Sun 15 Sep 2024
Diary Review: JOHN D. MacDONALD – A Deadly Shade of Gold.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews[9] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – A Deadly Shade of Gold. Gold Medal paperback original; 1st printing, 1965. Lippincott, hardcover, 1974. Reprinted many times.
Sam Taggart, an old friend of Travis McGee, returns to Fort Lauderdale to pick up the pieces of his broken romance with Nora Gardino. Before that can happen, a deal falls through, and Sam ends up witha sliced throat. The trail takes McGee and Nora to a small Mexican fishing village, and to Nora’s unpleasant death.
McGee continues, and he goes on to California and takes his revenge upon a rich pornographic blackmailer whose desires precipitated the entire chain of events, centered around two unfriendly groups of Cuban refugees.
A long book, perhaps too long. MacDonald’s comments of current American culture, religion and sex are still pertinent, but life in Mexico is too quiet. It takes Nora’s wealth for the story to get back on track, and a particularly dirty trick it is, too. McGee himself has no answers for the frustrations of ordinary life but excellently represents the Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit.
Especially noted was a view of the University’s role in subduing spirit (page 46). MacDonald’s background in SF is clearly revealed (page 37): a galactic concept of what is ours on Earth.
Rating: ****
September 15th, 2024 at 11:35 pm
The first of the double McGee’s and I thought the extra length helped define McGee as something more than the usual Gold Medal hero. McGee matures a lot in this one and is himself the recipient of the sexual healing that seems to bother so many modern old maids of both sexes even though it is a trope common throughout Forties, Fifties, and Sixties popular fiction and films though seldom with the honesty and accurate observations he shows.
Nice to see a JDM review that doesn’t go off the deep end about the women in his books as if because some reviewers never knew women of the kind he writes about they don’t exist. They do and did and JDM writes accurately about them.
JDM didn’t become the bestselling novelist he was without appealing to women readers, and his short stories and novels had been serialized in COSMOPOLITAN for years before McGee came along precisely because he did appeal to women readers a fact that seems foreign to modern critics who forget the era he came from and wrote in. The same critics seem blind to the fact that neither JDM, Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, Dick Francis or any of the popular mega sellers of the era could have had that success without a female audience.
September 16th, 2024 at 9:11 am
David,
The review was written in 1968. 56 years have passed. In which time things have changed. Most of us don’t read these books as historians. We read them for fun. And what was fun in the 60’s may not always be fun for contemporary audiences. And I disagree about ‘sexual healing’ in the 40’s. The late 50’s-60’s was a time of sexual liberation unlike anything in American history. Travis McGee could not have existed in the 40’s. He was of his times.
September 16th, 2024 at 11:17 am
H’umm. I like the content of all inputs so far.
Re: msg #2, I’m inclined to agree, but I hesitate slightly. A good many quirks do make the ’60s unique. Nevertheless there were previous eras in the US & Europe which were as ‘bohemian-minded’ and ‘free-spirited’.
One of the aspects of the ’60s which perhaps makes it seem like more of a revolution was the way people could suddenly roam around the entire country, thanks to interstates & car culture.
When bohemianism struck decades before, it was necessarily more contained and tamped-down.
Just 2 cents worth of noodling …
September 16th, 2024 at 11:31 am
This was the second McGee novel I read, and I recall that I liked it but not as much as DARKER THAN AMBER. I think the length worked against it for me. I was more open to reading long books then than I am now, but even in those days I preferred shorter, faster books. Still, it’s one of the better entries in the series as far as I’m concerned, although maybe that’s just nostalgia speaking.
September 16th, 2024 at 1:08 pm
Here is my review of A Deadly Shade of Gold, dated April 1973.
“One of his longer efforts, though it reads like JDM finished his standard length and tacked another 100 pages on, it still is highly enjoyable like all the McGee series.
As usual I don’t like the women in JDM’s work, they all are beautiful and there is no such thing as a homely or ugly woman character or one that doesn’t want to sleep with McGee.”
Despite my griping I gave it a “superb” rating.
September 16th, 2024 at 4:56 pm
Walker, I may be a romantic, but I don’t think there is such a critter as a homely or ugly woman. Alas, of the women I have met in my life, very few ever wanted to sleep with either me or with Travis McGee.
September 16th, 2024 at 8:02 pm
That last statement probably applies to many of us guys, certainly me, Jerry. You’re hardly alone, by any means. 😉
And thanks, everyone, for a very interesting discussion. Who knew, when I wrote this review, that the whole world would ever have a chance to read it!
September 19th, 2024 at 4:59 pm
As a younger female reader working my way through the McGees, I quite enjoy his women. The urbane, career-minded, sexually liberated girl in pearls nursing some secret primal wound is my kind of gal.
September 19th, 2024 at 7:38 pm
Candy,
If that’s your experience then that’s justification enough! Me and my white suburban middle aged male guilt be damned!!!