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 AgnesIf 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...
[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.
Do You like book The Deep Blue Good-By (1995)?
There’s a reason guys like me are still talking and writing on websites like this about Travis McGee almost fifty years after John D. MacDonald’s fictional boat bum and salvage consultant ambled onto the world stage for the first time. If this is the first you’ve heard of Mr. McGee or the book that hosted his first appearance, welcome to The Deep Blue Good-By. Gather ’round kiddies. You’re in for a treat.Verily, verily, before there was Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, and Tim Dorsey, there was a pulp fiction writer named John D. MacDonald. Through the 1940′s and 1950′s MacDonald laid fingers to his trusty typewriter keyboard, producing a variety of so-called “pulp” fiction novels, all the while developing the voice which would spring forth through the character of Travis McGee in the 1964 novel The Deep Blue Good-By.In a nutshell, McGee lives on a 52 foot houseboat, the Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game thanks to the eponymous hand . His athletic and military background combine with a tendency to tilt at windmills in defense of the manipulated and downtrodden to insure a life that could never be defined as boring. With the self described job title of “salvage consultant,” he takes his retirement in small doses along the way, in order to extract maximum enjoyment, rather than saving it all for the end. The reality is Travis stands ready to help (usually after a bit of convincing) to help good people who have been taken advantage of by bad guys. This kind of help comes at a price, though. Half of the value of anything recovered goes into McGee’s pocket, plus expenses.There must be a great demand for this kind of work, though, because 21 Travis McGee novels appeared over the next 20 years.Which brings us to The Deep Blue Good-By (TDBG). If you haven’t read or aren’t making plans to read this book by the time you finish reading this article, I want you to turn in your beach bum card right now. I’m serious. Put it on the table and get out. Travis McGee and John D. MacDonald are that important to what we do around here.TDBG begins inauspiciously enough with Travis lounging on the Busted Flush, tossing back a few adult beverages whilst admiring the contortions of his cabaret dancer friend, Chookie McCall, perfecting a routine. Since our hero is a magnet for psychologically and physically damaged women (sometimes both), it isn’t long before he decides to take on the problems of a friend of Chookie’s who has fallen victim to the worst kind of predator manipulator, losing something of value in the process. Strangely, she’s not exactly sure what is lost, though that minor detail doesn’t slow our hero down for long.From his home dock, slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, McGee is soon sleuthing his way up and down the Atlantic seaboard, over to Texas, and down into the Florida Keys. Along the way he picks up a female house guest who was also abused by the main baddie. Under McGee’s tough love, she’s soon doing well enough to hop in his bed for a round or two of refreshing sex. By the time the novel arrives at a satisfying climax on board a yacht somewhere between Miami and the Bahamas, we’re ready for Travis to inflict a suitably vile brand of retribution on Junior, the villain we’ve grown to fondly despise.At Florida Pulp Fiction, we don’t believe the Alpha and the Omega is too strong a term to apply to The Deep Blue Good-By. Maybe another writer would have happened along to launch the quirky Florida adventure genre, but maybe not. Regardless, we thank John D. MacDonald from the bottom of our ever-lovin’ fictional hearts for the gift of McGee.
—Derek Dowell
What I like about genre fiction is that very often, a genre novel or story is what it sets out to be - a mystery story, a space opera, a dragon-slaying yarn - and that's often quite enough if done honestly and with imagination, but they can often be all that and something else as well. Take this novel, for instance, a tale of a cool, drifter-type private eye making his way through the endless parties and permissiveness of Florida in the 60s. It's a pretty good private-eye tale, as far as that goes, with a truly chilling villain and lots of gripping incidents and some knock-out brawls at the end. It's also an updated version of a certain kind of Victorian novel, eminently successful as a novel but also written with a certain didactic purpose, or purposes, a novel expansive enough to encompass the exigencies of narrative as well as sundry moral and social asides and insights - the sort of thing Dickens or Thackeray used to write. This is definitely a novel in that tradition as much as the hardboiled private eye genre - indeed the two streams are probably not that far apart, at least when practiced by writers like Chandler. The character of Travis McGee and his internal journey are as important and gripping as the main narrative, or at least I think you have to be equally invested in both to get the full impact of this novel. Some of the comments on gender issues feel a bit patronising, and I was disapppointed by how little time the villain - a truly monstrous creation - eventually gets, but all in all I definitely want to read more by MacDonald now.
—Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Travis McGee finds things. It's enough for living “off the grid” on a houseboat in Lauderdale. It's enough for a guy who keeps his problems locked up and his life simple. This is MacDonald's introduction to Travis McGee. Cathy Kerr, a hard-scrabble unwed mother, asks for Travis's help. She works in the lounge dance troupe of Chookie McCall, one of Travis's few close friends. Cathy's father was involved in illegal activities during his stint in air transport during World War II. He died in prison without telling his family the details of his crime or the location of the illicit cache. A con man and sexual predator who knew Cathy's father comes on the scene. He pegs Cathy as a gullible victim who will welcome him into the homestead. During his stay he locates and steals the treasure. Cathy is desperate for money, and hopes Travis can track the man down and recover at least some of the stolen valuables, whatever they might be. Because of Chookie's urging and a kind of innocent, victimized-by-life despair he senses in Cathy, Travis reluctantly agrees to look into the case. The plot is straight-forward. There's a refreshing directness to the entire book. The bad guy is REALLY bad. Travis is REALLY good, with an innate sense of justice beneath his worldly cynicism. Travis has a frank and unabashed appreciation for the sensuality of women. His eye is appraising, assessing the quality of character, not just flesh. Included in that keen appraisal is a revulsion for the cheap and tawdry, and by extension for the whole fake culture of unbridled promiscuity and covetous materialism he finds around him. His sympathy for hard-luck cases is balanced by self-protective cautiousness. He restrains his impulses with the constant reminder that intervention is freighted with responsibility. At one point he asks himself: “Where does responsibility stop?....I had the feeling I now owned this sleeping thing. True, it was a splendid specimen, good bones and a true heart....But I wasn't built for owning, nor for anything which lasts.”(p.124)MacDonald sometimes gets carried away with his own prose. It's the less obtrusive observations that have the greatest weight. McGee uses credit cards only with reluctance. “The cards are handy, but I hate to use them. I always feel like a Thoreau armored with a Leica and a bird book. They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat.” (p.80) He describes an acquaintance, Willy Lazeer: “In appearance it is as though somebody bleached Sinatra, skinned him, and made Willy wear him.”(p.138) On the other hand, the dialogue felt awkward and stilted. In particular, it was difficult for me to imagine the kind of uncertainty and insecurity he seems to bestow on the women in this book. I honestly couldn't imagine these as genuine conversations. This is my first Travis McGee book, so maybe I will ease gradually into his world. I loved the writing and look forward to reading more of these books.
—Ms.pegasus
