So, to boost his Sancho Panza’s spirit, McGee and some friends finagle him a little secret morale boost: An invitation to speak at a conference in Canada. While the hairy economist is away, his niece Norma and her groom Evan Lawrence take over the John Maynard Keynes for a few days of fishing and sight-seeing. On their final cruise, they are blown up by a powerful bomb. A radical group supposedly from Chile announces that it had targeted Meyer because of his collusion with the Pinochet regime.

Of course, that’s not what was really behind the triple murder. Nor was the murder really what it seemed. McGee manages to track down photos of the Keynes from moments before the explosion. Yes, Meyer’s niece is in the shots, in her tiny bikini. Yes, the hired captain is there on the bridge. But where the new husband should be there’s a fellow who does odd jobs around Bahia Mar. No sign of the husband. Might he have been below decks? Maybe. But why, then, was a second hand needed? Hubbie could have handled the tasks.

The plot thickens when Trav joins Meyer in Houston, where the economist is settling his niece’s estate. Her attorney reveals that her not insubstantial nest egg had been mostly cashed out before her death. Husband Evan is looking to be a murderous con man. As McGee and Meyer follow the sparse trail that Evan left, they discover that he may indeed be a “black widower.” When the owner of the real estate company that employed him turns gray and retches at seeing his photo, because the guy murdered his sister… Well, our two heroes know what has to be done.

In the midst of all this, McGee’s current paramour, hotel manager Annie Renzetti, dumps him. She’s about to be given a big promotion and transfered to a much larger resort in Hawaii, and Trav isn’t about to transfer with her. Here, once again, JDM depicts the cost of Trav’s fantasy life when it encounters someone who lives in the real world. He’s understandably wounded (see quote below), but it seems too late for him to change.

Trav and Meyer put on their detective caps and begin to trace Evan’s history, based on scraps of conversation that he made back at Bahia Mar. Meyer finds likely candidates for the young Evan in photos in old Texas college yearbooks. (Evan spoke of living in Texas as a young man.) Then they go looking for someone who sold cement garden lanterns in Texas a generation ago—which Evan described shilling. And they find one of Evan’s early hits; or at least they find one of his aliases. Seems that a beloved kid sister vanished with him, never to be seen again.

Finally, the two sleuths hit pay dirt. Evan turns out to have been a kid named Cody Tom Pittler, who grew up in a Texas border town. He has been on the lam ever since he witnessed his father murder his stepmother, with whom Cody was in flagrente delicto at the time. He, in turn, apparently shot his father. This revelation leads to a trip to New York to talk with Cody’s sister, who receives occasional care packages of cash from her brother. She leads our guys back to a go-between in Texas. And that woman, albeit very reluctantly, points them to a name and address in Cancun.

Cody/Evan turns out to be living in a compound down there, where he stays for months at a time. Except for his fishing jaunts and his long absences out of town—presumably when he’s on the hunt for the gold of his next wife. He remains extremely dangerous, having just murdered an old business partner who apparently knew too much. Trav and Meyer are working with the partner’s devastated fiancée—a woman of Mayan extraction who helps them set up the endgame. She is Barbara Castillo, she of the cinnamon skin.

Now it begins—the hunter becomes the hunted. But as is often the case in McGee adventures, things don’t play out as planned. The situation goes to hell and the good guys have to scramble to survive.

After the uber-violent outliers of Green and Crimson, Cinnamon definitely takes us back into the mainstream of the McGee saga. It’s a tale of revenge and detection—fairly straightforward by the standard of most McGee tales. It’s such a workmanlike yarn, that it gives no clue that McGee’s last hurrah is rapidly approaching. And why should there be premonitions of the end? JDM at this point (1982) probably thought that he would be writing McGees for another decade or two.

(A big sigh from the blogger. Think! Another eight or ten adventures. Emerald and Fuschia. Jade and Maroon. Black and Ochre. Coral and Beige. Plum and Salmon. How great would that have been, even if Trav would have had to slow down and acknowledge the weakening of the muscles and reflexes? His wits would have been more than enough.)

I wouldn’t put Cinnamon in the very top rank of McGee novels. (My faves remain Blue, Gray, Lavender, Copper, and Silver.) But it’s an impeccable, super-solid, page-turning piece of crime fiction that JDM could be proud of; and that any first-time reader can use to launch his/her exploration of the McGee canon.

A few quotes from Cinnamon:

“Then came the hard part. I had suffered loss. I had been rejected. I was the lover cast out. I was alone. And when I tried to plumb the depths of my grief and my loss, I came finally upon a small ugly morsel way down in the bottom of my soul. It was a little round object, like a head with a grinning face. It said ugly things to me. It kept telling me I was relieved. I strained for the crocodile tears, but the little face grinned and grinned. It shamed me. ¶ And as I unlocked my houseboat and got ready to go back to bed, I realized that Annie had perhaps suspected that the little ugly feeling of relief and release would be there. We are all, says Meyer, in one way or another, large or small, hidden or revealed, rotten at the core.”

Meyer speaking about his murdered niece: “I never really got to know her. I should have made the effort. But she had a very busy life. We all think of the inconvenience of making an effort. We’re all going to do the right things a little later on. Soon. But soon slides by so easily. Then we vow we’ll try to do better. We all carry that little oppressive weight around in the back of our mind—that we should be living better, trying harder, but we’re not. We’re all living just about as well as we can at any given moment. But that doesn’t stop the wishing.”

“Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.”

Our knight in rusted armor is at home on the Busted Flush, with his Sancho Panza (Meyer) at his side. They’re consulting with the heir of a wealthy chemist. The potential client hadn’t gotten along with his difficult father, Ellis Esterland.  Now he wants to know about the circumstances surrounding his father’s death. Dad was robbed and murdered at an isolated Florida rest stop, even as he was dying of cancer. A tragic case, of course, but simple and straightforward. Or was it? Something, the son believes, didn’t smell right with the official story. And who better to flush out the truth than ol’ Trav?

After rattling around the Florida hinterlands, checking up on the dead chemist’s last days and personal connections—including the lady who had been his companion/caretaker toward the end—McGee comes up with a couple of useful clues. Clue 1: Tracks at the site of the murder and a witness account suggest that the killer may have traveled on a heavy motorcycle. Clue 2: The dead man’s third and last wife, an actress, was extremely friendly with a film director/auteur who made his name with two low-budget, cinema verité biker movies that utilized real motorcycle gangs.

Naturally, Trav begins to nose around the edges of the biker movement in Florida—to see if anyone in that world knows about the murder of an old man at a remote rest stop. And with a whiff of Hollywood in the air, he goes through channels to track down Lysa Dean. (As you’ll recall, the now-over-the-hill movie siren was Trav’s client way back in Adventure Number Four—The Quick Red Fox. They parted company in a less than amicable manner.) Lysa provides some inside poop on film director Peter Kesner, whose more recent cinematic efforts have not, shall we say, garnered either critical accolades or decent box-office revenue. It seems he’s financing his latest film—and possibly his last chance to reboot his career—with the money Esterland’s wife inherited.

The money trail that JDM lays down here is a bit convoluted. Esterland had set up his estate to go to his wife, in the event that he pre-deceased his daughter. And that indeed was the situation. (The young woman was in a vegetative coma from a bicycle accident.) That spells a motive for murder for a film director boyfriend who needs to finance a flick. At least as far as McGee can see.

Sailing under false Hollywood colors (courtesy of Lysa Dean), Trav makes his way to Peter Kesner’s location in Iowa. The director’s shooting a kind of existential hot-air ballooning movie with Esterland’s actress widow. Here McGee finally meets the biker who appeared in Kesner’s early films—the hulking Desmin Grizzel, aka “Dirty Bob.” I’ll let Trav describe him:

“Unmistakable bland moon face, the fringe of beard now flecked with gray, the small Mongolian eyes, slitted and slanted… Desmin Grizzel stared out at me through those little blueberry eyes set back behind the squinty lids… There was something going on behind those eyes. He was perhaps adding something up, something he had heard, measuring me in all the ways I didn’t fit the present role. Or maybe it was some primitive awareness of a special danger.”

I consider Desmin/Dirty Bob to be a member of a kind of trifecta of evil, an all-star team of malevolence. He’s one of Trav’s three nastiest nemeses, along with Junior Allen (Blue) and Boo Waxwell (Orange). Desmin is like some malign force of nature. And taken by himself, he’s a superb creation of villain-hood.

From here on, a few spoilers will be cropping up. If you’ve never read Crimson, and want to experience the jolts and shocks, stop reading now.

Needless to say, with Trav on location in Iowa, the cat’s among the pigeons. He insinuates himself among the filmmakers, goes for a scenic balloon ride (he really likes it), helps a bit with the shoot, and finally reveals his inside knowledge of the plot to kill the old man. Kesner doesn’t exactly deny that such a thing might have happened, but refuses any personal guilt. Kesner may well have wished out loud that Esterland would drop dead. And Grizzel and his buddy may have simply done the deed as a (wink wink) unrequested favor.

Trav is left in the position of having no proof that would stand up in court, and prepares to report back to Esterland’s son. But on the last day of the shoot, the Iowa locals (well known for their mob violence!?), stage a mass attack on the movie location. It seems that Grizzel and others have been making porno videos with underage farmers’ daughters. Trav escapes the mayhem with Kesner in one of the balloons, and plummets 45 feet to the ground just before the balloon crashes into high-tension wires. Kesner doesn’t make it.

Even Trav, of course, is not going to plummet that far without some injuries. And he takes time to mend. However, now a very loose cannon is out there.

Having lost his mentor and pal Peter Kesner—and on the run from the law—Desmin Grizzel goes on a rampage of revenge against those he blames. People are killed in Iowa. Lysa Dean is brutally raped and murdered. Then the biker comes for McGee.

When Grizzel boards the Busted Flush, he gains entry by means of Meyer—whom he has broken in some terrible way that is not explicated. The very foundation of Meyer is shattered. The cost of being McGee’s best friend has never been higher for the hairy, old economist. But McGee is ready for the onslaught, with the help of some professional muscle. Even then, putting down his latest Grendel is a close, close thing.

Okay, enough with the book report. Now, IMO.

When I started re-reading Crimson a few weeks ago, I was prepared to say that I don’t like the book. I have not ever liked it. In fact, it is the one McGee adventure that I will not read again.

So what is it about Crimson that gets under my skin?

Like its soul mate and predecessor, The Green Ripper, Crimson is a brutal, depressing book. And the turning of that brutality onto Meyer and, to a lesser degree, Lysa Dean, simply turns me off. For me, it’s a deal-killer. I think the story could have been told effectively without these occurrences. What is the point of murdering a nymphomaniac, over-the-hill movie siren in the nastiest way possible? I fail to see what’s gained by gutting Meyer. Keep in mind, at the beginning of the next book a year later, he is still a shattered man, still hollowed out.

Why not let Lysa Dean enjoy a narrow escape? Why not have Grizzel, in his very good disguise, come aboard the Flush without Meyer?

In addition, the whole rabid Iowa mob attack thing seems way over the top; a big miscalculation on JDM’s part.

I can only speculate, but I wonder if at this point in his life JDM was—as Meyer was in the hands of Grizzel—beginning to look death, to look utter darkness in the eye. Though I have not yet personally experienced the revocation of my “immortality” in the face of some close call or terrible diagnosis, I can well imagine what it might feel like. And JDM apparently wanted to bring this into McGee’s world, just five or six years before his own death.

That, of course, is the author’s prerogative. But I don’t have to like it. I don’t have to like that JDM, in a manner, went off the McGee reservation with both Crimson and Green. I expect some readers of this blog will disagree, and that’s fine. I’d love to read comments about Crimson both pro and con.

An interesting sort of postscript is that JDM—even as Green garnered an Edgar award and won the National Book Award for best mystery—was not happy with Green. He’s quoted in Hugh Merrill’s biography, The Red Hot Typewriter: “Green Ripper was, in retrospect, a mistake.”

I think that Crimson was, too.

Because, for one of the relatively rare periods in his career, he is in a permanent relationship with an exceptional woman—the stalwart, smart, gorgeous Gretel Howard. You’ll recall her as the woman whose brother played a key role in the dark doings of McGee’s prior adventure, The Empty Copper Sea. Gretel, of course, was innocent of any involvement in that conspiracy.

But Gretel—in addition to being the ideal girl for McGee—is feisty and independent and wants nothing to do with becoming a fixture of the Busted Flush, McGee’s dumpy houseboat. Maybe some day, but not now. She has already been an appendage of her no-good ex and her demented brother. Nix on the appendage bit.

That’s why, at the outset of Green, she’s off working and living at an athletic resort/fat farm in the far burbs of the Miami/Lauderdale metroplex. She manages aspects of the operation and teaches kids tennis. She loves the job but in her last overnight with McGee notes a quirky smell emanating from the place. It seems foreign investors are circling. More ominously, she has had a chance encounter with someone she had seen years before—a member of a radical religious cult, one Brother Titus.

Then the shit starts hitting the fan.

McGee hears from Gretel that one of the resort’s owners—last seen driving Brother Titus around—suffers a fatal bicycle accident. Presumably due to a coronary or stroke.

Then Gretel herself takes ill with some terrible refractory infection that the doctors cannot identify. All that she can suggest as a cause is an insect bite-like lesion. McGee takes up a vigil in the hospital. But Gretel slips into unconsciousness, burning up from the inside. If she even should survive, she would end up a vegetable. Finally, mercifully, her struggle ends.

But the shit is not done flying. Waiting for McGee on the Flush immediately after Gretel’s memorial service are two dour men in suits. They say they are from an obscure federal agency that is investigating the late Gretel’s former employer. Had she told McGee that anything unusual was going on there? Wisely, Trav mentions only that her boss had died in a freak bike accident. The two men thank him and leave.

Meyer, who’s been at Trav’s side throughout this ordeal, goes sleuthing, and finds out about the agency and the two suits. There is no such outfit in the government, nor any federal employees with the names given. Futhermore, a supposed agent of the FAA appeared out at the development, asking after a small blue airplane that landed there—about the time Gretel saw Brother Titus. Another bogus federal suit?

It’s Meyer who makes the leap: Gretel and her boss were murdered because they saw Brother Titus. Had any beans been spilled on the Flush about Gretel recognizing Brother Titus, our knight in rusty armor would very probably have suffered a fatal accident or illness of his own. A strange encounter with real feds confirms Meyer’s epiphany. Gretel’s autopsy had revealed that she was poisoned by means of a sophisticated Soviet assassination technique.

Meyer tries to restrain his friend, telling him it’s unlikely he could ever get his hands on Gretel’s killers. But Trav will have none of that and he goes off the grid—with nothing on his mind but vengeance. He becomes a man called Tom McGraw, an unemployed commercial fisherman, hunting the dusty California back roads for his fictional runaway daughter. The girl took off years earlier, joined some religious outfit out in the woods. “Tom” just wants to see her again.

Then he arrives at the compound of the cult whose operative killed Gretel, where—after a brutal initiation—he is “recruited.” The young people at the camp are undergoing military training for terrorist action. “Tom McGraw” patiently plays the game of building trust, until his hand is forced.

Finally, McGee begins his bloody work—wreaking revenge for Gretel. One by one, the young fanatics go down. Not, of course, without struggle and peril for our hero.

The Green Ripper seems to me an odd duck among Trav’s 21 adventures. Half of the book takes place on home turf and feels more or less familiar. But much of the rest of it unfolds amongst the starry-eyed, fanatic, would-be mass murderers who are members of the Church of the Apocrypha. For McGee and for us, there has been no deeper immersion in the world of the bad guys in the other 20 novels. Green is certainly a compelling read, but it doesn’t really seem like it belongs. It feels to me like JDM got up on the wrong side of his bed one day and started writing. The author, of course, places his boat-bum hero up on soapboxes pretty much constantly. But this one is the biggest soapbox of all; and what is delivered is especially hectoring.

Having said that, I think that Green is the most cautionary and prescient of all the McGee yarns. Here we have an instructive tale from the early days of the age of terrorism. Because JDM—however great his disapprobation—does try to let these terrible people express who they are and why they are planning acts of mass murder and social disruption. The young terrorists who aim to murder innocent hundreds for the good of mankind and at the behest of their religion sound almost reasonable at times. JDM knows how a terrorist cult works.

What I regret most about Green is the road not taken. JDM chose Grand Guignol over the very interesting things that might have transpired with a Gretel Howard who lived. The McGee of Green, while bloody and dramatic, becomes not more interesting, but less interesting. (McGee/JDM almost acknowledges it. See the first quote below.)

Let’s face it, McGee and his serial monogamy and his romping of ladies on leisurely cruises has gotten tired. (The coda of Green is exactly that, and it is not as much fun as it used to be.) A live Gretel might have shaken things up; challenged McGee in ways that he’d never been challenged; forced our favorite boat bum to grow in unaccustomed directions; opened up far more exciting narrative possibilities. Gretel was JDM’s last chance to do such a thing (though of course he couldn’t have known that).

But, as has been mentioned once or twice before in this blog, being close to Travis McGee can be a dangerous thing. Gretel has to die because her murder is the vital narrative device in the book JDM decided to write. No murdered Gretel…no powerful explosion of violence and retribution at the hands of McGee…no Green Ripper. Gretel was a real person in Copper, but here she becomes an object—a lit fuse in a stick of dynamite. It was JDM’s call.

I wish it had been otherwise.

Three passages from The Green Ripper:

“She was destined to be a part of the life that would come after the marina. But she was gone and I was fixed there, embedded in time, embedded in a life I had in some curious way outgrown. I was an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale-eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lampshade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon. They don’t make grails the way they used to. She had deserted me here, left me in this now unbreakable mold, this half-farcial image, trapped me in my solitary, fussy, bachelor hang-ups from now until they turned me off too.”

“…He was draped over a boulder, spread-eagled, hip pockets high. He looked almost normal until I noticed how totally flat his chest was. From front to back he seemed to be about four inches thick. He had huge pale hands. I wanted to see his face, but I didn’t care to roll him off his boulder. I sat on my heels, put a hand under his cold chin, and lifted. He had no visible eyelashes or eyebrows. His fine blond hair was cropped short. One small gray eye was open, the other almost closed. A conspiratorial wink. A little mouth, a delicate little nose, and a face pitted and scarred by the acne of his youth. ¶ ‘And how are you, Brother Titus?’ I asked him.”

“Not much of the fading daylight came in. I sat on a crate purporting to contain electronic equipment. Eleven silent ones. I felt a strange affection for them. They were so docile. This was my own tiny little Jonestown. We had shared together the final climactic emotional experience. Did dark shadows move within the fading electrical charges of the emptied minds? Did the final instant record on continuous replay, over and over, each playing dimmer?”

It seems that an old acquaintance of the two men—a fishing charter captain named Van Harder—has been professionally disgraced and essentially put out of business. On the face of it, it appears that he got himself drunk while piloting a luxury cruiser through dangerous night-time waters; so drunk that he lost consciousness for an extended period. The boat’s owner, a friend, and two young ladies attempted to bring the cruiser safely into port without Harder’s help. The owner, Hub Lawless, in the process managed to fall overboard and vanish into the waves.

Harder is a devout Christian and near-teetotaler. He had only part of one drink on the bridge of that cruiser. It quickly made him go fuzzy and unfocussed and then knocked him out. As a former heavy drinker, he knew what a hangover was and how it felt. And this drink produced an outcome nothing like that. Moreover, a single drink shouldn’t have had such a dramatic effect. In short, he’s convinced that Hub Lawless slipped him a mickey.

Quite simply, the old captain believes that his good name was stolen from him and he wants it back.

Of course, the only man for the job is McGee. Pretty soon, he and Meyer air-drop into Timber Bay, on the opposite coast; where the incident occurred. Meanwhile, Van Harder slowly brings the Busted Flush the four-hundred miles around to join them.

Trav and Meyer start operating in Timber Bay under what’s essentially a false flag. They have cast themselves as representatives of a property speculator who’s interested in Hub Lawless’s holdings in the area.

Pretty soon they’re worming their ways into locals’ confidences—and, of course, making an enemy or two. There’s Lawless’s widow (or is she not a widow?), selling off all of hubby’s fancy toys (custom rifles and fly rods and so on). There’s the clingy piano player at the supper club, hell bent on setting her little hooks into Trav. There’s the scary-smart sheriff, who (like every lawman in the series) is awfully suspicious of the rangy visitor. There’s Lawless’s pugnacious, drug-addled former lieutenant, who promptly gets hospitalized after his instant brawl with Trav. There’s the pair of bimbos who accompanied Lawless on his ill-fated cruise.

Lawless’s number two—who had also been with him that fateful night—has suffered a major mental breakdown and is being tended by his sister, Gretel. (I don’t think I’ll spoil anything here by noting that Gretel Howard becomes one of McGee’s most important and treasured women.) This fellow admits that Lawless drugged Van Harder’s drink. In fact, Gretel and her brother are a fount of inside info on how Hub Lawless converted assets into cash and set up his escape to Mexico with his sexy Swedish girlfriend. Apart from a blip or two—a minor heart attack after Hub jumped off the boat—it all seemed to go well for the fugitive businessman. At least according to Gretel’s brother.

Hub Lawless had reason to disappear. His property developments had suffered a horrible run of plain bad luck and were in the process of taking down his other enterprises. It’s common knowledge around Timber Bay by the time Trav and Meyer arrive. And the best clue that Lawless had ducked and run is a photo that shows up in an anonymous good citizen’s color slide—depicting a man who looks a lot like Lawless, sitting in a Mexican sidewalk café some weeks after the boating “accident.” Clearly, Lawless would have wanted his death to seem accidental, so that his abandoned wife and kids could collect the substantial life insurance policy.

The final act of the drama involves a lot of sleuthing without much resolving of anything. That has to wait until the true facts of the case finally emerge from their hiding place. Still, any kind of situation that allows for ongoing McGee ruminations is worthy of our attention. Of course, this being a JDM tale, there’s a twist or two coming your way.

In the final analysis, McGee is able to reclaim the stolen “property” that Van Harder wanted back: His reputation and his honor. And the strapping boat bum gets a little something for himself, beyond his customary “salvage” fee.

So how does Copper rank in the McGee canon? For me, just bellow my top four (Blue, Gray, Lavender, Silver). It has the classic elements. Dark doings in small-town Florida—the big boat bum’s bedrock background. Social observation and cracker-barrel philosophizing occur. Meyer makes insights and provides feedback. Good-looking women are bedded. Brutal fights take place. People die violently. Local power structures are dissected. I know I’m getting repetitive here, but these are evergreen aspects of the McGee chronicles—the things that make for a classic McGee tale

From Copper you can see McGee’s ending and I’m already starting to feel morose.

Here are a few quotations:

“There was beginning to be such a subtle additive of light that I could make out the ghostly shape of a marker off to my left, where North Pass entered Timber Bay, and beyond it some shadowy tree shapes on the outcroppings that sheltered the bay. The Gulf was quiet, with a gentle lap and slap of small waves on the packed wet sand. I heard a deep-throated diesel chugging through the wet noises of the sea and soon saw the outline of a shrimper heading out. There was a pale yellow rectangle in the amidships area, with a man standing against the glow, and I saw him lift his arm and realized that he was lifting a cup of coffee to his lips. It was so vivid I could smell the coffee. ¶ “And I had a sudden wrenching urge to shed my own identity and be somebody else. Somehow I had managed to lock myself into this unlikely and unsatisfying self, this Travis McGee, shabby knight errant, fighting for small, lost, unimportant causes, deluding himself with the belief that he is in some sense freer than your average fellow, and that it is a very good thing to have escaped the customary trap of regular hours, regular pay, home and kiddies, Christmas bonus, backyard bar-B-cue, hospitalization, and family burial plot. ¶ “All we have, I thought, is a trap of a slightly different size and shape. Just as the idea of an ancient hippie is gross and ludicrous, so is the idea of an elderly beach bum. I dreaded the shape of the gray years ahead and wished to hop out of myself, maybe into the skin of the coffee drinker now far out of sight in the just-brightening morning. And he, the poor deluded bastard, would probably have changed places willingly.”

Meyer says: “Florida can never really come to grips with saving the environment because a very large percentage of the population at any given time just got here. So why should they fight to turn the clock back? It looks great to them the way it is. Two years later, as they are beginning to feel uneasy, a few thousand more people are just discovering it all for the first time and wouldn’t change a thing. And meanwhile the people who knew what it was like twenty years ago are an ever-dwindling minority, a voice too faint to be heard.”

“Slowly, slowly the whole world was suffused with that strange orange glow which happens rarely toward sunset. The clouds turned to gold as the sun moved behind them, and the reflection of the clouds colored the earth. I have never seen the Gulf so quiet. There were no ripples, no birds, no sign of feeding fish, no offshore vessels moving across the horizon. I had seen this strange coppery light in Tahiti, in Ceylon (before it became Sri Lanka), and in Granada and the Grenadines. The world must have looked like that before the first creatures came crawling out of the salt water to spawn on the empty land. I turned my head and saw, beyond the shoulder of my beloved, the empty copper sea, hushed and waiting, as if the world had paused between breaths. Perhaps it was like this in the beginning, and will be like this again, after man has slain every living thing. Sand, heat, and water. And death.”

McGee’s asleep on the Busted Flush and one of his intruder alerts goes “ding.” He starts awake, prepared for action, only to discover a dainty old squeeze of his huddled in front of his door. It’s Carrie Milligan, who made a poor choice of husband a few years earlier and is now on her own. She’s aged prematurely, showing lots of hard miles. Not drug or alcohol miles, mind you, but simple old tough times. And she’s come to McGee because he’s one of the few people she feels she can trust. What her exact problem is, she refuses to say. She only has one favor to ask of her old lover: Take this hundred grand in cash money, keep it safe, and if I should happen not to come back in the next few weeks, get it to my kid sister. McGee accepts the sizable wad for safekeeping, for a cut of ten grand. He politely declines a nostalgia bonk and offends the lady. But he shelters her for a night. Then she’s gone.

Of course, Carrie doesn’t return.

Meyer spots the report in the back pages of a newspaper: Young woman struck dead by truck on a country road near the coastal town of Bayside, after running out of gas. Carrie Milligan. (If you recall, JDM used a similar device back in Darker than Amber—a hooker smashed to pulp in a terrible auto “accident.”)

Naturally, an occurrence like this fails to fly with our man Trav. Coincidence? Almost certainly bullshit. Besides, the late Carrie paid him ten large and he aims to earn it. He and Meyer fix up the Flush for a “road trip,” and start putt-putting their way toward Bayside.

When the two men dock the Flush at the marina in Bayside, they walk into a festering stew of scandal and mystery and deadly violence.

Soon after their arrival the marina owner’s drunken, pugnacious husband blunders in and assumes that Trav is coming on to his wife. A quick, brief brawl ensues as Trav defends himself and sends drunken hubby to the hospital—where the guy surprisingly dies. (It’s murder, actually.) As Trav and Meyer start digging into Carrie’s situation in Bayside, the nasty circumstances come bubbling up. Her former place of employment is going belly up; one of its owners has apparently vanished with a bundle from the corporate treasury. The theory the survivors have is that Carrie was in on the scam with the owner.

As for the accident, things don’t add up. Meyer discovers that the gas tank of Carrie’s car had been tampered with, to drain out gasoline and strand the young woman out on the road. There are clues inconsistent with an accidental stumble out into the deadly traffic lane. A purse left in the car. (In the 1970s, at least, what woman would go ambling out in the middle of the night, seeking gasoline, without her purse?) There’s also evidence that someone was in the car with her—who may have administered a hearty shove somewhere between Carrie’s shoulder blades.

Carrie Milligan’s trail goes deeper and darker yet, when Trav discovers where her big wad of cash actually came from. Carrie, the disappeared boss, and a few others were pot smugglers. Not pros, but successful enough to make some nice walking-around money. Could an outside operator have come in and applied a Darwinian solution to the small-timers?

Not least, Trav and Meyer consider the “hidden body” theory of astronomy to the situation. Is there some unknown person or organization whose gravity distorts the orbits of everyone else? The best candidate is a local attorney who pops up at almost every turn, “Ready” Freddy Van Harn—an up-and-coming political figure and rapacious, kinky lady’s man.

When one of Carrie’s friends appears on the Flush one rainy evening, bearing a brown package that she’s just received, Trav has little reason to worry as she starts to open it. But then, KA-BOOM…

And five days later, McGee wakes up in the hospital.

(Lately, I’ve been thinking about bumps on the head and the neurological fates of old football players—much in the news lately. And quite apart from his brief pro football career, poor Trav suffered concussion after concussion in the execution of his duties as a fictional hero. I wonder if JDM ever pondered the notion of a 60- or 70-year-old McGee toodling around a care center somewhere, forgetful and incontinent. In the real world, that might indeed have been the fate of knights in rusted armor.)

Once he’s recovered somewhat, rather than doing what any sensible person like you or I would do—call it a day and cruise home to Lauderdale—McGee begins anew with the poking of sticks into hornets’ nests. And he’s ultimately rewarded with the unmasking of not one, but two malefactors.

On both occasions, the rangy boat bum feels the cold chill of the grim reaper blow by him very closely indeed. One baddie dies grotesquely, horribly, and (ironically) quite inadvertently. The other, the bomber of the Busted Flush—having ambushed and murdered an admirable local cop right in front of McGee—has his ankles shot out by our hero. McGee almost pops a cap between the hobbled villain’s eyes. But he reconsiders, due to all the trouble and grief that such an action might bring to his discreet lifestyle.

In Lemon JDM has crafted one of the top middle-pack McGees. It has Byzantine dealings in a small, corrupt Florida town. It has drug money and power-structure money and political influence all sloshing around. It has a gorgeous widow woman falling into the sack with McGee. It has Meyer, with his wit and wisdom and super-hot chili recipe. It has drug-running. It has the Busted Flush in a semi-starring role—severely damaged in the bombing, then rising heroically from the ashes, so to speak. It has dark, dark violence and hidden emotion. It has a nifty, convoluted plot. And, of course, above all, it has McGee.

Lemon simply has everything you’d want from a first-class crime/suspense novel.

When I’m reading these books, I often turn to my wife and read a passage out loud. Then I usually observe, re. JDM, “Man, that son of a bitch could write.” Here are a few more examples of his mastery, from The Dreadful Lemon Sky.

“Guilt is the most merciless disease of men. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.”

“The world looked strange. There were little halos around the edges of every tree and building. I did very deep breathing. It is strange to sleep for five days and five nights and have the world go rolling along without you. Just like it will keep on after you’re dead. The wide busy world of tire balancing, diaper changing, window washing, barn dancing, bike racing, nose picking, and bug swatting will go merrily merrily along. If they were never aware of your presence, they won’t be overwhelmed by your absence.”

“The bed was by big windows. The draperies were open. The storm moved closer. The lightning flashes were vivid. Each one made a still picture of her in black and white. Black eyes and lips and hair and nipples and groin. White, white, white all the rest of her. The lightning arrested movement. It caught her in a fluid turning, mouth agape with harsh breath and effort. It froze a leg lifting. It stopped her, astride, arms braced, halting the elliptical swing of hips, turning her into a pen and ink drawing of greatest clarity.”

“A mockingbird flew over, singing on the wing, a melody so painfully sweet it pinched the heart. I do not want to leave the world of mockingbirds, boats, beaches, ladies, love and peanut butter from Deaf Smith County.”

Yet the young wife is convinced that her new husband intends to kill her. Indeed, he allegedly has made one attempt already, but failed to carry it through. The other woman he secreted away on the wife’s boat, whom the wife thought she photographed, wasn’t in the prints she got back. The young wife exhibits signs of paranoia and mental instability—which she readily acknowledges. But she still holds to her assertion that murder is in her future.

The young husband is utterly at a loss to explain his bride’s increasingly disturbed behavior. Now alone on her boat, he’s devastated, close to tears. He loves her, would never knowingly harm her. The bimbo she claimed was hidden away on the sailboat/cruiser? Paranoid fantasy. The murder attempt? A simple accident, a potentially tragic tumble overboard into the waves. His wife needs professional help.

Now imagine that you’re Travis McGee—knight errant in rusty armor, righter of miscellaneous wrongs—flying into Honolulu to confront just such a baffling situation. That’s how JDM opens The Turquoise Lament (1973).

The bride, Pidge, is the daughter of an old friend. She’s the one who sent out the SOS. Back when McGee knew her late dad, the pretty teenager had a huge crush on Trav. Indeed, one time she stowed away on the Busted Flush, planning for a romantic cruise with the strapping salvage consultant. Trav returned her untouched, spitting and fuming, to her old man. But dad—with whom Trav worked a treasure salvage operation—died in a gruesome traffic accident, and Pidge ends up with the not insignificant estate and the sailboat/cruiser. She meets her future husband, good-natured Howie Brindle, and the fairytale proceeds. That is, until it turns into a melodrama.

Amateur shrink McGee debriefs Pidge and manages to wrangle her to the epiphany that her semi-breakdown was not due to a subtle plot against her life, but to her deep dissatisfaction with her groom. The marriage had been a rebound kind of thing for Pidge. Howie, a decent guy, was just not the man for her. The isolated months aboard the boat merely concentrated and distilled her unhappiness into a bitter liquor of near-insanity. Time to tell poor hubbie the bad news. The big D’s comin’ your way, Howie.

Before departing Honolulu, McGee—not to his credit—relents to Pidge’s long-held desire to bed him. Then it’s back to Lauderdale and an odd, disjointed Christmas season that is not at all jolly. People are dying in accidents and even McGee’s sidekick Meyer keels over after a swim in the ocean. A serious viral infection, many days in the hospital—where McGee keeps an eagle eye on him. The hairy economist has a close call, but survives. Into this uneasy time comes the beginning of a suspicion that McGee made a mistake back in Honolulu.

One of the treasure-hunting crew that McGee was a part of with Pidge’s pop turns up on the Busted Flush. That old comrade is now the proprietor of one of the top treasure-hunting outfits and a project has come his way. What makes it a matter of moment is that it seems to have come from the treasure-site research of Pidge’s dad, a retired professor. That material—potentially worth many millions—was nowhere to be found after the professor’s death. Could one of the financial/legal professionals who had helped handle the professor’s estate have purloined the research? Then waited a decent interval before attempting to utilize it? Someone who couldn’t have known McGee’s old comrade had worked with the author of the vanished research?

Things take an even more ominous turn, when McGee learns that good ol’ Howie Brindle knew one of those lawyers who had helped Pidge. And that another young woman who had had a relationship with good ol’ Howie had disappeared. And that bimbo whom Pidge had “imagined” and photographed? She was a real girl who apparently was nowhere to be found. Lots of circumstantial evidence, you say. But what nails it are those pictures, which Pidge gave to Trav. The prints had been tampered with—the three showing no girl on the empty deck had come from another roll of film.

McGee follows the trail of theft and fraud that put the professor’s research in evil hands—even to the tune of torturing the key malefactor. Trav’s detective work furthermore discovers that unexplained accidental deaths had a way of cropping up in the vicinity of good ol’ Howie when he was a teenager. Good ol’ Howie is sure looking like a “bug,” a slippery homicidal psychopath with an engaging smile and manner.

At this very moment Pidge and good ol’ Howie are ferrying her boat across the Pacific to a potential buyer in American Samoa. It didn’t take much paranoia to imagine how good ol’ Howie might finalize his divorce out on the open sea. At last, it’s time to decamp to the South Pacific—to see if the new Grendel can be conquered and the princess saved.

While The Turquoise Lament has most of the perquisites of a good McGee yarn, it seems to me that its proportions and pacing are off. The second act—as Trav goes sleuthing, uncovering both the bloody history of good ol’ Howie, as well as the theft of the treasure plans—is overblown and bulky. As if JDM was just having too much fun here turning over the rocks to see what crawls out. It’s a masterful case study of an unorthodox investigation. But it insistently begs the question: What about the girl?

Why isn’t McGee booking a ticket to American Samoa sooner rather than later? If this very valuable life is still available for saving, save it! You could reasonably argue that the time it takes for Pidge’s boat to get there from Hawaii gives Trav plenty of elbow room for his complex investigations. But that’s real-world time, and Turquoise ought to exist more in emotional time, in which the girl’s fate is of preeminent dramatic importance.

After all the gyrations of the second act, I almost feel that poor Pidge is not a real person who is loved, but a MacGuffin that drives McGee’s increasingly frenetic machinations. The ending of the book almost supports this theory.

Of course, that’s just IMO. You, the reader, will have to decide whether or not JDM has miscalculated here—both in terms of dramatic structure and pacing. I’d be curious to know what his editor was saying.

Still, caveats and all, there’s much to enjoy. Good ol’ Howie’s a fine, creepy psychopath, almost up there with Junior Allen and Boo Waxwell. Trav’s tender care of Meyer through his illness provides an excellent portrait of true friendship. His sleuthing is clever and produces results. And the final set piece—in which good ol’ Howie gets his comeuppance (a “come-down-ance,” actually)—is deliciously nerve-wracking.

Some McGee-isms from The Turquoise Lament:

“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them. I can recognize the feeling. I’ve been there a lot of times.”

“The house takes a cut of every wager. So you can play a close tight game, work out little conservative systems, calculate the odds to several decimal places, and no matter what you do, sooner or later They will bust you, because the house busts everybody. The house percentage does it, sooner or later.”

“The [trailer] park had been there a long time. Shade trees and tropical plantings had grown up around them. The Sunday birds sang. So many ‘Florida’ additions had been affixed to these old aluminum boxes that it was hard to visualize any of them as having once rolled along the open road. The dewheeled village seemed to be trying to nestle itself further into the turf, forgetting old bad dreams of tires, traffic and tolls.”

D. R. Martin

The old man’s primary business is putting together investment-grade stamp collections for individuals looking to diversify their assets. But into this musty little precinct of Eden has come a serpent. Somehow, some way, someone has switched out the better part of a $400,000 investment collection—beautiful, valuable, pristine specimens—for junk and garbage. What’s there now is worth only a few tens of thousands. On most occasions there were three people in the bank vault where the switch could have taken place. Fedderman. His assistant, Mary Alice McDermit. And the client, Frank Sprenger. One other time Fedderman’s other employee, Jane Lawson , filled in for Mary Alice. It certainly wasn’t the old man. Sprenger never even touched the stamps or the portfolio they were in. Of course, Mary Alice—a loyal, beloved employee and stamp fanatic—is outraged when McGee even suggests her connivance. The upstanding Jane seems equally unlikely to have committed the theft. But clearly one of the women did it. Which one?

The set-up becomes clearer when McGee talks to an old friend with deep ties to Miami mobsters. Sprenger, it turns out, is the guy who makes sure that all the criminal groups in town get their fair share of the action. (Miami, like Vegas, was “neutral” ground for organized-crime families from other cities, and agreements were made between them. At least according to JDM.) It seems, therefore, that Sprenger has arranged to double his money—keeping the very valuable stamps as well as getting restitution from Fedderman for their “loss.” McGee has to figure out how the scam went down, and protect the old stamp dealer from financial and physical harm.

Somehow Sprenger catches wind of McGee’s interest in his stamp collection and sends two of his guys to try to buy McGee—to hire the big boat bum to investigate on his behalf. They make it clear that should McGee refuse the fee, it will be taken to mean that he’s in on the scam. McGee takes the money, but later persuades the dangerous Sprenger to lay off him. This connection proves to be vital.

Things take a nastier turn, though, when Jane Lawson turns up murdered. Her death could signify that she had the $400k stamp collection and someone took it from her. Or that she knew who’d done the job and was shut up in order to protect the real malefactor.

As McGee begins to put together the puzzle pieces, he devises a complicated plan—a master ruse—to draw out and trap Sprenger. It involves sending out Meyer (who is a helluva friend to put himself in such jeopardy) to bait the steely gangster; and setting up a theatrical scene to hell and gone out by an obscure mangrove island. The Busted Flush is to look abandoned; Trav’s little runabout, the Muñequita, is partly sunk; a faux corpse is arranged in a rubber dinghy with a big red floppy hat on its “head”; and his companion is tucked away out of sight. Trav has everything all planned out, down to a t. That is, until one of Sprenger’s sniper rounds shatters the mirror that covers the hidey-hole upon which McGee’s whole strategy depends. Things, of course, go down the crapper in a big hurry. And Trav—as he often does—sustains serious damage. He ends up recuperating under the tender ministrations of a dear old friend from his very first adventure—in fact, McGee Client Number 1.

(Haven’t you ever wondered, reading a McGee adventure or watching some action hero show, how these fictional heroes can sustain the breakage that they do and keep on heading back for more? I sure do. I’d love to have an ER doc go through the wounds and injuries of McGee and give an assessment: Does this guy have anything to do with what the human body is really capable of enduring and bouncing back from?)

JDM shows his hand earlier in this book than usual. But in the interest of helping you enjoy a little bit of suspense, I’ve resisted revealing very much. What I find most enjoyable about Scarlet is how someone as canny and smart as McGee can still be snowed by a clever operator. It’s fascinating to be there later on, in his head, as he deconstructs how he made mistaken assumptions and barged off in wrong directions, just as we did. How he was played like a Stradivarius.

McGee is very bright, very strong and very lucky, but Superman he ain’t. And that’s one of the big reasons why we love him.

Here are some choice quotations from The Scarlet Ruse:

“Good old Meyer. He can put a fly into any kind of ointment, a mouse in every birthday cake, a cloud over every picnic. Not out of spite. Now out of contrition or messianic zeal. But out of a happy, single-minded pursuit of truth. He is not to blame that the truth seems to have the smell of decay and an acrid taste these days. He points out that forty thousand particles per cubic centimeter of air over Miami is now called a clear day. He is not complaining about particulate matter. He is merely bemused by the change in standards.”

“It is humiliating, when you should know better, to become victim of the timeless story of the little brown dog running across the freight yard, crossing all the railroad tracks until a switch engine nipped off the end of his tail between wheel and rail. The little dog yelped, and he spun so quickly to check himself out that the next wheel chopped through his little brown neck. The moral is, of course, never lose your head over a piece of tail.”

“I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far off to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog  of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else… Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. ‘But we are all like that!’ he said. ‘That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?’”

“The first part of anything is usually easy.”

McGee is engaged in a relationship with a wealthy British widow who’s in the market for a long-term male companion—handy arm candy, as she marches deeper into middle age. There’s nothing the least bit wrong with Jillian Brent-Archer. She’s attractive, smart, affectionate, great in the sack, owns a terrific sailboat and wants to spend her money having a good time with McGee—cruising, partying, making love. What’s not to like about that? Well, Trav, gnarly knight errant, finds a life at Jilly’s beck and call—however kindly and subtle the lady may be—to be oddly queasying. The very good deal that it would be is not a deal he can accede to. He cannot yet think of a life without the bent lance and rusty armor.

Into the midst of this miasma barges the boorish, unwelcome husband of one of McGee’s old flames. It seems Mary Broll three months earlier discovered her husband Harry pretty much in flagrente and skipped town. Harry—knowing his wife’s fondness for ol’ Trav—figures that ol’ Trav’ll know where to find her. It’s not that Harry’s doesn’t have some feelings for the missus, but he mostly needs her signature on an important financial instrument for a property development he’s working on. Thing is, Trav has no idea where Mary is. Really and truly. But Harry doesn’t believe him. Harry thinks the big boat bum is holding out on him and pulls a gun and starts shooting. The owner of the Flush just barely averts a nasty outcome. It’s not clear which depresses him more. That this fool of a philanderer would actually pull the trigger. Or that he, Travis McGee, the supposed professional tough guy, didn’t handle himself very professionally. He wonders if he’s getting soft, if he’s losing his edge.

Now McGee needs to know the story. So he and Meyer don their detective hats and track down where Mary Broll has gone to ground: A deluxe resort on the island of Grenada. But when Trav makes his way there, he discovers that the woman in the guest house occupied by “Mary Broll” is, in fact, not Mary Broll. On seeing the imposter, Trav intones: “My heart had turned heavy, and there was a taste of sickness in my throat. But you have to be certain, terribly certain. Like a biopsy. Make absolutely sure of the malignancy. Because the surgery is radical.” Trav puts on his scrubs and picks up his scalpel. As soon as he separates “Mary” from her momentary toy boy, he begins operating, to get the story of what really happened.

“Mary” is actually Lisa Dissat, the cookie with whom Harry Broll was found by the real Mary. She and her cousin Paul Dissat entangled Harry in a sex and money scheme that involved the murder of his wife. After all, the real Mary was never going to sign the financial document that Harry needed, after Paul arranged for her to discover Harry’s affair. So Harry was stuck with Paul and Lisa, come hell or high water.

Lisa would play the real Mary’s role for some months off in sunny Grenada, be in touch with real Mary’s best friend back home to establish “viability,” scam the bank, forge the signature on the document, and get the money to Harry. Faux Mary would arrange a bogus swimming fatality for the long-dead real Mary—body vanished, food for fishes. The new widower would find himself taken to the cleaners by the rapacious Paul…and possibly murdered himself, since he knows who his killed wife.

Trav intends merely to rattle the cages of Lisa and Harry, but spare their lives. For the lethal Paul he lays plans for one McGee Retribution Special. But he is indeed a bit slow and complacent—as Meyer feared at the beginning of the story. Sensing another predator circling his prey, Paul ambushes Trav and very nearly finishes the boat bum for good. Miraculously, he escapes by sea (one of his niftiest and luckiest ever), but for a time he’s damaged goods.

Trav has another close encounter with Paul—this time with Meyer also in jeopardy. And yet again—surprise, surprise—he just barely avoids doom. But for the forced jollity of the very last pages, Tan ends in the kind of dour rumination that opened it. Here McGee makes a kind of uneasy peace with who and what he is. He will remain true to himself. For better or worse

Excerpts from A Tan and Sandy Silence:

“I’m overdue. That’s what Meyer says, and that’s what my gut says in a slow cold coil of tingling viscera. Overdue, and scared, and not ready for the end of it yet. The old bullfighters who have known the famous rings and famous breeds despise the little country corridas, because they know that if they do not quit, that is where they will die—and the bull that hooks their steaming guts out onto the sand will be a poor animal without class or distinction or style.”

“She had deftly pushed a lot of my buttons. She had worked on proximity, touch, forthright invitation. She had talked in areas that accentuated sexual awareness. She smelled good, felt good, kept her voice furry and intimate. I knew she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by my fabulous magnetism. We were moving toward an association, possibly profitable. For maximum leverage within that association of two, she wanted to put that weapon to work which had profited her in the past, probably in every relationship except the one with her cousin.”

“It was a good rip [tide] that carried me way out and put me into a sea current that seemed to be taking me due north at a hell of a pace, increasing speed the further out I got. The water was warm, and the sky was squinty bright, and I was gently lifted and dropped in the swell. It had been a good way to live, and given a choice of dying, it was as good as any that came to mind. I wanted to stay aware of the act of dying as long as I could… When it is the last sensation left, there is a hunger to use all of it up, just to see what it is like at the very end, if it is peace or panic.”

“I have an addiction. I’m hooked on the smell, taste, and feel of the nearness of death and on the way I feel when I make my move to keep it from happening. If I knew I could keep it from happening, there’d be no taste to it at all.”