Thu 7 Aug 2025
Diary Mystery Review: JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews[8] Comments
JOHN D. MacDONALD – The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. Travis McGee #10. Gold Medal T2023; paperback original, 1st printing, 1968. Cover artist: Ron Lesser. Reprinted many times.
It takes about 60 pages of slow going, through a very familiar story of a woman dying of the Big C, before the story begins. But before it’s done, the dirty inside secrets of another pretty-on-the-outside Florida town are exposed by the actions of the ever adventuresome Travis McGee.
The lady’s request that McGee stop her daughter’s suicide attempts brings him to Fort Courtney, and he stays when the nurse who picks him up in a bar is murdered. It isn’t suicide he still has to stop, but a carefully planned murder, by a man who can’t believe anything will stand in his way.
McGee is a bit too late, and the daughter becomes the first girl in a plain brown wrapper. The second is more obvious, and yet more subtle.
Emphasis, or detail, is added to McGee’s sexual appetite. What indeed does make man an man, and a woman a woman? And any resplendence to an abortive scene from The Graduate is purely intentional.
Rating: ****½
August 7th, 2025 at 11:52 pm
The girls always jump into McGee’s bed for a bit of Sixties-style “sexual healing.” Less of this male fantasizing would have made these books stand the test of time a lot better.
August 8th, 2025 at 12:03 am
That’s the general consensus about the Travis McGee books today, David, and I have to agree, I’m sorry to say. Not about this one, since I don’t remember much about it. But four and half stars? That’s what I thought then. But today, I really don’t know. Quite possibly not.
August 8th, 2025 at 7:56 am
Travis McGee was a hero for his time and I happened to be reader for that time. I would hate to go back and read a Travis McGee novel now.
August 8th, 2025 at 1:59 pm
A comment that sums the books up for a lot of people, Jerry. I wish it were otherwise, but I think you’re right. “Travis McGee was a hero for his time.”
August 11th, 2025 at 9:47 am
John D. MacDonald was aiming at a mostly male audience in the late 1960s when he wrote THE GIRL IN THE PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER. Our culture today is very different from 1968 and both Travis McGee and the women characters in these books strike us today as oddly variant. I suspect if Steve re-read THE GIRL IN THE PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER his grade would be revised.
August 11th, 2025 at 1:33 pm
Suspicions all around would probably be right. It was a far different time back then.
August 23rd, 2025 at 4:29 am
Read deep enough in the McGee saga and you start to see the “sexual healing” is mutual and was intended as a reaction to the “love em and leave em” attitudes of most popular fiction for men at the time. McGee benefits as often as the women in later books, and one factor no one seems to notice in the rush to bury JDM because he is a man of his times is that unlike every other writer save Fleming writing in that period JDM deals with the messy aftermath of McGee’s sexual healing, the ill feelings, the eventual breakup because sex isn’t enough to hold together long term relationships, and the bittersweet ending for McGee and the women he is involved with, a level of realism not seen in any other series I can think of.
That is a level of maturity you didn’t see in most popular fiction for men in that period and frankly don’t now. JDM never suggests so called sexual healing is anything more than a short-term solution to loneliness and some trauma and certainly never suggests McGee is some sort of saint or anything less than a corecipient of any benefits.
McGee’s so-called “conquests” are messy and dealt with in adult terms unlike any other writer of men’s popular fiction in his era. It is even openly stated in later books that McGee feels somewhat limited because that is all he has to offer.
The relationships in MacDonald’s books are the most open and adult relationships between men and women in the genre at the time and one of the reasons he became a bestselling author and went from paperback originals to hardcovers, because like Fleming, even then you couldn’t crack the bestseller lists on sales to men alone (Spillane incidentally had a surprisingly strong female readership too).
You had to be selling books to women as well, and I note one of MacDonald’s top markets was in the women’s slick magazines, particularly COSMOPOLITAN who not only published his short fiction but serialized his pre McGee novels.
August 23rd, 2025 at 12:19 pm
A excellent thesis, David.Very, very good. It’s sure a shakeup of “common knowledge,” isn’t it? I think all of us should keep it in mind the next time we read a Travis McGee — and that includes me. It’s a whole new way of looking at him, that’s for sure. A kind of makeover that doesn’t happen often. Hardly at all, in fact. A most humble thank you.