Number 16 in the Travis Mcgee series.
This is my first Travis McGgee book so I’m not sure how it compares but after hearing all the praise John D MacDonald gets I had some pretty high expectations.
McGee is lounging on his houseboat one night when an old lady friend of his shows up unexpectedly. Their history is a one-night stand that led to just-friends. She then met a lunkhead when McGee didn’t want to take the one-night any further and married him. McGee let them use his house boat for their honeymoon but that was years ago. She dumped the lunk and is now in need of McGee’s private detective services. Someone is after her. She won’t say who. She also has a bag full of money. She tells McGee that if anything should happen to her he needs to give the money to her sister. She spends the night and takes off in the morning.
A few weeks later she’s dead. Hit by a car. Looks like an accident but McGee isn’t having it. He gets his fellow boat house buddy, Meyer, to hop in his houseboat and drift on up the coast to help investigate.
There we meet the players. Drunk guy and his hot wife who run the marina and their two young male helpers, sister, gaggle of old foxy roommates, ex-boss, ex-coworker, rich guy, shady apartment manager, local cops, widow and a sleezy lawyer. There is murder, drugs, explosions, fist fights, vagabonds, and naked ladies.
McGee and Meyer lackadaisically kick around and solve the case. I’m not sure if it’s the whole lives on a houseboat thing or the Florida setting but it was hard not to imagine the two main characters with unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts, their white shoed feet constantly kicked up and a fresh cold beer in their hands. There are fist fights and other forms of violence, but it was all just so sunny. Like a Magnum PI episode.
The pair talk in this familiar way of speaking that you must read between the lines to understand what’s being said. It got on my nerves at first, but I got used to it by the end.
I did like how the mystery was slowly peeled away, giving you a chance to figure it out for yourself. And though it was hard-boiled, other than some of the atmosphere, it really wasn’t updated to the 70’s in terms of cheap exploitative violence. The ambiance of the case and the detection is classic. There was no touch of Men’s Adventure in this. Honestly it reminded me of Dashiell Hammett and those other early purveyors of hard-boiled crime.
I think this one was a little too laid back for me though. It kind of felt like he was going through the motions. I picked up an earlier McGee novel in the series and am hoping that one has a bit more energy. Overall though I did enjoy it, it just wasn’t as good as I thought it was going to be from all the MacDonald praise I’ve heard.
Fawcett Gold Medal 1974
Review by Nick Anderson
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