Fri 21 Dec 2018
Mystery Review: JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Deep Blue Good-By.
Posted by Steve under Characters , Reviews[11] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Deep Blue Good-By. Trevis McGee #1. Gold Medal k1405, paperback original, 1964. Reprinted many times. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1975.
I don’t think there’s any reason why we can’t think of Travis McGee as a private eye, is there? Of course he’s not a PI in the traditional sense. He doesn’t have an office with a secretary — rather a 52-foot house boat called the Busted Flush— not does he even have a license. He calls himself a “salvage consultant,” and asks for (and gets) expense money plus 50% of the proceeds accruing from whatever he is able to find that has been lost.
In this case the daughter of a war vet who never quite made it home wants the money or whatever it was that her father brought home from the war. She assumes that Junior Allen, the man who was her dad’s cell mate at Leavenworth, an out and out villain if ever there was one, came looking for it, loved her for a while until he found it, then left her and took up with another woman.
Which is where the other part of Travis McGee’s personality and mystique come into play: his self-appointed role as God’s gift to shattered women. This particular aspect of the McGee stories has become more controversial in today’s world than it was in the mid-60s, which is when they began.
When it comes down to it, even though the trail takes McGee from Miami to New Your City to a small town in Texas, the first adventure a simple one. It all comes to a head back in Miami and a direct confrontation with the aforementioned Mr. Allen, the end of which is twist upon the McGee mystique above [PLOT ALERT!], as he is the one who needs the time and TLC for a full recovery.
Here are some inner thoughts that Travis McGee has about himself:
Here is a view he has of one aspect of Miami social life, and the role of some of the women in it.
Here some thoughts that McGee has about his adversary in this book:
Here is a rant — I cannot think of a better word to describe it — McGee has about life in modern America, a feature readers came to expect in each and every follow-up novel. There were 20 more to come:
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.
December 21st, 2018 at 11:21 pm
I like JDM, especially much of his pulp work in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when he was one of the main writers for Popular Publications. He wrote some fine novelets for BLACK MASK, DIME DETECTIVE, DETECTIVE TALES, and NEW DETECTIVE. He also wrote some mediocre fiction but overall his work for the pulps was well done. Unfortunately the two big collections GOOD OLD STUFF and MORE GOOD OLD STUFF were full of rewritten passages to bring them up to date. This was a mistake.
The Travis McGee series is also of note and often quite well done but one of the flaws, as Steve points out above, is the soap box speeches where Travis rants and raves about the things that he sees wrong with American culture, etc. These passages often come across as dated and sometimes just plain wrong.
Later on in the series Travis also began to save and instruct young women in sexual matters. Quite condescending and very dated when read nowadays.
December 21st, 2018 at 11:40 pm
Back in the 60s and 70s, I didn’t mind the soapbox speeches. In fact I looked forward to them. I’m a different person than I was then, however, and they strike me quite a bit differently now.
MacDonald disappointed me greatly in updating his early stories in those collections Walker mentions. Doing so was completely wrong minded, as far as I was concerned, and I refused to read them.
As far as McGee helping the women he meets is concerned, often healing them from previous personal relationships, the practice didn’t evolve gradually. It’s present in this very first book in the series. In this case he finds himself two different women, both affected disastrously by the very same Junior Allen.
December 22nd, 2018 at 12:16 am
One thing many miss about McGee is how often in mid series McGee is on the receiving end of sexual healing from women, sometimes older women, sometimes not the kind of women we associate with McGee (in A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING he avenges a woman he misjudged and in A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD his life is saved by a woman), but real women who have led less than perfect lives and emerged stronger. There is a period mid series when every title was a bit better than the last and JDM seemed to have found the perfect balance of story, character, and commentary.
Granted JDM is a man of his era. If he had written a series that would be considered politically correct now no one would have read them then. Compared to Spillane and Prather’s and most of the Gold Medal crews inflatable sex dolls JDM is a feminist. Certainly unlike too many writers of his era he doesn’t fetishize, hate, fear, or make Playboy cartoons of women, that alone, for all his flaws sets him above the field. Even the femme fatales in his novels are humans, not archetypes.
I’ve known women who could easily have fit in a JDM novel, even a few in a Bond novel (not film, novel), and I can honestly say that’s more than I can say for female characters of most male and some female writers of the same period.
As for the rants, ironically, this is the main reason I find Hamilton a pain to read, and one of the reasons I enjoy JDM. I know quite a few people complain about these, and maybe they get in the way of plot at times, but I think JDM was trying to do what Chandler attempted, to write thrillers that had something more to say, and for me it worked (on the other hand I suspect Hamilton was just being a crank). At least in JDM’s case this was authentic, part of who he and McGee were.
Oddly, what I notice many writers have borrowed from JDM other than the McGee style hero (Jack Reacher the most obvious) are the McGee villains, the Junior Allen types, Those predatory sociopaths with a smile are rampant in modern mystery fiction, and most of them seem to be directly descended from the JDM mold though few of them are as truly terrifying as the originals. You can tell reading JDM he was drawing on types he actually knew.
I suspect eventually there will be a JDM revival, and I suspect it will draw controversy, because he is too good a writer not to create passions.
December 22nd, 2018 at 1:03 pm
I would love it if the Travis McGee series underwent a full-fledged revival. Right now the stories were written not so long ago, and this in some strange way, feel dated than books from the 1930s.
On the other hand, many if perhaps not all of the books in the series are still in print, in eBook and trade paperback form. It may be too soon for a revival. JDM and Travis McGee have not yet gone away.
December 22nd, 2018 at 8:24 am
I enjoy JDM’s novels for their tight plotting, vividly-evoked characters and MacDonald’s wry view of post-war America. But Travis McGee always seemed entirely too fatuous to carry a story, much less narrate one.
December 22nd, 2018 at 12:56 pm
You guys are giving me a workout this week.
Fatuous. : complacently or inanely foolish : silly.
I have a sense of what you are saying, but while McGee does reveal a lot about himself in his first person narrative, I certainly wouldn’t go that far.
December 22nd, 2018 at 7:21 pm
Aside from a series character to hopefully generate sales and money, JDM intended McGee to fulfill multiple roles, a Quixotic character tilting at windmills in one long picaresque crusade. McGee gets to take on the injustices the rest of us see, but know we can’t do anything about. He’s more Parzival the holy fool than St. George or St. Michael, his victories are about survival and maybe avenging or saving one innocent when he can’t save them all, and even the dragons turn out to only be symptoms and not the problem.
Even though McGee wins, they are seldom victories. He rights a major wrong, but the world remains the same despite his tirades. Meyer is Watson, Sancho Panza, and the voice of reason trying to show McGee his righteous anger can only save a few, only go so far toward protecting the innocent. He also represents the reader and JDM, a bit out of shape, a bit wiser, too reasonable to go crusading, but still wishing we could, but knowing we could never live as McGee must to do what he does.
I think fans of more traditional series find McGee too novelistic a character, not just an avenger or justice figure in the traditional role, or detective for that matter, but a corrector of destinies. If you are expecting a crusading avenger alone the McGee books aren’t really in the mode. In those self referential put downs of himself where McGee indulges in referring to himself as boat bum, tarnished knight, and scarred JDM is trying to tell us that McGee isn’t a superman, but a clear eyed Quixote all too aware that the giants he fights are windmills he can’t defeat.
And I think too JDM is telling us McGee, while his own man and admirable in his isolation, is ultimately a tragic figure, a man who lives on the edge because he can’t come to terms with the normal world. Like a child whose view of the world is in clear cut good and evil McGee has trouble negotiating the gray areas adults deal with.
Like Ian Fleming’s James Bond McGee isn’t meant to be likable or even admirable, he’s necessary, but not comfortable or comforting. His famed sexual healing comes at the price of realistic views of those relationships unraveling at the start or end of virtually every book — he seldom sails into the sunset with his female prize, the relationship either breaks up or McGee shows us it will break up before the final scene, as Fleming tells us at the start of every Bond adventure how his last relationship unraveled because Bond is Bond. Neither McGee or Bond are easy heroes, simple heroes drawn in black and white, they are opinionated, lonely,
flawed, emotionally wounded variations on the classic romantic hero, more Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights than Lancelot; people like Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe you would love to know, but hate to have to put up with. I would argue their greatness as characters lies in that child-like quality. They are Peter Pan’s who allow us for an hour or two to indulge in our own child-like nature and dreams of adventure, justice, terror, and ultimately victory over the boogey-man.
December 22nd, 2018 at 7:32 pm
This was the first Travis McGee book I’ve read (or re-read) in at least five years, and I’ve been struggling to put into words what I found in the book that I didn’t see before.
I had come to the point of deciding I’d better think of him as a flawed hero, but what the flaws were, I hadn’t quite put my finger on.
Not until, David, you said “I would argue their greatness as characters lies in that child-like quality.” (That’s taken out of context, so everyone, go back and read that paragraph again in its entorelty.
But I think that sums up Travis McGee in as few words as you could possibly do.
Thanks, David and Dan!
December 23rd, 2018 at 1:58 pm
The impression one gets from this review: “The Deep Blue Good-By” doesn’t actually have a mystery to be solved. One learns the villain’s identity right away. And that McGee battles the villain – but doesn’t actually solve a mystery or do real sleuthing. Is this correct?
Have never read any of these novels.
I tried reading GOOD OLD STUFF. But found the tales remote from my taste.
Mildly liked “The Homesick Buick” when read in an anthology.
How could anyone be against payroll deductions or retirement benefits?
December 23rd, 2018 at 2:17 pm
You’re right. There is some detective work done by McGee in this book, but not a lot. His efforts to track the villain down are all but unnecessary, as he brazenly comes right back to Miami on his own.
The bigger part of the job that McGee is hired to do is to find out what it was girl’s father brought back (or has sent back) from the war, and then retrieve it for her.
As for payroll deductions and retirement benefits are concerned, I suppose that true libertarians who do not want the government involved in any part of their life might object.
December 23rd, 2018 at 10:42 pm
McGee is more a justice figure than a detective, though he does some detective work delving into the past and into the various criminal business activities he stumbles onto — JDM wrote many novels with business backgrounds and was well grounded in the various ways money could be manipulated illegally. The books are seldom who dunnit’s, but how-is-he-going-to-set-things-straight.
He is less a detective than a corrector of destiny an avenger for hire. His ancestors are less Sherlock Holmes than Rocambole, Monte Cristo, and the Saint. Ironically, considering how much JDM disliked Spillane, he is more Mike Hammer than Marlowe or Spade.