One Fearful Yellow Eye (1999)

Do You like book One Fearful Yellow Eye (1999)?

It’d been twenty-some years since I’d read the Travis McGee books, and when I heard that a movie version of The Deep Blue Good-Bye was in the works, I’d started picking up copies in used bookstores to give the series another read. I’ve had moments where I’ve started to regret that decision.While I had fond memories of MacDonald’s tales of the Florida beach bum who makes his living recovering funds that were stolen by semi-legal means or conned from the victims, re-reading these early books from the’60s with a 2010 perspective is starting to depress me because the attitudes and portrayals of women are so painful that they make an episode of Mad Men look like feminist propaganda.McGee is summoned to Chicago by an old girlfriend, Glory, who had married Fortner Geis, a prominent and respected surgeon who has recently died after a long illness. Geis should have had a large estate to leave to Glory and his two grown children from a previous marriage, but all involved are shocked to find that Geis had spent his final months converting his funds to cash and now the money is gone. McGee’s first theory is that it has to be some kind of blackmail, but what kind of threat could make a dying man leave nothing for his family?I often laughed out loud at how dated some of this comes across. Geis is repeatedly described as a good and honorable man, yet it’s known to most of the characters that he once had a relationship with his nurse that started with an act that was borderline date rape. He also had an illegitimate daughter that he deliberately never met, even when he was dying, but everyone still thinks he was a swell guy because he set up a small trust fund for her and had private detectives check up on her regularly.The most cringe inducing parts involve a woman who is known by all the characters to be ‘frigid’. Of course, McGee can help her solve that problem, and you can imagine what kind of therapy he plans to use.But for all the flaws, these books still hold a kind of charm for me. The mystery of why Geis gave up all his money is intriguing, and McGee’s brooding commentary about modern life circa 1966 still made this an good crime novel. Plus, when MacDonald isn’t sharing his views on women, he regularly delivers writing gold. Check out this sample when McGee is flying into Chicago and bad weather is making the landing tricky:Even with the buffeting, there is an impression of silence inside the aircraft at such times. People stare outward, but they are looking inward, tasting of themselves and thinking of promises and defeats. Anyone who has ever white knuckled an armrest during a bad flight should be able to relate to that, and it’s these moments that’ll keep me going through this series.
—Kemper

She was a very affectionate woman, needing and giving the casual touches and pats which to her were as necessary a part of communication as words. (p. 13)He told me that [Hans] Hoffman had such an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm, that youthfulness that comes from being eternally inquisitive. (p. 13)In such a situation there could be almost a compulsion to find a guilt-feeling. When the beloved is dying, we want to be blamed and punished. Without that there seems to be nothing left but an indifferent malevolence of fate. (p. 43)"Funny, but everybody I can think of right off the top of the head could sure God draw a fat realistic cow if they ever happened to want to. Hans Hoffman, Kline, Marca-Relli, Guston, Solomon, Rivers, Picasso, Kandinsky, Motherwell, Pollock…. You dabblers bug me. You want the applause without all the thousands of hours of labor learning how to draw, how to make brush strokes, learning all the things that give painting some bite and bones even when you don't use any part of it. Go ahead, draw the lamp. Quick sketch. Prove that I'm a jackass." (p. 62-63)tBut once he knows that it is absolutely no dice, there is no persistence. They know how to keep their worlds separated. And most of them are wryly aware of the ugly fact that the overly male type who thinks he hates them so thoroughly is the man who is, deep in his heart, unsure of his own masculinity. The man who knows that his preferences are solidly heterosexual has no need to go about thumping everybody who lisps. (p. 72-73)The he told Fort that no matter how much he might try to deny it or ignore it, he was still a mammal. By questioning him, Dr. Wyatt showed how much warmth there ha been in Fort's childhood. He'd been breast-fed, hugged, patted, cuddled, kissed, spanked. People with austere childhoods could adjust to the life Fort was living. But for Fort, some essential assurance-area was being starved. He felt remote because his body, untouched, was beginning to doubt the reality of its own existence. Hayes Wyatt told Fort that casual sex relationships would not do very much to help him. He said Fort should marry an affectionate and demonstrative woman. (p. 85)tWhat had seemed drabness, both in her and in the room, became merely understatement. I had the feeling this would be a comfortable room to be in, a comfortable woman to be with. She had the indefinable quality of restfulness, of making no trivial demands upon others or upon herself. (p. 103)Two surgeons can make two cuts that look identical, and one will bleed like a pig and the other will be almost dry. One surgeon can cut to where something is supposed to be, and it isn't there, and another will somehow guess that the patient doesn't quite match the anatomy lessons and, without knowing how he does it or what clued him, go right to where he wants to be. (p. 105-106)tHe didn't trouble easily, you know. He had his own philosophy about worry. He always told me that people spend so much time fretting about what they did yesterday and dreading what might happen tomorrow, they miss out on all of their todays. He said that when you realize you can't change the past or predict the future, then you come alive for the first time, like waking up from half-asleep. (p. 111-112)
—Shuriu

This is something of a departure for Travis McGee. It (almost) all takes place in Chicago, where McGee tries to puzzle out who has drained his friend Gloria Doyle's inheritance from her late husband, a marriage of only a few years, as she knew he was ill when she married him. There is hardly any "action" until the very end. Instead, it's McGee keeping track of a couple dozen characters and trying to piece together how this particular scam worked. We see McGee evolving somewhat on homosexuality. Whereas a few novels ago gays were just objects of ridicule, here Trav says: "I am always skeptical of the male who makes a big public deal out of how he hates fairies, how they turn his stomach, how he'd like to beat the hell out of them...the average homosexual in the visual and performing arts is usually a human being a little bit brighter and more perceptive than most."And, we revisit LSD, first broached in 1964 in Nightmare in Pink, pretty early for an awareness of the drug. We learn that McGee had several medically supervised trips to help him get over that Nightmare. And so did Gloria, with her husband, to help them come to terms with his eventual passing. The fact that there was a fair amount of the drug left around is a pivotal plot point. We get one nice description of evolving fashion in 1966: "a Limey lass, the height of mod exhibitionism, her little-girl skirt a good four inches above the knee, and a metallic golden serpent wrapped around her left leg just below the knee."As we get to the climax, the sadism ratchets up. Upon discovering a body, McGee affects a childlike narrative: "Can that be you, Mr. ____? How straight you sit! But of course, sir!...My goodness, they dropped the cold chisel among your poor teeth, sir. And ripped away your pants for further intimate attentions which have left that faint stick of burning on the silent air..."There's kind of a false ending where you know there's more because not everything has been wrapped up and there are still a couple chapters to go. And we find that our ultimate villains have been, shall we say, intimately involved with some ultimate 20th century evil. The villainess describes her partner, who has a woman captive: "First there must be the gross humiliations, the unthinkable violations of the precious citadel of self, with pain as the spice, fright as the sauce. But he will have to do with what variations he can invent on that theme, because he cannot have what he likes best, to create those moments of ultimate hopeless horror when the companion experiences damage she knows cannot be undone, cannot be mended, and then begins to wonder how long he or she will be forced to sustain the burden of consciousness and of life itself." Nicely chilling there.So not the best of the McGees, and a lot of characters to follow, but still head and shoulders above any other crime writer I'm aware of.
—Jim