The Deep Blue Good-By (Travis McGee Mysteries)

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Reality is in the enduring eyes, the unspoken dreadful accusation in the enduring eyes of a worn young woman who looks at you, and hopes for nothing. And you women out there, I met him first. You guys, well, hummm. Face it you love him too, especially his sensitive side, eh? MacDonald's books ought to be part of a writer's education on how to write. He's incredible with his poetic descriptions, how beautifully he paints a scene and creates a person, using words without going into cliché. And no, his words are unique enough that I don't recall reading them in anyone else's work. So no excuses that he was able to create the clichés later writers have to avoid! What’s it about? McGee helps recover a lost fortune in stolen goods to help a friend and Allen is the gold hoarding dragon who must first be bested. This comparison to knights errant and romanticism is intentional, MacDonald has drawn McGee to be the last of the free romantics in a world growing increasingly more mechanized and impersonal. And he wrote it in 1964!

Self-described as a beach bum who was “wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television” McGee fills the role of the cool, cagey outsider who has a deep-set sense of right and wrong and a live-and-let-live nonchalance about all the rest. Living aboard his poker game won house boat ‘The Busted Flush”, McGee’s standard operating procedure is to make money when he needs it by retrieving lost property for friends for half the value. I didn’t even feel revulsion towards him. Our think of him as a person. He was a force I had to accept […] It was easier to stay a little bit drunk.’ I'm a huge fan of suspense fiction, absolutely loving the surprising and unexpected twists and turns. I've read (and re-read) a lot in this genre over the years, but John D MacDonald (JDM) had escaped me. I'm not sure why. I had heard of the movie "Cape Fear", which was adapted from JDM's book The Executioners, but for some reason I knew nothing of his pulp fiction series about Travis McGee. She was a tall and slender woman, possibly in her early thirties. Her skin had the extraordinary fineness of grain, and the translucence you see in small children and fashion models. In her fine long hands, delicacy of wrists, floating texture of dark hair, and in the mobility of the long narrow sensitive structuring of her face there was the look of something almost too well made, too highly bred, too finely drawn for all the natural crudities of human existence.”

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. All these women, thoroughbred or common, whole or corrupt, are of one sort, although one minor (possibly continuing) character may be native American. I’m not sure I go along with you there. So much of Marlowe depends on Marlowe’s narrative voice — the plotting is notoriously often Rube Goldberg — and yet good Marlowe screen adaptations have been made. When MacDonald created the character, he was to be called Dallas McGee, after the city, but after the Kennedy assassination he decided that name had too many negative connotations. He was searching for a first name for McGee when a friend suggested that he look at the names of the many Air Force bases in California. MacDonald's attention was caught by Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, and so he named his character Travis. [4] I love the early 1960's Florida keys setting. MacDonald's flowing and spare descriptive prose is wonderful, almost like the words don't exist, as if MacDonald just places the images directly into your mind. Very Hemingway. Truly amazing.

In 1967, author MacDonald refused permission for a television series about Travis McGee, believing that people would stop reading the novels were Travis McGee regularly on television. Readers will not likely be surprised that something approximating these goals occurs in the plot’s resolution, though the actual conclusion is far more thought-provoking than the good guy putting the bad guy in jail. John D MacDonald’s contribution to hardboiled crime fiction was to take an unusually thoughtful hero and to place him against a series of brutal opponents. MacDonald created the character of Max Cady in his stand-alone novel The Executioners, which inspired two films, both titled Cape Fear. Cady would hardly be out of place in a rogues gallery of Travis McGee villains.In any case, agreeing or disagreeing with the protagonist's opinions or manners doesn't always determine whether you become interested or entertained by a writer, and I must admit, I could barely put the darn book down. For most fast readers, this is positively a book to be read in one sitting, but I am one of those unfortunate readers that contemplates the hidden meaning of every word, thus it required me four sittings. For me, MacDonald's writing was something that I could almost touch, and the action was in a way non-stop, that is, unless he was handing out a spoonful of Travis McGee wisdom to which I didn't always concur, but I couldn't help but appreciate. McGee is no James Bond, more like Paladin in "Have Gun Will Travel". Our self-professed tough guy doesn't like to work & lives in semi-permanent retirement. He only takes on a job when there is a good chance of a substantial return & then takes 50% plus expenses - or so he says. It's fun watching him give in & rationalize his departures from his hard-hearted intentions. But when the bad guy encounters the women, he hooks them on sex, presumably the wrong kind, addictive and corrupting. Some of what we today might call abusive, but mostly the sex: Even when that means believing women are nothing more than objects of his sliding scale of deserved affection and taking advantage of those too weak or too kind or too grateful to say no. A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability. But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out, in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. She had high small breasts, and she was very long-waisted. The long limber torso widened into chunky hips and meaty thighs.” (Every woman in this story gets a similar deconstruction.)The Deep Blue Good-By was author MacDonald's first Travis McGee novel and was published in 1964 beginning twenty years of Travis McGee stories that would finally total twenty-one novels. The Florida based main character could be described as a kind of private detective who rescues lost valuables for a fee. He resides on a house boat he calls The Busted Flush and drives a vintage Rolls Royce named Miss Agnes. He is quite opinionated, which I am sure mirrors the opinions of Mr. McDonald, and considers himself to be a veritable lady's man. I am not sure I agree with McGee's lifestyle, but I suppose, as they said about the lifetime resident at San Quentin, he has a good heart. Christian Bale Eyed to Play Travis McGee in 'The Deep Blue Good-By' ". thewrap.com. July 15, 2014 . Retrieved July 17, 2014. Bonus. From the 1970 "Darker Than Amber" movie starring Rod Taylor, pictures of the producers' ideas of McGee's "The Busted Flush": Director James Mangold— The Wolverine, 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line and Girl Interrupted (he also wrote the last two) - was onboard. Deadline reported the filmmaker was looking for an A-List talent; Fox hoping that The Deep Blue Good-by, the first of MacDonald's 21-book series would be the beginning of a beautiful franchise. John D.MacDonald writer of over 75 novels and 500 short stories has been widely viewed as having influenced numerous writers living today: Hiaasen, Vonnegut, White, Hall, Koontz (who considered MacDonald his "literary Guru"), and Stephen King, a very good friend of McDonald and to whom the MacDonald estate gave its only serious consideration to allowing another author to create a McGee sequel (for good reasons both financial and ethical, this did not happen). Many other authors have considered MacDonald to be influential in their own work.

Justin Kroll (26 February 2015). "Rosamund Pike Lands Female Lead in 'The Deep Blue Goodbye' - Variety". Variety. Chook reappears now and then in future McGee novels, and very surprisingly in the last ever McGree "The Lonely Silver Rain". His main character, Travis McGee, is a romantic hero, loner, in fact "he who is alone," one man against the world, trying to stem or at least contain and limit its corrupting influence. Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. MacDonald starts off "in progress", as if Travis has been doing this for some time, and he sets Travis up as lazy, but also a man with a heart and a strong sense of justice. Cathy's story is sad enough, but it's Lois' that will really break your heart. MacDonald makes excellent use of her character and her condition to provide the nasty details about Junior Allen.However, unlike other fictional detectives such as Raymond Chandler's jaded and world-weary Philip Marlowe, McGee clings to what is important to him: his senses of honor, obligation, and outrage. In a classic commentary in Bright Orange for the Shroud, McGee muses, Like Spielberg's shark in Jaws, we feel the presence of Junior without actually seeing him. This tension is intense and superb, and grows throughout the first 2/3 of the book. We know there's a battle to come, and its outcome is uncertain. Excellent. He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.” From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Deep Blue Good-by is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.