Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GREEN RIPPER by John D. MacDonald; Lippincott; 221 pages...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...