Books: The Mid-Life Surge of McGee

THE GREEN RIPPER by John D. MacDonald; Lippincott; 221 pages; $9.95

Locked inside a beige file cabinet in Sarasota, Fla., is an unfinished manuscript entitled A Black Border for McGee. May it never be published. The book, as its name suggests, would write finis to Travis McGee, the perdurable, persnickety shamus whose demise, white-haired Author John Dann MacDonald once vowed, would occur after his tenth color-coded* starring role. “I keep the MS.,” says the author, “as leverage on my publisher.” The latest McGee, The Green Ripper, is the 18th in the Travis saga, and the best.

Everyone knows McGee’s address, if not his destination. He is usually to be found at Slip F18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, aboard The Busted Flush, the old tub he won in a poker game with “four pink ones up and a stranger down.” Trav is calls himself a “salvage consultant,” but his real business is not in maritime wreck age but rescuing lost souls and money. In recent years, starting with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (No. 16, 1975), McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real challenge. In the middle of the journey the Big was “embedded in a life I had some curious way outgrown. I an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lamp shade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon.” John MacDonald acknowledges that his hero “could not have gone on in that vein without boring me. I had to shake him up.” In Green, Travis gets rocked, socked and knocked from boots to brains.

Indeed, for most of the book, McGee seems headed straight from Green to Black. A hardhearted trifler by inclination, Trav has fallen deeply in love this time around. Then Gretel, his live-aboard mate, dies a hot and horrible death, the victim of an inexplicable assassination. Desperate and half demented, McGee writes a note leaving all — The Busted Flush and Miss Agnes, the elderly “hand-hewn” Rolls-Royce pickup truck — to his old pal and counselor, Meyer, a famed economist who inhabits the next-door houseboat, John Maynard Keynes. The salvager plucks his life savings of $9,300 from a cache and becomes Tom McGraw, a retired fisherman. Following a ritual clue Gretel had given him a few days before dying, he heads for northern California, in search of a fictitious missing daughter who has supposedly disappeared in the moil of a fanatical religious commune. Its remaining inhabitants, when he finds them, are no Moonies. Armed to the bicuspids and as pious as piranhas, the communards turn out to be dedicated members of an international conspiracy to overthrow the capitalist-imperialist world.

McGee-McGraw stumbles into the camp and is immediately captured. After being forced to murder one of the terrorist group, he is tentatively accepted by the crazies, nine distinctly characterized men and women who have come to mania from all over the map. After a harrowing indoctrination, “Dads,” as the kids call him, finds out that they have blown his cover. He has no choice but to blast his way out, killing all his captors—and nearly blowing his mind. It is the most intense and savage narrative that MacDonald has ever written. As for McGee, he recovers in time quite nicely in the arms of an old flame, en route home to Miss Agnes and The Busted Flush.

No plot summary can so easily capture the real McGee. One of the most complex long-run characters in American fiction, he is moody, sensuous, suspicious, quixotic, cynical, compassionate—and funny. He has achieved independence from “plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, checklists, time payments, political parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, Junior Chambers of Commerce, pageants, progress and manifest destiny.” Hence his license to purge iniquity. Unlike most of his fictional colleagues, the creaky crusader visibly ages. “He grows older at about one-third the natural rate,” says MacDonald, who hovers above 60. “Otherwise, I could be senile before I’d finished with him.” Trav is now about 45.

There are two more McGees in the works on the author’s blue IBM Selectric, which he totes between a house in Florida and a summer fishing camp on a lake in New York’s Adirondacks. MacDonald’s wife, Dorothy Prentiss, is an artist. He has long since shed any resentment against the other Macdonald, that more critically esteemed thriller writer whose real name is not John Ross Macdonald at all but Kenneth Millar. (“At least,” allows John D., “the guy is literate, even if he does keep hitting the same barrel.”) The real MacDonald is a graduate of Syracuse University, the Harvard School of Business Administration and the OSS in World War II.

When embedded in McGeeish boredom in Burma he wrote his first short story. After a few disastrous jobs in the Manhattan jungle, the apprentice author be came a penny-a-liner for the pulps; since then he has banged out 70 novels and some 600 short stories. He calls his tales “why-did-its,” not whodunits, and likes to think of them as “folk dances.” Since most of his books have been published in paperback, he has thus far escaped serious critical attention in the U.S. A pity.

MacDonald is one of the few crime writers since Arthur Conan Doyle to rate a regular newsletter for fans (JDM Bibliophile is published twice yearly at the Uni versity of Southern Florida); he is also one of the American authors to have won France’s coveted Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere. But critics and scholars have lots of time to catch up. MacDonald’s mind still brims with mayhem for McGee. And there are lots of colors to go. “Let’s see,” says John D., sitting down to work. “There’s ocher, ultramarine, peach, beige, cherry, white . . . and black.”

Michael Demarest

Excerpt

” They said we would stay overnight in San Francisco, so I could rest up a little, and fly out in the morning. I said that would be nice. They said maybe the money problem could be resolved in my favor. Like a kind of unofficial reward. Like, maybe, a bounty. I said that would be nice. I looked out the car window at the tall evergreens and wondered why all the birds had left this part of the world. Jake turned the wipers on, smearing the small sad rain. I think they were glad to stop trying to relate to me.

They felt uneasy about me, about being close to me in a small car. I think they felt not exactly certain of what I might do next. And I knew they would not have felt better about it if I had told them I didn’t have the faintest notion, either, of what I might do next, today, tomorrow, or ever.”

*Every McGee novel, from the first, The Deep Blue Goodbye (1964), has had a hue in its title. MacDonald explains that this is a mnemonic device to help readers avoid buying the same book twice, an all too familiar experience for thriller addicts.