Me and Travis McGee

There was a great article over the weekend about John D. MacDonald and his best-known alter ego, Travis McGee, in the Weekend WSJ. Leonard Cassutto's piece is, sadly, behind a firewall, but thanks to some industrious spies, I'll have the full text after the jump (till I get some sort of C&D order, that is.) We'll start here:

As Americans debate their retirement options, they should look to the example of private investigator Travis McGee. The immortal creation of crime novelist John D. MacDonald, McGee would "retire" after each payday until the money ran out, on the theory that it's better to enjoy your golden years in installments while you're young.

It's been 20 years since MacDonald, who died in 1986 at the age of 70, wrote the last of his 21 Travis McGee novels. But the books all remain in print and, what's more, eminently relevant. Musing on global problems while solving local ones, McGee was a meditative action hero who offered opinions on war, drugs, race relations, corruption, and other issues of both yesterday and today. The prescient social vision of the McGee series continues to shape contemporary crime fiction.

McGee lives aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush in a bohemian dockside community in Fort Lauderdale. He drives a Rolls Royce that has been converted into a pickup truck, drinks Plymouth gin, and loves women, lots of them. McGee describes himself as a "salvage consultant," not a professional private detective (he keeps half of what he recovers). He takes jobs on spec or, more often, to do favors for his friends. But these ventures quickly turn into conflicts with ruthlessly corrupt businessmen and sadistic killers.

The criminals in the McGee novels remain startlingly current. Through his repeated explorations of murderers who love meanness and cruelty for their own sake, MacDonald outlined the character type of the modern fictional serial killer. Indeed, MacDonald's villains stand as the godfathers of Hannibal Lecter and his epigone. Yet this literary innovation has gone largely uncredited.

The villains in the McGee series uphold MacDonald's conviction that pure malevolence can walk the earth in human form. Against the therapeutic grain of his times, MacDonald believed, as he wrote in the literary journal "Clues," in "a kind of evil which defies the Freudian explanations of the psychologists, and the environmental explanations of the sociologists." This type of evil appears repeatedly in MacDonald's books in the form of Nazi torturers, sadistic scientists, truncheon-loving policemen, and hired killers who delight in their work.

The accountant-turned-murderer in "A Tan and Sandy Silence" (1971), for example, tortures his victims for the information needed to complete a complex swindle, but loves inflicting pain so much that he decides to use his extorted gains to finance a new vocation as a recreational sadist.

But MacDonald wasn't just interested in monstrous killers. More than any other crime writer before him, he focused on the details of corrupt business practices. In "Pale Gray for Guilt" (1968), McGee uncovers the workings of a greedy developer who first ruins a friend of McGee's and then has him murdered. With the help of Meyer, the economist who lives on the houseboat next door, McGee devises a complex con that combines an apparent real-estate flip with an invitation to what looks like a foolproof insider trading scheme. The crooked financier falls for it, and MacDonald renders McGee's revenge in meticulous financial detail.

MacDonald's focus on the business scene was no accident. He held a Harvard MBA, and probably would have made a career in business but for his espionage work during World War II. Because his letters were censored, he wrote short stories home instead. His wife sold one and, spurred by this surprise success, MacDonald decided he would be a writer.

Initially living on his army discharge pay, MacDonald wrote hundreds of stories and received as many rejections until he learned his trade -- all in a matter of months. This harsh apprenticeship gave MacDonald a clear-eyed professionalism which he never lost. He had already written 43 books when, in 1964, he introduced Travis McGee in "The Deep Blue Goodbye," branding the series by putting the name of a different color in each title.

Ever industrious, and thinking like an entrepreneur as well as an artist, MacDonald wrote the first three McGee books ahead to build up an inventory. Fawcett published them a month apart to give the series a running start.

Always aware of the bottom line, MacDonald continued to write for the paperback market long after he could have gained greater cachet -- but fewer royalties -- by publishing in hardcover. That way, he didn't have to share the proceeds from a sale of paperback rights with a hardcover publishing house. MacDonald carefully explored the tax law affecting professional writers, and even wrote a financial advice pamphlet that he gave out for free to his "fellow ink-stained wretches." By the early '70s, the McGee series had brought MacDonald considerable financial rewards.

Unlike McGee, MacDonald planned his financial future carefully. He left an estate worth over $9 million -- and a lot of valuable copyrights. He also left an enduring legacy of artistic achievement in a genre whose practitioners are usually forgotten before the ink dries on their last books.

I'm not sure why, but I love that MacDonald was fluent in tax law and tried to help other writers on the financial advice side. Because it's tricky and strange, and lord knows we could all use the help we can get....

Comments

[Ingrid (I.J.Parker)]

I am clearly odd, for I developed instant hatred for Travis McGee.

[Middle Browser]

I think it was Penzler himself in his shop (or perhaps one of his employees) who was a little dismissive of the Travis McGee template, saying to me (to the effect) "one thing is for sure, you don't want to be his friend 'cause you'll wind up dead." I like the ones I've read but you can definitely overdose if you read too many in succession. After reading several McGee novels in a row, I recall putting one down and swearing not to pick it up ever again because half-way through the novel yet another of his many girlfriends is brutally murdered (this on top of the original death he was investigating). I had had enough.

That said, I agree with everything in the article. MacDonald definitely had a lot of insight into society, business, etc. and it is worked well into the novels. Yardley is a big fan of MacDonald and last year revisited "Condominium", which he recommended. While I have it, I've not read it yet. I fear I'll become attached to some smart, appealing young woman only to watch her die.

MB

[JDRhoades]

The Travis McGee books were among the first crime fiction I ever read. What amazes me now after going back and reading some of them again is how McDonald could pack so much story AND McGee's philosophical digressions into what were, by modern standards, pretty short books. Despite the philosophizing, there's not a wasted word in there. No small trick, that one.

[Bill Crider]

I'd been reading MacDonald for a while when the first T. McGee book came out, so I was already a big fan. I loved the McGee books from the start, and while reading them now is sometimes a little painful (the dialoge between Trav and the wounded women can get pretty awful), I still enjoy them every time I go back.

[Helen]

I read those books when they came out and thought the storytelling was excellent. But the female characters were awful, and no amount of taut narrative could take away the bad taste of those dreadful women. In fact Travis McGee turned me into a feminist! I remember a line in one of the books--I think the 'gray' one--in which Pussy Galore or whatever her name was said 'all women are at war all the time' and I thought 'bullshit!' 'Condominium' was no better. Well-drawn male characters and one-dimensional female characters reduced to a sum of their sexual parts.

[Middle Browser]

I agree with both Bill and Helen, but I think MacDonald did sometimes create a proto-femninist who was smart and accomplished only to have her killed off late in the novel. One woman actually survived to the next novel before she was killed. It just got to be too much.

MB

[Mary R]

Two summers ago I read all of the Travis McGee novels, in order. The "kiss the Captain and you die" women definitely date the work. In defense of MacDonald, this plot affectation was very common in the 60s. Look at the Bond novel/movies and Star Trek - probably the worst offender. In books and movies the hero is killing off maybe one woman a year, but on Star Trek it was a weekly occurrence! I just saw it as how the plot problem of the hero having a love-of-his-life level affair in every novel, but not having to marry him off, was solved in genre fiction at the time.

The social commentary has held up better. One thing that I noticed was how tight the writing was in those sequences. Often, a novel which felt like it was really tackling issues, in actuality had only one or two paragraphs devoted to social commentary. But they were bleak and clear-eyed looks at reality, with no pity for the victims and little hope that things will ever get better.

I've tried to bring that into my writing. No hand wringing, no whining, just the facts.

[Brad]

I'm obviously a fan. My blog's name is: Where's Travis McGee?

The novels are great - but I always find it amazing that everyone wants to talk about social commentary from as far back as the late-60s.

Travis McGee: The enviromentalist that existed before it was cool to be green.

[Carole]

Thank you for bringing this series to the attention of this generation of readers. Many decades ago I traded 52 John D. MacDonald paperbacks for credit at a bookstore and miss them very much.

I always thought a young Nick Nolte would have made a great Travis McGee.