 or 5 star ratings. When coming across lower ratings (1-3 stars) it wasn't because of the writing, plot, characterization or what not. The lower ratings seem to come primarily as a protestation against the sexual exploits and objectification of women by the main character Travis McGee. These reviewers date the material as belonging to an age where the gender issues in one era are dated and in turn ascribe to modern day conventions social enlightenment and superiority and therefore this renders the McGee series unacceptable to such readers. To these reviewers I would say: visit any strip club and tell me Travis McGee would sense a modern day superiority in attitudes towards such women, an objectification different from another era. On the contrary, the McGee novels and the hero's friendliness with women of ill repute, women with vices, women abused (poor or not), along with his unmistakable sense of justice towards such women to me seems in many ways morally equal if not superior to the bland moral evasion based on enlightened superiority practiced today. Trav is no evader. He does something about injustice and has no qualms ascribing the profit motive as part of his motivation, falls for gorgeous women, accepts them as they are, fights for them no matter their class, struggles with his own moral imperatives that come into conflict. This is one of the reasons why I love the McGee series...(so far).
Higher ratings for the Travis McGee novels seem to prevail, however. And I agree completely. Ratings of 4 and above concentrate primarily on MacDonald's ability as a writer of the genre and in this he is a master. There's a reason why so many writers deem him influential in their own work. Interspersed throughout his McGee novels are many passages best described as philosophical musings that are incisive, direct, and acute as Florida transforms itself across several decades. Taking one at random (I'm turning a few pages and grab the first paragraph I see):
"There are some other things you do when they turn your lights out. You learn how to use darkness. Varieties of darkness. The darkness of hot sun on the beach, and intense physical effort. The small darkness of liquor. The small darkness of the Tiger's girls. But these do not work in any lasting way. The body mends, but a part of it took its last breath behind that glassine barrier.
So, for now this review will be duplicated across all my McGee reviews. If you've read this one, you've read 'em all.
Enjoy!
May 10, 2023
09/2012
The first Travis McGee book ... Good page turner with non-formulaic details. What I love about his writing, besides all the original details, is how easy, not trying too hard, it feels.
The first Travis McGee book ... Good page turner with non-formulaic details. What I love about his writing, besides all the original details, is how easy, not trying too hard, it feels.
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