Full disclosure: this is one of my all-time favorite novels, one of my all-time favorite thrillers, and my favorite Travis McGee novel. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t think so.You could begin the series with this book, and many people have. However, doing that gave some readers the wrong impression of Travis McGee. You should really start with other books in the series: The Scarlet Ruse, Pale Gray for Guilt, The Turquoise Lament, and Dress Her in Indigo to see how the events in The Green Ripper change the character. This change is the crux of the novel, and impacts the later books in the series. I have been a fan of John D. MacDonald and McGee since I first read The Dreadful Lemon Sky and then enthusiastically read through the series.When this novel first appeared in 1979, local supermarket chain Farm Fresh had nicely stocked, deeply discounted book departments. They had all the current bestsellers and new releases in hardcover and paperback, and a good backlist. They even handled special orders. Their discounts allowed me to afford hardcover books. I snatched this one up, read it one Saturday afternoon, and I was also changed. This was my first, and maybe the first, post Jonestown thriller.One evening in mid-November 1978, I was watching television in my apartment in Va Beach, when the network interrupted programming with a special bulletin. California Congressman Leo Ryan had been killed while on a fact finding mission in Guyana. That was it. Only a few little bits of information were released over the weekend. The true horror did not start to become clear until after Monday when we began to hear about the shootout at the Port Kaituma airstrip where the Congressman and others were killed, and the more than 900 bodies found by the first people into Jonestown itself.It was revealed to be a mass murder/suicide at the People’s Temple Agricultural Project. The People’s Temple was led by Jim Jones. It was the greatest loss of American life in a deliberate act ever recorded, and remained so until 9/11. The increasingly gruesome news reports, the iconic Time and Newsweek cover images, and two quickie paperbacks by the editors of the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, ensured this event would always have a tremendous impact on me.I believe it also affected and inspired John D. MacDonald. In this novel Gretel Howard has just moved out of The Busted Flush, McGee’s houseboat, after living with him there for several weeks, and left a vacuum. He is determined not to let her get away. She means everything to him. Then, while in the capacity of her new job, she is murdered insidiously. Travis McGee is shattered, but determined to catch the killers. Posing as a man who lost his daughter to a fanatical religious cult, he infiltrates the Church of the Apocrypha. They do not trust him. They imprison him. Gradually he gets them to grudgingly trust him, but when he learns the group’s true intentions he realizes he can find depths of savagery even within himself.This novel won the National Book Award for hardcover mystery in 1980. The dust jacket art became an iconic classic. MacDonald’s message is just as true now as it was then: we must outwit the monsters.
When Travis McGee goes undercover it’s usually in a bed with some cute beach bunny, but this time McGee will be going undercover for a more serious reason. REVENGE!The series has reached 1980 and with the free love and disco days gone McGee has settled down and is in a relationship with Gretel Howard. Just as he’s getting ready to sail off into the sunset with his lady love, Gretel tells McGee about having a chance encounter with a man she’d seen in an odd situation years before. Suddenly, Gretel dies of a mysterious illness. A heartbroken McGee is grieving hard when the appearance of a couple of strangers makes the circumstances of Gretel’s demise seem very sinister. What’s a Sea Cock to do? Why, pretend to be someone else, go back to the place where Gretel originally met the mystery man and kill a whole bunch of people, of course!This is a real departure from the rest of the series which usually featured Travis drinking some gin and bedding some babes as he went toe-to-toe with a ne’er-do-well who had swindled somebody. As the Reagan era dawned, it was almost like MacDonald could sense the wave of action heroes on the horizon and wrote a story that casts McGee in the mode. That means getting Travis involved with a kooky plot featuring spy games and terrorism, and that’s just too much for a character like McGee who was at this best when working the cracks and crevices of American society while lamenting how the system was rigged. Travis even has a couple of moments in this where he admits that he’s over his head, and that even a cynical bastard like him can’t comprehend people willing to commit mass murder for vague ideological concepts.Still, this one is a milestone in the series because it was such a marked contrast to the rest with the death of Gretel and the huge action movie like ending to it which, looking back now, makes me wonder how many Hollywood types read this and were influenced by the book’s last act. In the end, I think this one stands out for McGee readers just because it was so different from the rest of the series.On a personal note, this is one of those milestone books in my own reading history. It came out when I was 10, and someone (I think my grandfather.) had a paperback copy laying around. I was at a point where the kiddie books had lost their appeal, and there was no young adult genre at the time so I would try to read the grown-up books with varying degrees of success. This one intrigued me because of the cover. “Why does that ghost have a gun?” I wondered. And I tried to read it. Man, did I try to read it. But the opening chapter is about the economist Meyer gloomily telling Travis how the world’s dwindling resources and increasing population pretty much mean we’re all doomed. That’s not the kind of thing my young mind was looking for. So I finally gave up and thought I’d never know why that damn ghost had that gun. Years later when I was reading the Travis McGee series and came across The Green Ripper, I knew it instantly. It’s still one of the most iconic covers in my own memory so this one always brings about a rush of nostalgia whenever I see it.
Do You like book The Green Ripper (1996)?
The first half of this book is among the best things in the English language about grief and mourning. It deserves 10 stars out of five.The second half is an interesting strong-guy caper/thriller worth about 4 stars out of five.Average the two together and the book is definitely worth more than five stars.For a more complete review, let's try this: Travis McGee as usual gets told something unusual by a woman he knows. Some strange dealings at her place of business. Next thing he knows someone up there is dead and his girl, Gretel, is dying. This section of the book is MacDonald the Writer at his best, lyrical and mournful and really beautiful.Of course, that section had to give way to the story holding the book together. Unfortunately, the idea is better than its execution. There's this cult in California that's decided to branch out into possible Russian sponsored terrorism. Cult, yes. Doing bad things, yes. Russian sponsored terrorism, uhh I think I missed my stop. Can we back this bus up?McGee lies his way into the camp to learn a few things, which is interesting and silly at the same time. It then turns into something Lee Child might have written for Jack Reacher. A good thriller, but not the book this started out to be.That said, still worth the read.
—James Schubring
The Green Ripper is the 18th McGee novel in a series of twenty one. Macdonald writes elegantly in an easy and engaging style. His characterisation is excellent, and he has a keen eye for observing and commenting on different social phenomena. The first half of the story is well plotted and paced, unfolding in a way that draws the reader in. The second half though lacked any real credibility. Whilst how the religious cult operates and the motivations behind their actions seemed realistic, how they act with respect to McGee is a nonsense. The rule of the camp is to kill all interlopers. McGee is not only spared, he is invited into the group and becomes a confidant to all the other elite combat group members. Then when they discover the truth, he triumphs against odds of 11 to 1. All tense stuff, but it’s all but impossible for the reader to buy it. I was confident based on the first thirty pages or so that this was going to be a five stars book, but in the end it tailed off to be a slightly above average affair.
—Rob Kitchin
Some books from earlier eras age very well, every bit as readable as when they were written, some even find a more appreciative audience many years after the first publication. But while looking through a few books in the Travis McGee series, I became worried that this highly regarded series would seem dated. I looked for one of the more recent books, one that was also mentioned in places as one of the best. I picked up this one, not sure if it met the second criteria, but it met the first.I suspect it was more of a sensation when first published. It is, for better or worse, very much in the style of much 70's adventure fiction. The characters talk a great deal, they follow leads and uncover a few facts which lead them to a new location. In this case a female character is introduced as McGee's latest girlfriend, and of course we read how awesome she is, and that McGee wants to marry her. Then very quickly she is killed off. McGee wants revenge. She was, it is obvious in the story, killed off by a cult. In the seventies cults probably seemed even more mysterious than they do now. Today they are a familiar menace, then they were a new menace. Anyway, McGee spends most of the book wandering around following leads. He discovers that government agents are also after this cult, but McGee learns little else.Finally McGee decides to join the cult as a way of finding out who killed his girlfriend and then killing them. Luckily for McGee, the group he joins are not regular cult members, they are part of some special cult militia getting military training. Either the author did not know about cult brainwashing techniques, or he ignored them. Just their possibility makes joining a cult to get information a very stupid idea. But the hero is lucky because this section of the cult is a military section.McGee is told he cannot leave, but is allowed to wander around the camp\base and ask any questions he pleases and have them fully answered. They even give him a woman to - well I am not sure what she is supposed to be doing. She is more or less there to watch him, but her author-purpose is to supply sex scenes and give plot information. The absurdity builds until the action finale.This novel is silly really, and I hope not an example of the Travis McGee greatness which so many write about, because this book certainly isn't.
—Terry
