Thu 15 Jan 2015
Reviewed by Mark D. Nevins: JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Dreadful Lemon Sky.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[14] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Dreadful Lemon Sky. Lippincott, hardcover, 1974. Fawcett Gold Medal Q3285, paperback, 1975. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft.
Continuing my reading of the Travis McGee series in order, and at this point rationing them because I like them so much, but there are so few left.
The Dreadful Lemon Sky is a solid entry in the series — not one of the best, but very good. By now it seems that MacDonald has basically ditched the whole quasi-PI/“salvage expert” formula: one of McGee’s old girlfriends visits the Busted Flush and asks him to hold a hundred grand in cash for her, and in the event that she never comes back, get it to her younger sister.
She never does come back, and moral Trav sees fit to get to the bottom of the mystery, which is a clever one, knotted up as McGee tales often are in petty local politics and petty characters, both politics and characters fleshed out with an uncommon level of attention and realism for a thriller novel.
There are a few surprises here [SPOILER ALERT] including Trav’s houseboat The Busted Flush getting blown to smithereens (don’t worry, it gets fixed up), and as always MacDonald shows off some really nice writing, such as:
January 15th, 2015 at 9:23 pm
Much as I enjoyed his plots I confess I read MacDonald for McGee in the McGee novels, his narrative voice there and elsewhere, his beautiful near poetic touch with language, and those asides so many other people complain about.
I also read him for the MacDonald women. I know many believe them fantasy, but I’ve known too many like them — maybe its the South and West — and its always a pleasure to meet one in print.
I think the asides are why the books hold up today. Observations don’t change half as much as other things do.
January 16th, 2015 at 1:41 am
I agree that ‘action’..plot & storyline are the most trite parts of any genre work. That’s why its so hard to write any new work of genre without feeling you are just re-echoing something someone already did before…actions are never really distinct or unique. To some extent, lots of dialog is as well. Characters speaking about the junk they see around them (cars, clothes, drinks, money) ..the ‘small-talk’ you find in every cheap paperback, it all gets very similar after a while. So yea, when an author has the power-of-mind to incorporate sharp, caustic/wry little insights or bits-of-wisdom into an ‘airport-read’ …that ‘voice of his’ does tend to stick in the memory.
January 16th, 2015 at 5:26 am
Nicely put, both David and Feliks.
January 16th, 2015 at 5:16 pm
My favorite John D. MacDonald novel so far is ‘One More Sunday’. I found it outstanding, and I heartily recommend it to anyone I know. For any reason–I recommend it for almost any need or wish expressed by anyone, for an engrossing novel; whether they’re seeking crime or not. It was spectacular and riveting.
On the other hand, the few Travis McGee books I’ve sampled in my genre reading did not lure me back irresistibly to the character, unfortunately. I’m not ruling out future exploration, (Vineyard is very convincing) but my lingering impression from what I read was that it was all just too ..’sunny’? Too ‘Californian’? There was a lot of mention of cabin-cruisers, and Mexico, millions-of-dollars, coffee, liquor, bikinis, lazy lounging around, comfortable life in marinas, etc. Nothing I found I could relate to.
Also: a sort of half-asleep, unconcerned, non-energetic, rambling ‘character voice’ by McGee. I found McGee’s speaking voice maddeningly vague, sly, and coy. He would say things like, “Meyer is close-mouthed like that about certain things, and I’ve learned to let him stay close-mouthed about those things, and he doesn’t seem to mind, in fact he seems to prefer that I let it go instead of worrying at it, and I don’t mind that either, for that matter…neither of us are worrying type-of-guys…”. Just my paraphrasing the style I remember.
The title I had the most contact with was called, ‘The Empty Copper Sea’. The cover itself, was copper-sheened with some kind of coating.
Anyway. Make of this woolgathering what you will. Maybe I just ran into a weak-sister in the series. I have great admiration for JDMcD based on ‘One More Sunday’; and willing to learn more when and where I can.
January 16th, 2015 at 7:33 pm
Feliks
Travis McGee did leave Florida but not too often. The only one I can think of in which he was in California for most of an adventure was THE GREEN RIPPER. COPPER SEA took place in Florida, and while I’ve never been there myself, his reputation as being one of the best authors to describe the state, from the glitter of its beaches and big cities to its not so pretty underbelly, is as solid as any other author I can think of.
Otherwise, you’re right. I don’t relate all that well to the coffee, liquor, bikinis, lazy lounging around, and the comfortable life in marinas any more than you do, not in person, but in reading about it, yes. We’ve discussed McGee many times on this blog, and while not coming to any overall agreement that I recall, it’s been conceded that while his adventures may be dated, he’s an iconic symbol of a certain time and place in the world.
January 16th, 2015 at 5:26 pm
The best blog on John Macdonald is http://thetrapofsolidgold.blogspot.com
The Trap of Solid Gold is run by Steve Scott and is full of fascinating information about JDM. I highly recommend it.
January 16th, 2015 at 7:53 pm
Well said. I’m all for tradition and an often fervent…even rabid!.. supporter of ‘leaving things just the way they are’.
I think the plot of ‘Copper’ had something to do with a millionaire who went missing in Mexico, which is probably how I associate California with it. I wish I had a better introduction to McGee. Totally agree that JDMcD is THE writer of Florida.
Lawrence Sanders did a little bit; surprisingly Hemingway did not. Hmm. Have to see if I can name any others.
January 16th, 2015 at 8:04 pm
COPPER was the one that was made into the late Rod Taylor movie, and you’re right about the millionaire, but in the book, he went missing off the Gulf Coast shore. There was a McGee adventure that took place in Mexico, but this one wasn’t it. One possible point of confusion was that when they made the movie of COPPER SEA, they shifted the scene to, you guessed it, California.
January 16th, 2015 at 8:25 pm
Considering MacDonald and McGee’s opinion of California in general — or parts of it — ‘too Californian’ is a biting comment.
I guess because I lived on the Texas coast and came from Houston I relate more to McGee’s world and the accurate depiction of it. The first McGee found him in New York and quite unhappy about it, while most of A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING takes place mostly on and around a ranch. Less of the boat bum business there, but most of them find him near water.
Other than being a bit sexist I’m not sure I understand the ‘dated’ comments, because Lee Child’s best selling Jack Reacher is pretty much a straight steal from McGee in terms of the basic voice and the character’s persona, in one book he is even running a bar and a beach bum in the Keys. Even the plot of that one is straight out of a McGee novel (dangerous sociopath etc.).
I suppose you could argue McGee is dated because he’s sexist, but he’s rescued by the women in the books as often as he rescues them. He’s healed as often by his famous sex as therapy as any of the women he’s with. I can’t find anyone who writes about women like MacDonald sexist, and McGee had a female following — more so than the average Gold Medal series.
But anyone who has lived in a coastal area can tell you that general McGee types are not uncommon — fairly attractive boat bums who work enough to get by and spend the rest of their time on the upkeep of their boat. Of course they aren’t ‘salvage’ experts, don’t battle crime or run cons on criminals (the early McGee pretty much specializes in running cons), and probably don’t get the kind of women McGee does, but the type is not untrue — like James Bond McGee is an idealized version of a real type, and like Bond there are still actual prototypes out there.
I can’t claim they are at the cutting edge of modern society, but they still exist. We are holding McGee to a standard here no one holds Mike Hammer or Philip Marlowe to which is ironic because McGee’s world is still around in many places while their’s have been gone for fifty years or more.
For me McGee reached that iconic status of a Holmes, Father Brown, Lord Peter, Bond, Sam Spade, or Philip Marlowe and lives outside of time in a world that is always the same. I’m no fan of the Florida novel but only because I don’t think anyone does it as well as MacDonald (he doesn’t do the Miami drug novel much though which is what most do and I am heartedly sick of), but McGee and his world remind me of every marina or coastal area I was ever in. I can damn near smell him sweating beer through his pores scraping barnacles off the bottom of the Busted Flush in some books.
It’s much less fantasy than reality, or at least deeply seated in reality, though if you don’t relate to it you don’t. I’ll confess I sometimes have trouble relating to perfectly good books with the Mayberry vibe or the Cape Cod Down East version (other than Asey Mayo). It’s a big country and just because we are all from it doesn’t mean we relate to every part of it. I suspect most people would find the oil business I grew up around almost alien.
January 16th, 2015 at 9:18 pm
Well that’s the answer then. When I read “gulf coast” I was too young to know what it really referred to. I assumed the Pacific coast of Mexico rather than the Caribbean.
I despise the term ‘sexism’ and abhor ‘sexist’ finger-pointing going on lately. Believe me, if I picked up a McGee book and women were described as lays or shrews, it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I grew up on such paperbacks. It bothers me a lot more to find people today turning everything into an “-ism” as if we’re all some kind of disease which needs stamping out.
I would affirm as D.V. does above, that the 1970s cemented a certain look-and-feel which (to my eyes anyway) still seems current. That aesthetic seems visually very different-looking than do the 40s-50s-60s; but not very different from today. Probably something to do with manufacturing. Every barrio I’ve ever seen –either growing up or now–seems to have Volkswagons and Fords and Chevys and they all look decade-less. Did the 1960s have logo t- shirts and ballcaps? I don’t think so. Something about the 1970s gave us a boom in distributed commercialism that makes every impoverished neighborhood feel unchanging.
But I also think that the 70s were the first non-hierarchical decade in America, a big wave of ‘informality’. Less rigid and less striated. Adult men no longer wearing hats (thanks to JFK) and less undershirts and stiff-looking fashions. You know the kind of suits on the original Hawaii 5-0? The seventies don’t look so uptight as McGarrett and his men did in that program.
But the eras which did have that severity–1940 through 1960–stay more in focus, become more iconic because they’re so codified and easy to reproduce in new ‘retro’ films. Does that make sense?
No one will ever remember ‘Night Moves’ as much as they will ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ or ‘Chinatown’ even though ‘Night Moves’ is as solidly genre as either of those. The outfits in ‘Night Moves’ look like what we would wear today.
January 16th, 2015 at 9:57 pm
That Rod Taylor movie is renowned in certain circles for the outlandish mayhem of the fight scene between Taylor and the legendary William Smith. I don’t know how they filmed it without serious injury happening to someone on the set. Both men were as big as oxen. Slamming into each other as if they’d both gone berserk!
January 17th, 2015 at 1:20 am
Oops. I messed up. Re my Comment #8, the movie made from EMPTY COPPER SEA was the one made for TV with Sam Elliott as Travis McGee, and that’s the one that was shifted to California. Its title was simply TRAVIS McGEE (1983).
The one with Rod Taylor was a theatrical movie entitled DARKER THAN AMBER (1970), the same as the book, and I’m sure it took place in Florida, where it should have been.
And Feliks, you are right about the fight scene in AMBER. Here’s a link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aABT-FjR4_M
February 5th, 2015 at 9:26 pm
The common theme of defensiveness – why is it there? Well, we most assuredly know that the literati and the cognoscenti dismissed Macdonald as a hack. Prolific beyond words, he churned out novels and stories at a mind blowing pace his entire life. In the old school reference work World Authors 1950-1970 (published by H.H. Wilson) he says that when starting out as a young writer he kept thirty to forty stories in the mail at all times. What a fine example of self confidence and determination!
http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2015/01/john-d-macdonald-look-at-some-aspects.html#.VNHn89L
February 5th, 2015 at 10:14 pm
Very interesting. I’m going to do my best to follow along as you start taking a look at individual books.