Word: macdonald
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...Scarlet Ruse and The Turquoise Lament are the 14th and 15th installments of MacDonald's serially published dream manual about the beachboy Hamlet, Travis McGee. This paladin is a roughneck who lives on a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., despoiling stewardesses and brooding about the decline of the West. He quests forth, when funds are low, to do battle for the dread forces of reality-a Robin Hood among chattel rustlers who steals loot back from thugs and swindlers and returns it, minus a 50% commission, to the widows and orphans from whom it was taken. Oftener than...
Such gratification is worth a lot to anyone fumbling among paperback sleazies in bus-station bookracks. Yet, until now, it has not cost much. MacDonald was an old penny-a-liner, with 50 or 60 paperback thunderations behind him, before he began the Travis McGee series more than a decade...
...experiment of issuing MacDonald in hardback (The Turquoise Lament) is not progress. Few artifacts are as needless as hardback crime stories. Still, those who lose a day from their lives whenever a new McGee mystery appears will no doubt continue to do so. (The McGee series has sold more than 14 million paperback volumes, and MacDonald's income has been estimated at $100,000 a year.) To understand why, consider the portrait on the covers of the new novels. Each cover shows a view of the formidable McGee, leathery, curly-haired and, say, a rugged...
What better barge on which to ride out male climacteric than McGee's houseboat Busted Flush (won in a poker game), with its pasha's bed, four-nozzle shower, 1,100-mile range and capacious tanks full of nostalgia and contempt? This time MacDonald gives McGee and his brainy friend Meyer (a retired financier who lives aboard the good ship John Maynard Keynes) some fine autumnal soliloquies...
...that this is escapist claptrap. MacDonald offers something far more profound, the claptrap...